IBM cuts costs by $45 million through an enterprise content management initiative.

Challenge

Effectively store and manage unstructured Web content so it can be reused and repurposed for greater consistency, accuracy and productivity

Solution
An enterprise content management initiative that promotes the sharing and delivery of trusted information where and when it’s needed

Key Benefits
Drove $45 million in savings through the consolidation of 915 Web sites; improved the overall Web experience for IBM customers, business partners and employees; reduced the time to localize content from months to weeks

“Our Enterprise Content Management initiative provides a federated environment with consistent standards and metadata tags to enable the solutions-based business model that we are working toward.”
–Howard Miller, Vice President, Enterprise Business Information Center of Excellence, IBM

“IBM Content Management solutions are essential in helping us deliver accurate, consistent and timely information on demand so our employees, customers and business partners can focus on innovation.”
–Carmen Rufo, Manager, Enterprise Content Management, Office of the CIO, IBM

“We didn’t know where the information would ultimately be. IBM Content Management solutions enable us to consolidate information where possible and federate it where appropriate.”
–Carmen Rufo

Information is the lifeblood that runs through companies. So when information is difficult to find, manage and update across an enterprise, there can be significant repercussions. That’s why IBM, the world’s largest information technology company, has made enterprise content management one of its top IT initiatives.

The challenge the IBM CIO office faced was that each business unit managed and stored its Web content separately. Given the company’s more than 4,000 Web sites spread across diverse lines of business and 174 countries, this process resulted in inefficient and redundant information silos, organized only by individual brands. As a result, employees responsible for creating content on the IBM internal Web site and the company’s external Web site—ibm.com—often were unable to find and leverage work created by colleagues in other divisions and geographies. This meant “reinventing the wheel” when it came to developing information for each Web page and made globalization and localization of content a lengthy process.

When content was reused, it was often copied and then pasted to a new location. Content accuracy and consistency were jeopardized as there was no way to ensure information updated in the primary location would also be updat­ed in all secondary locations.

“IBM is moving toward a solutions-based business model in which we must seamlessly bring together consulting, services, hardware, software and financing to solve customers’ business problems,” explains Howard Miller, vice president of IBM Enterprise Business Information Center of Excellence. “Driving to consistent content creation and collaboration, and providing content management tools that integrate content across brands quickly is critical to our success in this area.”

Adds Carmen Rufo, manager, Enterprise Content Management, Office of the CIO, IBM, “The lack of content management standards across the enterprise threatened to prohibit IBM from fully delivering on key business strategies. We faced the same challenge many of our customers face: With the explosion of information, it was becoming difficult for our employees and customers to locate and utilize the information they needed.”

Delivering information as a service
In response, the IBM CIO office worked to create a unified content management framework that would:

• Help customers and employees find accurate content in a timely fashion.
• Create a single trusted source from which content authors could repurpose and reuse content.
• Minimize the development and hosting investment made by individual business units for Web content management. The savings could be reinvested in advanced end-user portal capabilities instead of backend content management capabilities.
• Leverage standards-based enterprise management metadata tags to help enhance search capabilities and enforce legal requirements.

This framework is based on a model of delivering Information as a Service, the IBM vision for creating reusable services that helps unlock the value of informa­tion and enables individuals to easily tap into previously unexplored content. “By delivering Information as a Service, unstructured content could be repurposed and reused,” says Rufo. “And by applying service oriented architecture principles, we could create a flexible environment in which services could be deployed quickly. This is vital in helping us reduce operational costs and meet our business goals.”

An open, integrated suite delivers information on demand
To meet these goals, the CIO office teamed with IBM Software Group and IBM Global Business Services to build an environment that allows a single asset to be shared across multiple sites, transformed for multiple contexts and assembled with other assets as needed.

IBM Content Manager software, which runs on an IBM System p cluster, provides the robust repository for managing, sharing, reusing and archiving unstructured Web content and related attachments. It enables the organization to standard­ize key words, subject tags and expiration dates to improve end-user searches, help maintain compliance with legal requirements and personalize content. When posting content, authors can select a future publication date. This relieves employees of having to remember to post event or announcement information on a specified day and time.

The solution’s sophisticated workflow capabilities help ensure that documents are approved prior to posting. Based on the team’s business policies, IBM Content Manager solution automatically determines if new or updated content must be reviewed, and then forwards an approval request to the appropriate person.

IBM WebSphere Application Server technology powers the authoring interface, enabling the organization to deploy browser-based forms that enforce the content and enterprise tagging standards. It also facilitates the distribution of content, providing built-in intelligence to track content changes. This information is then shared with IBM WebSphere Information Integrator for Content Edition software, which automatically updates content in each published location. This has eliminated the highly time-consuming copy and paste processes and has helped ensure greater accuracy and consistency of content.

WebSphere Information Integrator software also enables the organization to federate content so that different content repositories appear as a single virtual repository. “We didn’t know where the information would ultimately be,” says Rufo. “IBM Content Management solutions enable us to consolidate information where possible and federate it where appropriate.”

IBM Rational Application Developer software helps staff construct these Web services quickly and efficiently. “We can deploy new services for content provid­ers without a great deal of effort, thanks to Rational Application Developer,” adds Hans Kahler, senior application architect, Web and Content Management Development, Global e-Business Transformation, IBM Software Group.

Currently, more than 325,000 content assets and 1.5 terabytes of data are managed through the Enterprise Content Management initiative. The IBM CIO office anticipates that the amount of data will grow to 2.5 tera­bytes by the end of 2007.

“The solution provides the scalability to handle growth seamlessly,” says Michael Desimone, senior IT archi­tect, Enterprise Content Management Strategy and Implementation, IBM. “This is critical. Almost 2,000 content authors use the system today and we believe this may rise to more than 80,000 content authors. And today, the content produced by this system appears on the desktop of 320,000 IBM employees.”

$45 million in savings and counting
Already, IBM has consolidated and shut down 915 Web sites. “IBM Content Management solutions have helped us realize tremendous cost savings—$45 million to date—and helped us ensure that Web information can be exploited across the enterprise,” says Rufo. “We expect savings to reach a potential $100 million as more business units leverage this infrastructure and the enterprise content management strategy.”

At the same time, the overall Web experience for IBM customers, business partners and employees has significantly improved. “Our Web site effectiveness, user experience and Web site score rat­ings have improved in recent years according to siteIQ assessments,” says Avi Rakhsha, manager, Web and Content Management Development, Global e-Business Transformation, IBM Software Group. “This is due in part to our enterprise content management framework.”

Additionally, content developers can now quickly localize content for faster time-to-market of new information. With templates that can be deployed globally for different languages, Web site deployments that once took months now take just weeks.

“Our Enterprise Content Management initiative provides a federated environment with consistent standards and metadata tags to enable the solutions-based business model that we are working toward,” says Miller.

And ultimately, it enables staff to lever­age content in new ways and gain greater business insight. “IBM Content Management solutions are essential in helping us deliver accurate, consistent and timely information on demand, so our employees, customers and business partners can focus on innovation,” concludes Rufo.

Key Components
Software

• IBM Content Manager
• IBM Rational® Application Developer
• IBM WebSphere® Information Integrator Content Edition
• IBM WebSphere Application Server

Servers

• IBM System p™

Services

• IBM Global Business Services

For more information
Please contact your IBM sales repre­sentative or IBM Business Partner.
Visit our Web site at: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/data/content-management/

You can get even more out of Information Management software by participating in independently run Information Management User Groups around the world. Learn about opportunities near you at ibm.com/software/data/usergroup