Today, information is a precious commodity, and the enterprises that produce, curate, and sell information have a lot of moving parts to manage to successfully operate. These organizations are often global, and multi-disciplinary and contain numerous business units, many via acquisition. Their content is abundant, complex, and dense, and can influence billions of dollars in investment. Typically, all of this content is housed in the enterprise’s legacy systems. It’s a complicated ecosystem – a recipe for entropy and a barrier to scaling or innovation. For content architects and content platform professionals, this Sisyphean set of problems traditionally had no graceful solution on an enterprise level… until recently. Many “enterprise” platforms were never properly integrated with the rest of the organization or did get out the door just to fizzle after onboarding a few products or business units. Then the latest tech disrupts the process, and the cycle begins again. Today, we can attempt to use cloud, agile, and other contemporary techniques, treating an information provider business unit or product like a startup, but that only adds to the messy web of siloed systems. The answer may be to ignore the “enterprise” label and borrow a method from SaaS vendors. This paper outlines an approach for large multi-faceted information providers to model their core content platform as a multi-tenant set of assets with a common core. We’ll use Alfresco and AWS to make some very concrete points, though the recipe can be baked with many other flavors.
