Controlling content chaos

Computerworld - In 1995, the American Hospital Association launched a Web site—its first ever—for one of its publications. It proved so popular that another department at the AHA decided to put up a site too. Soon others also wanted to be on the Internet, and five years later, there were a staggering 72 AHA-affiliated Web sites, all running on different hardware and software, all managed by different departments and organizations, and all totally incapable of sharing content with the others.

It was, in short, Web content chaos, a situation that Herman Baumann, the Chicago-based organization's executive director for strategic development, says "was not sustainable from a business perspective."

The solution, it turned out, was a content management system, which the AHA purchased from Interwoven Inc. in Sunnyvale, Calif., in 2002. The product, called TeamSite, has enabled the AHA to consolidate the content from all 72 Web sites into a single Oracle database, thus reducing maintenance costs while still permitting individual webmasters to manage their own content.

Enterprise content management (ECM) software is designed to keep track of documents and records that are stored in a variety of locations and formats (paper, Web pages, PDF files and, increasingly, audio and video media) throughout a company. Interest in ECM systems has intensified as IT managers feel increased pressure both from their own executives and from regulatory agencies to carefully track and consolidate all of the organization's key documents.

For the AHA, not only did the implementation of a content management system help to centralize diverse stores of information, but it has also vastly increased the content available to all AHA organizations. Now each group can contribute content to the public database, and the others may opt to "subscribe" to that content and have it posted automatically to their sites.

Herman Baumann of the American Hospital Association Image Credit: Andy Goodwin

"For instance, we get 35,000 bodily injury claims each month, and for each, we take audio statements from both sides. These were stored on cassette tapes in a warehouse. If the case went to court, somebody had to go find the tapes, transcribe them, then put them back," explains Valentine, noting that other departments kept documents on microfiche and microfilm, as well as in good old-fashioned filing cabinets.