Web Content Management - High-Performance Web Databases: Design, Development, and Deployment - page 99

involved in just this single transformation. Transforming from a brick-and-
mortar enterprise to e-Business, however, involves much more. E-Business
incorporates e-Commerce. In addition, it also refers to activities involving
online customer service, support, and possibly front-end collaboration. It
involves innovation, design, and other supply-chain collaboration. Finally, it
may involve online procurement.
Most of these activities involve business processes that are dependent
on documents and content. By all estimates, these represent the majority
of the business processes within an enterprise. This is corroborated by the
fact that between 80 and 90 percent of information within an enterprise is
in unstructured data. For many of these functional units, B2B interactions
generally involve protracted negotiations or collaboration using content.
These interactions can involve partners, suppliers, and possibly custom-
ers. This occurs throughout the value chain, generally involving the shar-
ing and re-purposing of information, and knowledge (i.e., content).
CONTENT AND BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS E-BUSINESS
Most organizations have had to develop an external focus. Competitive
forces are mandating that the walls have to come down. However, for those
entities owning processes within enterprises that depend on unstructured
data, this may not be an easy process. There may be significant challenges.
It has been found that in order to capture many of the benefits offered by
e-Business, they cannot be encumbered by business solutions designed
with the assumption of:
• intimate familiarity with the processes
• intimate familiarity with the physical knowledge repositories
• geographic proximity to enable collaboration, access to, and the shar-
ing of knowledge content
Processes that were designed to operate with content management on a
manual basis are proving to be grossly ineffective and in most cases just do
not work in the B2B environment.
B2B interaction cannot suppose geographic proximity nor intimate
familiarity with either the internal processes or the internal knowledge
repositories. This mandates a focus on managing content in a way that IT
has managed structured data during the past half century. The incentive
for IT is that in the coming years, investment in content management could
yield far greater returns than investments in standard IT. One reason may
be simply due to the law of diminishing returns. Most of the structured data
within organizations is computerized to a large degree, while the cherries
in the content management orchard are yet to be picked.
To reduce risk and enhance efficiency and effectiveness, it is imperative
that the content powering B2B interactions is trusted and is available