Conundrum of Consolidation

From my experience of working in a large organization, one of the things that we get used to is the fact that there are many different systems to do very similar things across the enterprise. Why does this happen? There are perhaps many reasons for this. As the organization grew, a need arose. The small team running around trying to implement the tool to meet their specific need never realized that there was, in another corner of the organization, another tool that could be utilized to meet this need. Instead each team ends up implementing their own solution! A little less frequently, the reason is not lack of knowledge sharing across the organization, rather a ‘feeling’ that the need is unique enough to require a different solution.

Collectively, these reasons help explain how one particular large organization has ended up with 13 different Content Management vendors! Sooner or later, someone senior enough is going to look at this and say, “Geez, this is a mess! We need to consolidate!!”

And consolidate the organization absolutely should. Think about the costs.

Costs of Maintaining Multiple Content Management Systems

• Hardware for all these siloed implementations
• Software licensing fees
• Software customization/extension costs
• Support and maintenance costs (both hardware and software)
• Logistic Costs (for example, each of these thirteen vendors will be putting out updates that need to be deployed. Separately!)

Totaling these costs could have a significant and potentially paralyzing effect on an organization.   Wouldn’t it make sense if the organization moved from 13 to 1? What exactly would they have to lose?

Perceived Drawbacks of Consolidation

1. Flexibility to be ‘unique’
   • Only to an extent, modern day CMS systems will allow specific extensions
2. Freedom to do things as/when we please
   • Not really, a large organization is bound to have standards and processes to be followed across the enterprise
3. Change Management is more involved
   • The number of system ‘tenants’ increases
   • Changes have to be coordinated

Once the pro/con analysis is complete, it doesn’t take long for an organization to see the value in consolidation; a crucial benefit being the use of a single team of experts to manage the system (both hardware and software).  Consolidation also allows for a centrally managed process for upgrades/installs that is uniform for all groups, uniform content management standards, and uniform authoring environments. An author can learn one system and be capable of moving/supporting other lines of business (of course, at a technology level, not business expertise). A thoughtful consolidation effort can actually prevent content redundancy (across groups) and workflows spanning groups can be more easily created, managed and tracked.

So if it all sounds so great, what is the problem? What prevents organizations from rushing to consolidate?

Real Challenges for Consolidation

1. Agreement on Corporate Standard
   • There is an upfront effort needed to get all of these different groups to agree to a corporate standard.
   • Most organizations do understand and recognize the need for governance and standards, it is not a show stopper Implementation of Corporate Standard
2. All groups will have to design the content/data model in the new system (read ‘time and cost’)
   • This is an opportunity to clean up the model, modify it to suit the modern day business needs
   • There is a cost, and an inherent value to this transition
3. Migrate the Content from the legacy system to the new system
   • This is perhaps the Achilles heel of consolidation
   • Countless organizations have tried to orchestrate this internally, only to run into a multitude of challenges

The first is a management challenge which will need to be handled via internal governance and standardization processes. What would feed into it is the cost-benefit analysis (CBA) for the effort. The second and third would specify the cost component of the CBA. The second could be an internal IT effort or utilize third-party CMS implementers. The third fits into the space of Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG). ECoG is achieved by improving the ‘quality’ of content. A content migration is a great opportunity to apply ECoG rules to the content. Migration has three major steps – Extraction, Transformation and Load. The Transformation step offers an opportunity to effectively perform a number of quality enhancing activities. This can include de-duplication of assets, brand enforcement and regulatory compliance amongst many others.

Over the years, organizations have not been making consolidation and/or migration a priority. However, in the present economic climate, there is a greater threat of compliance and eDiscovery risks. Organizations are becoming more and more cognizant of the challenge, and the technology solutions to address them. As organizations arrive at this juncture and are looking for third party experts to enable the consolidation, one thing that they should place special emphasis on is finding experts with a proven track record and a strong methodology. The success of any consolidation effort is part technology, and part expertise/methodology!