IKS Deliverable - D1.3 Report: Validation of the Semantic Benchmarking Exercise

Confidential Deliverable - Deliverable 1.3 of the IKS Project is a non-public report describing in some detail, the results of the following research activities: 1. An empirical study concerning perceived business needs in relation with content management. This study generated more than 170 individual statements of needs and was based on a survey done with two populations: (a) senior executives from CMS technology providers and (b) senior executives from CMS user organisations. 2. The detailed qualitative analysis of an experiment in which six CMS technology providers had been asked to 3. (a) develop prototype solutions for seven "semantically rich" CMS tasks and where they were subsequently asked to (b) provide a self assessment of their current ability to provide the above semantically rich services to customers. A detailed comparison of 12 high level business needs as perceived by: (a) CMS technology providers (based on the above empirical study) (b) CMS customer organisations (based on the above empirical study) (c) CMS intermediaries and consultants (using their benchmarking criteria) (d) Researchers into CMS and Semantic technologies (based on the semantically rich CMS tasks and their implicit rating of technical difficulty). The tangible outcomes of the work presented here are the 170+ business needs, ranked and prioritized according to stakeholder's opinions and aggregated into 12 high level requirements. In addition, the document provides a basis for aligning and harmonising various exist- ing benchmarking methods and criteria lists for assessing CMS technology. By linking benchmark criteria to business needs, the report makes an important contribution to the field of IT Alignment, specifically for advanced content management applications.