A Strategic Approach to Closing the Collaboration Gap in Capital-Intensive Programs

For a great number of organisations operating in complex capital environments, the inability to effectively communicate with a geographically dispersed group of organizations is resulting in poor performance around cost, schedule and scope.

Addressing this complex problem requires a practical solution that can help manage critical project documentation, standardise and enforce business processes and workflow across organisational and geographical boundaries, and provide relevant metrics and key performance indicators to all internal decision makers.

The need to support new, agile business processes is the top pressure driving enterprise organizations, according to the latest results from Aberdeen's Business Process Management Benchmark. The overwhelming concern from line of business executives and top management surrounds the lack of ROI in their ERP investments. Over half of the respondents (51%) - mostly from small and mid-size organisations - say their companies' ERP systems or best-of-breed supply chain solutions don't provide adequate functionality! Some application software, particularly custom applications common in the supply chain, retail areas, and on shop floors are not designed to adapt or react to the rapid business process change and distributed enterprise models on which enterprises operate today.

This document reviews the state of the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market from the perspective of the specialised needs of organisations with all or part of their focus on engineering. We have taken input from recent surveys undertaken by Datamonitor as well as the extensive supporting research undertaken by a series of Butler Group analysts.