Content Management Systems - All grown up and plenty of places to go

So now your organization has started social media interaction, have acquired many third party applications that interface to your ERP system, how can you manage all this extraneous data?  The problem that this causes for an organization is the unstructured data that this produces.  There are several implications for unstructured data being storage, indexing, tagging, ability to reuse and access data with email are problems an organization will continue to face even more so with the proliferation of social media within the organization. 

Organizations have always had a difficult time to capture the unstructured data contained within email and other forms of informal office communications.  Often valuable information, links, ideas, thought leadership, proprietary company information is shared with no real way to leverage this goldmine of information that is created.  This problem also extends throughout the organization stemming from product design to all the way through the supply chain.  The lack of internal data capture extends to outside the enterprise when social media is invoked. 

Systems that capture data such as PLM systems have started to evolve as the backbone to organizational storage.  The link of storing data and the ability to reuse it has caused some PLM vendors to incorporate content management and PLM functionality. This provides a basis for meta data tagging, indexing, storage, ability to leverage existing intellectual property and reusing company data that should be reusable. 


Enter one evolution of content management system.  These systems can not only store data effectively but store it as usable chunks that can be indexed and readily accessible for many purposes.   These content management systems can be thought of as another weapon to harness business performance.  As these applications spread and start to merge with other applications we are seeing a new evolution of PLM and CMS to start to include social media.  By including this functionality here it may alleviate some concerns about capturing data, customer feedback etc.  It is pretty easy to see as more of these applications evolve and include greater features and functions they are encroaching on the ERP itself.  Ideally, this would be integrated into your ERP and the SOA that acts as the platform would allow the applications to speak freely without interruption.  By providing platform consistency should also allow the UI to be more user friendly and more readily accessible to allow use of all information stored within the system.