Ann Michael, Founder of DeltaThink, moderated a panel including Bill Burger, VP of Marketing at Copyright Clearance Center, Sasha Gurke, SVP and Co-Founder of Knovel Corporation and Jim Reeves, SVP of New Product Development for Thomson RIA. Why, integrate content, into who's workflow, and what does content integration mean? Ann outlined how enterprises can review numerous workflow products in "bakeoffs" to determine which are meeting user needs most effectively.

Sasha outlined Knovel Library, a collection of scientific references that has been digitized through Knovel to allow engineers to access individual graphs, charts and tables from these references and to use them interactively via Knovel-generated tools. By getting the content to be highly usable, the user's workflow is transformed through increased productivity. Jim Reeves from Thomson Tax & Accounting focuses on CPAs and other financial professionals. Users can log in and find information on Sarbanes-Oxley andother key topics of interest, search by keywords. Documents retrieved from this system can be integrated into Microsoft Office documents and charts can be generated using content from a wide variety of sources into a common view of regulations. Bill Burger outlined how CCC's Rightsphere has integrated content licensing awareness relicensing capabilities into corporate workflows. Rightsphere is integrated across all kinds of content as opposed via a vertically assembed content collection. Starting with Pfizer and AstraZeneca as research and development partners CCC provided a tool that helps enterprises to understand licensing across all of their licensed content. The key thing that CCC learned from their research into enterprise markets is that rights management is a "speed bump" that people need to verify quickly and effectively. The Rightsphere tool provides a simple graphic that lets users check whether they have full permissions to redistribute content.

All interesting examples of workflow integration, but I think that the key lesson I learned from this is that your product will benefit from thorough field research to understand your users' needs. I.T.-centric products that presume too much about the value of a current platform are likely to result in "workflow" solutions that may increase productivity on some level but are not necessarily truly integrated into the ways in which users really to their job. Workflow is a sword that can cut both ways: if you invest heavily in a tool that works well in a closed environment when your customers are looking for more open-ended workflow integration you may be finding your content locked in to a platform that will have a problem responding to competitors who can devise more horizontal integrations via widgets, mashups and other new technologies.

Labels: CCC, Knovel, SIIA Content Forum 2007, Thomson, workflow integration