The primary advantage that organizations gain through incorporating WCM in their enterprise information management (EIM) strategy is the ability to repurpose existing information. Research has consistently demonstrated a material cost incurred when employees search for information and spend time re-creating information that already exists. When WCM is included in a larger EIM strategy, content owners are able to leverage the web distribution channel without having to re-create content. This has the follow-on effect of minimizing or even eliminating synchronization efforts to keep multiple copies of the same item up to date. It also means that when a change to the content is affected, it ramifies throughout all the distribution channels including WCM channels without additional work.
Think about your corporate web site and the mobile version of your web site. Most of the content is probably the same with the mobile site maybe containing a subset of the main site content. If you are copying and pasting content or even “automatically publishing” a copy of main site content to a mobile website directory or server, you are forced to update the same information twice: Once for the main site and again for the mobile site. Even when replication is automated, if problems occur synchronization and tracing efforts are required. A better solution is to leverage WCM systems that draw content from the same logical (even if physically distributed) repository and render it for the appropriate delivery channel.