They say content is king. I say content is king if we manage it correctly. There are two fundamental elements to content management: (1) storing stuff in a content repository, and (2) supporting the workflow of a group of people engaged in putting stuff into that repository. If managed correctly, enterprises will reap its benefits.

Picking the correct business focus is the most important first step to successful content management and information governance, according to Gartner.

Gartner analysts said it is critical that organizations take a total cost of ownership (TCO) approach using a five-year time frame. Organizations should expect software licensing costs to account for between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of the TCO over five years.

Gartner has identified six tactical approaches to help organizations save money in content management:

1 - Pare Down to the Essential Content: Eliminate old or duplicate content before “standard” ECM, business process management and content-enabled vertical application implementations. Appoint "content strategists" to calculate the cost, value and risk associated with storage and provisioning of content.

2 - Include a policy implementation When You develop a Content Architecture: A policy about documents takes the form of rules and metadata that allow some automatic categorisation and expiration of content. In particular, the policy can be used to separate "content of record" from intermediate content. It can also be used to clean up repositories and file servers.

3 - Include a Content Service Provider and Open Source in Your Strategy: Content service providers are vendors that extend beyond software offerings alone and offer consulting, implementation, outsourcing or other services. IT managers must take a closer look at vendors that compete with content services beyond traditional software, such as Xerox, EDS, HP, Iron Mountain, Astoria, and Clickability among others. Open Source offerings have matured and the market has stabilised. Leaders regularly compete for government and higher education contracts among vertical markets.

4 - Leverage Your Web Channel: Organisations must stop wasting money on manual data and content transformation between customer-facing channels and instead put in place a structured and unstructured master data system.

5 - Explore the Green Benefits of an Electronic Workplace: There are various green initiatives that organisations can explore, such as moving to electronic forms and storing records electronically, eliminating redundancies (50 per cent of archived paper documents are duplicates) that are ultimately saving time, money, trees, and physical storage heating/cooling environmental impact.

6 - Get Out of the E-mail Business: Gartner believes that the hybrid on-premises and hosted e-mail services model will become increasingly popular for organisations – whereby some users (those without extensive mail and calendar needs) will use Outlook web access "in the cloud" at a low price — while the company maintains a population of Outlook/Exchange users at headquarters.