Future of Content Applications Revisited

The vast majority of the information that enterprises must manage today is"unstructured"? textual information and rich media content that doesn't fit neatly into the rows and columns of a relational database management system. Organizations need to leverage this information to automate business processes, but to do this the content itself must be prepared and managed in such a way that it is intelligible to a computerized process. This IDC study presents results from a recent survey of approximately 600 content management professionals, and provides an analysis of technology adoption trends and market readiness for content applications.

"Users need to assess how their current business processes ? both collaborative, and transactional ? can be better automated through the more effective use of unstructured information,"said Melissa Webster, program vice president, Content and Digital Media Technologies."Business processes that include multiple transformations in and out of paper form, or that require information workers to manually assemble information from multiple sources and manipulate it to support decision-making, are areas where organizations can reap a good return on their investment in content applications."

• IDC Opinion
• In This Study
• Situation Overview
  • The Rise of Content Applications
  • Repeating a Survey of Content Management Professionals
  • Table: Survey Respondents by Job Title and Company Size, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
  • Table: Survey Respondents by Industry, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
  • Adoption of Content Applications
    • Overall Trends in 2007
    • Figure: Expectations for Using Content
    • The Growing Importance of Semantics
    • Table: Respondents' Expectations for Content, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
  • Content Technology Adoption
    • Shifting Usage
    • Table: Use of Content Technologies, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
    • The Role of Content Management Systems
    • Table: The Role of the Content Management System, 2007
  • Publishing Content
  • Table: Where Content is Published, 2005, 2007, and 2009 (% of Respondents)
  • Kinds of Content
  • Table: Content Produced, Managed, or Delivered Electronically by Type, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
  • Significant Challenges for Managing Content
  • Table: Significant Challenges for Content Management, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
  • Using XML for Content Applications
  • Table: Using XML in the Organization, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
  • Deploying Taxonomies
  • Table: Taxonomy Adoption, 2005 and 2007 (% of Respondents)
  • Table: Number of Taxonomies Used, 2007
  • Table: Issues Developing and Maintaining Taxonomies, 2007
  • Figure: Number of Languages Need to Translate Taxonomies Into, 2007
• Future Outlook
• Essential Guidance
• Learn More
  • Related Research
  • Synopsis