Enterprise Content Architecture - my take on the Metastorm acquisition

I'm particularly excited by today's announcement acquisition of Metastorm by OpenText, but not perhaps for the same reasons as many others.

What excites me is the potential of Metastorm's strengths in Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Analysis (BPA). As noted in the release:

"Metastorm is a leader in both BPA and EA as recognized by Gartner in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis Tools, published February 22, 2010 and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, published October 28, 2010."

These capabilities play to both the 'Enterprise' and 'Content' in Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

Organizations depend on a growing proportion of knowledge workers as I discussed in a previous post (Value for Knowledge Workers), but as noted in the McKinsey study I covered (Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers),  most organizations do not understand how to boost the productivity of knowledge workers or indeed the barriers to that productivity. As I noted:

"What struck me in reading the article is that while an increasing proportion of staff in companies are knowledge workers, it is not clear what knowledge work is and how to best enable it to drive productivity gains. Given that, it is hardly surprising that people struggle to define the value of those software tools best able to support knowledge management."

Content is the currency of knowledge work. It supports the exchange of knowledge during business processes, and is very often the work product of such processes (e.g. a market analysis report, an engineering drawing or a website page). Too often in the past discussion of the value of content has centered on either reducing the unit cost of producing, finding or using content, or mitigating compliance risks created by poor content management.

This is not a new theme for me, indeed last August I expressed my enthusiasm for why Content Matters. I noted:

"It's no surprise to people that you can understand a business by 'following the money' or 'following the customer' and that is the basis for ERP and CRM systems. On the other hand most people are only just coming to realize that 'following the content' is just as important, so while we've talked about content management for many years, that conversation is starting to be important to business."

The potential to apply Metastorm's ProVision tool set to elucidate and illustrate the critical role of Content to the achievement of Enterprise Goals is an exciting one which offers new value to our customers.