Enterprise content management (ECM) tools and strategies allow the management of an organisation's unstructured information (and to a lesser degree structured data), wherever that information exists. This is so that an organisation, such as a business or governmental agency, can more effectively meet business goals (increase profit or improve the efficient use of budgets), serve its customers (as a competitive advantage, or to improve responsiveness), and protect itself (against non-compliance, law-suits, uncoordinated departments or turnover within the organisation).

However, enterprise content management has not been well addressed by industry standard methodologies. Ixxus has developed the expertise and methodologies to ensure the cost effective development of extensible content management solutions that deliver and maintain (as volume and complexity grows) the operating performance and financial benefits that a well implemented ECM solution can deliver.

We have summarised this approach as 'Intelligent Content Management™'

The following diagram provides an overview of our intelligent content management™ process:

Ixxus has a wealth of experience in all of the different aspects of enterprise content management, be it document management, records management, web content management, collaboration, or digital asset management.

We have found that one of the key ingredients to a successful deployment is paying detailed attention to the under lying information architecture - building a common and precise tagging model that describes the content. Information architecture refers to the analysis and design of the data stored by the different information systems, concentrating on entities, their attributes and their interrelationships.

We help organisations establish corporate semantics (vocabularies, synonyms, terms, taxonomies) that model and support their business. This provides them with the ability to standardise, map and manage the technical business models and semantic standards found throughout the enterprise that is vital for maintaining an agile and competitive business.

Unstructured information that is exploding in its growth across an organisation. Couple that with the rapid changes in the utilisation of technology, and you have an urgent requirement to ensure an efficient, effective content management strategy is utilised throughout your organisation.

For example, in the field of web content management there has been a dramatic shift in technology and customer expectations. Today consumers are used to using Google Maps, GMail, Blogger, Flickr, del.icio.us, and Wikipedia. These new services (associated with a new generation of websites popularly known as Web 2.0) have again reset expectations creating a fundamental shift in both technology requirements and associated business requirements for content management. These have had a fundamental effect on user's expectations in the areas of: Rich User Interface, Participation, Community Services, Categorisation and Trust - all built on a decentralized infrastructure.

If you are looking for a document management solution, you will need to consider many different facets. Document management systems commonly provide storage, versioning, metadata, security, as well as indexing and retrieval capabilities. Therefore, from a retrieval perspective you have to consider how to architect your search solution; what is your filing strategy across the organisation? How do you protect against loss, tampering or destruction of documents, and how do you deal with sensitive information? What is your archival strategy? What is your retention policy - what to retain? Length of retention? Removal? What number of users and the logistics of collaboration? The list goes on .

Our customers want to intelligently manage their digital information in all its forms, hence the need for our intelligent content management™ approach.