There's nothing like a big corporate scandal to get businesses to focus on their own lines of responsibility and the strength of their content audit trails.

But it isn't just the Enron effect which has given the content management market a new impetus.

Many sectors already have a culture of compliance with their own regulations, although global organisations face an extra layer of complexity created by local variations.

But new challenges are arising, such as privacy legislation embodied in the UK by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act and the Data Protection Act.

The latter is about to be rigorously enforced by the new Information Commissioner Richard Thomas. Organisations must adopt a watertight approach to any content management which involves personal information or could conceivably become part of proceedings in action taken under RIP.

There is also the issue of intellectual property and copyright ownership. The idea of content is, by definition, nebulous.

Traditional ad hoc and silo-based management strategies rarely take into account who owns the content.

The situation has been exacerbated by the rise of web content, which has been treated differently; practically as a 'free' resource which can be copied and adapted without any thought about its ownership.

"Legal issues vary a lot by industry and some need strict adherence to regulations," explained Tim Wort, European vice president at content management software developer Vignette.

"Organisations have moral obligations beyond statutory requirements to provide information in the right way and provide a better service to their customers.

"That won't necessarily be covered by legislation, but we are certainly seeing greater attention being paid to corporate governance and business ethics."

Simon Stokes, head of the e-commerce and digital media group at law firm Tarlo Lyons, warned that a content management system should not be introduced without a full written content ownership policy.

"Businesses need to ensure that intellectual property rights clearances are obtained for copyright and database rights," he said. "This is important when digitising material for storage, or when it is reused on a website.

"If content contains personal data, the Data Protection Act also needs to be considered. This is essential if the data can be accessed by reference to the details of the data subject."

He advises organisations to consider best practice content protection with appropriate digital rights management tools.

Simon Halberstam, partner and head of e-commerce law at Sprecher Grier Halberstam LLP & Weblaw, explained that companies are struggling to marry commercially desirable content management practices with that which is legally mandated.

No one wants to spend money storing content which they don't need to retain beyond a certain time. The trouble is that there's no absolute benchmark.

"All organisation have to look at the basic legal issues, but it depends on the context in which the content is being used," said Halberstam.

"If it's content you have published, you must ensure that the people who created it are employed by you, or have given you the copyright. But do you have the legal right in relation to the content to manipulate it?"

Halberstam believes that organisations are lax when implementing a basic content management policy.

There are twin imperatives: to ensure that they are not infringing any legislation themselves, and to protect their content from theft or misuse.

"Smaller companies are less likely to commission their own content, which tends to be cribbed and often infringes other people's copyright and moral rights," he said.

"This is a big issue for small and medium-sized businesses, and it really needs to be pinned down.

"There's a big temptation to copy something as basic as another company's legal terms and conditions from a website. People think that, just because something is in the public domain, they have an unfettered licence to use it."

The wake-up call comes when content becomes a revenue source which has to be defended. A good content management policy, with the adequate tools, should ensure that unauthorised manipulation is barred, and that people are prevented from doing unauthorised things with your content.

Content management vendors have not yet grasped this as a potential marketing tool. "'We've done this to address your legal requirements' sounds like a good sales pitch!" said Halberstam.

Take control of your content
There has never been a stronger practical, business or legal case for establishing the role of a content manager to ensure consistency and compliance.

While a full-time position will be beyond the budgets of many small and medium-sized businesses, there is a need in larger organisations to address content management problems, such as inconsistency of content, to develop a content management culture through training and to manage departmental contributions to a central repository.

"There's a big cultural impact to be made by empowering owners to manage the lifecycle of the content," explained Richard Anstey, chief technology architect at enterprise content management specialist Obtree.

"This is a new environment, with business people in charge of the process. For example, in the public sector many people still have secretaries to do their typing.

"It takes a leap of imagination for them to stop passing on the responsibility for their content. But, once systems are in place, the content they produce becomes more relevant and interesting."

Charlie Abrahams, European managing director of portal-focused web content management specialist Plumtree, suggested that the necessary cultural change will see the end user becoming a content contributor as well as a consumer, submitting content to portals using a managed, template-based process.

The role of this content manager would be to fulfil the non-trivial task of selling the concept to the users and formalising compliance with the strategy through their own terms and conditions of employment.

"If an organisation is reliant on internally generated content, it needs to make sure that users understand that, if they crib stuff, they must have obtained copyright clearance, otherwise the company becomes responsible," warned Halberstam.

What do you really want from content management?
"Customers are taking a more modular approach to content management," according to Neil Louw, solutions consultant at systems integrator Dimension Data.

"There's a big impact on the business and it entails a massive training exercise. That way, the impact is lessened and businesses get a quicker return on investment [ROI].

"The market will split into smaller chunks and each module will have to show a ROI and deliver proven benefits before the next phase."

Dimension Data has published its 2003 Enterprise Content Management Benchmark study, which looked at how 500 large UK companies managed multiple content streams.

About 40 per cent plan to invest up to £75,000 in content management projects, which suggests that the modular approach is taking hold. But 10 per cent are considering big-ticket implementations worth up to £2m.

Web content management has been the primary focus for initial projects, followed by the drive to standardise and publish content. Some 35 per cent of these systems are used for document management.

The majority (74 per cent) of respondents indicated that integration is important in meeting the following business goals of an enterprise content management system:

• Improved operational efficiency
• Improved customer support and service
• Better knowledge sharing
• Enhanced brand awareness
• Closer supply chain collaboration

Preferred implementation methods reflect the perceived fluidity of the market. Some 25 per cent prefer to build in-house, 23 per cent will buy off the shelf, 25 per cent will buy bespoke, 16 per cent from a current partner, and just 10 per cent from a new partner.

CASE STUDY: LINKLATERS

"The legal sector is no more advanced regarding records management than any other," said Phil Shenker, office systems consulting manager at Linklaters.

The global law firm, with 6,000 employees and 28 offices on three continents, has been developing its content management strategy on a Documentum platform since 1997.

"Complete compliance, where data protection and retention law in a global market varies from one country to the next, is hard to achieve," explained Shenker.

All the more reason for a strategy which embraces single check-in and check-out procedures to avoid any replication or duplication of content, but still allows rapid turnaround.

Some 75 per cent of the 1.5 million compound documents produced every year by Linklaters are collaborative, often worked on by lawyers in different countries.

In 1996 the firm used a bespoke document management system and faced the choice of migration, which was too expensive, or an off-the-shelf platform.

"We were looking for a platform-independent system so that we didn't have a large hardware outlay and could leverage what we already had," said Shenker.

"The audit trail is also vital. It isn't unknown for people to change documents after they've gone out, and we have to guard against any possibility of litigation against the firm or its clients. It's crucial as a records management tool."

Shenker admitted that Documentum was something of a left-field choice because it had no track record in the legal sector at the time.

But it was the only platform which offered the scalability, architecture and functionality Linklaters was looking for. It also provided a foundation for the web-based delivery of content, now embodied in the law firm's BlueFlag online legal services.

"The fact that users were familiar with the concept and understood it was an advantage," said Shenker.

"No migration was necessary. We gave them tools to access the old system and there was no bulk import strategy. We left it as a repository and it's still available today."

Linklaters claims to have been the first law firm to securely deliver legal online documents and the business processes necessary for the completion of legal transactions surrounding those documents.

The sheer volume of the content it generates, coupled with the need to store it in four discrete locations around the world, could only be controlled by a powerful end-to-end content management platform.