In the past each group within an organization typically worked with its own content and applications, each with its own server, capabilities, workflows, and user interface: financial personnel with accounting data and systems; knowledge workers with documents in document management (DM) systems; customer service staff with CRM platforms, and so forth. As long as business processes remained confined within these departments, the lack of interoperability among these systems was of secondary concern.
However lately, in order to improve productivity and agility in responding to changing business requirements, organizations are pursuing new initiatives and objectives that increasingly involve multiple departments, data stores, and business processes, as well as moving more content and applications out to internal and customer-facing Web sites. As developers seek to integrate ECM into a broad range of packaged and custom applications and portals, the need for a more flexible approach to integrating ECM technologies across the enterprise becomes increasingly evident. Separate silos for different types of content make composite business applications difficult to develop and deploy, and require custom code to bridge different APIs, interfaces, and platforms. Further, foundation capabilities such as security, access control, workflow, and renditions may be available only in selected content type-specific offerings.
Web services offer a way to escape these content silos, thereby enabling developers to put specific ECM functionality where it's needed more quickly and in a more cost-effective manner.
