In today’s competitive business environment, organizations need to achieve greater process efficiency and control in order to succeed. Increasing knowledge worker productivity through the use of state-of-the-art technology has long been an approach to try and achieve these goals. During the late 1990s and early 2000s many companies invested heavily into Business Process Reengineering with substantial investments in hardware and software infrastructure with a focus on the latest advancements in Web-based technologies. Enterprise information portals were introduced to provide knowledge workers with an Intranet gateway into an organization's resources, processes and knowledge base. At the time, however, enterprise information portals were in an early technology market where the offered features and services were unproven, expensive, and not fully supported by the underlying infrastructure. The serious buyers in this early market were primarily leaders in large organizations looking for technology to solve long term persistent business problems and provide their company with a competitive advantage. At the heart of these efforts was the recognition that the implementation of technologies that support the development of better structured and more efficient business processes is the key to success. 

W. Edwards Deming stated, "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing." A good working definition of process was provided by Dr. Jim I Jones as “… documents in action, enterprise knowledge reflected in repeatable sets of tasks that perform key functions in an organization.” Efficient and controlled processes with reproducible results can be achieved only through the use of documents. Documents provide a way for knowledge workers to comprehend and act on enterprise knowledge. Documents are used to define, initiate and control the flow of processes. Documents also reveal the state, record the output and summarize the results of processes. Process documents record an organization’s core knowledge, provide the intellectual capital that differentiates it from other organizations, and represent the source material for developing a business strategy to gaining a competitive advantage. A document-centric or content-centric view of process recognizes the key role documents (content) play in the day-to-day operation of an organization.

The benefits an organization can gain from a content-centric view of process can be realized through the implementation of a collaboration infrastructure that supplies content on-demand and facilitates the creation and management of content as “knowledge objects of enterprise processes.” The fundamental relationship between process and content is driven by two inter-related lifecycles, the content lifecycle and the workflow lifecycle. These two lifecycles integrated into an extensible portal-based collaboration platform will provide the foundation upon which a content-centric view of process can be built. An information portal designed to deliver an integrated business environment that enables a content-centric view of process can be called an Enterprise Knowledge Portal (EKP).

Over the last several years, Microsoft has developed a set of mature collaboration technologies that provide an affordable, scalable, and extensible platform on which to build web-based applications. This whitepaper provides a systematic approach to defining a content-centric organization as one that implements a series of five content methodologies or maturity levels to develop better structured and more efficient processes. These methodologies, collectively, are referred to as the Content Maturity Model. Subsequent whitepapers will be written to show how Microsoft’s collaboration technologies can be used to build and implement each of the five content maturity levels.

EKP Terminology