CRM Meets Content Management

[Sunite]

CRM Meets Content Management
By Ron Miller
October 10, 2007 11:08AM

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While it sounds logical to get CRM and CM together -- and there's been a need for quite some time -- the reason it hasn't happened sooner, says Tony White, a Gilbane and Company analyst who covers content management issues, is because it remains extremely difficult to combine structured and unstructured data.

Related Topics
   CRM
   Content
   Databases
   Customer Data
   Business Intelligence
   Business Processes
   BPM
   ERP

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   For the past 10 years or so, customer relationship management (CRM Relevant Products/Services) and content management (CM) have traveled along parallel paths inside the enterprise. While they have a lot in common -- both are, after all, databases for collecting and organizing crucial enterprise information -- CRM collects structured data about customers and sales, while CM, for the most part, organizes unstructured documents. Even though the two systems have a great deal in common, they have rarely interacted unless someone built a communication bridge specifically designed for the task.

Yet it seems counterproductive for CRM and CM to remain database Relevant Products/Services islands when they have so much information to share with one another to help users make meaningful connections among different content types. If they could get together, sales and marketing personnel, for instance, would not have to check one system for customer data and another for other customer documents to put together a sales presentation.

It only makes sense to combine the two applications to enable employees to access all of the structured and unstructured data about a customer or project from a single interface. At the very least, it's time to get CRM and CM systems communicating. That's just what many vendors are beginning to do. The only question is: What took them so long?

This workflow illustrates how CRM and CM can work together at an insurance company. Experts author and manage benefits information in a WorkSite-based knowledge base and the call center reps access this information to communicate with members and providers.

What Took So Long?

While it sounds logical to get CRM and CM together -- and there's been a need for quite some time -- the reason it hasn't happened sooner, says Tony White, a Gilbane and Company analyst who covers content management issues, is because it remains extremely difficult to combine structured and unstructured data.

"Historically, there has been a big disconnect between the two types of applications and vendors," he says. If you look at the content management, especially enterprise content management vendors, such as EMC Documentum, for example, these applications are still very much information silos that don't communicate very well with applications like CRM," he explains. Integration, White says, when it does exist, is more a point-to-point solution to move a specific type of information from one system to another, rather than a comprehensive way of sharing information across the two systems. (continued...)

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