Greening the Data-Centre - the ECM Way

Greening the data-centre is an initiative that any responsible environmentally-aware organisation should be undertaking.

Simply virtualisation at the server-level goes along way to achieving your goals - but so does switching off monitors, ceiling-lights and other items of electrical equipment that are on your desks right now!

One of the major challenges that is faced by an organisation is actually around the amount of information spread across multiple systems and held in numerous versions or simple duplication of data. Within an organisation, 85% of information is comprised of unstructured data and of this - a high percentage (30-40% in some cases) is duplicated. Implementing an ECM solution properly, that promotes single-point-storage for unstructured data is a key deliverable in greening the data-centre. Managing a smaller data footprint on fewer servers delivers environmental benefits as well as reducing overall costs in real-dollar terms.

Paul

ECM - 'One' Repository or 'Three'?

Quick question, which looks simpler to you in the following diagram....?
If you answered A then you are probably from another ECM vendor organisation claiming efficiency, scalability and all the usual reasons quoted to your customers. Whilst it is true that during the 1980's and 1990's this was the ONLY architecture available that would work for an enterprise organisation - things have moved-on in the world!

Oracle's 11g technology allows any information to be managed in a single database architecture. You really, and truly don't have to deploy and manage a separate filestore and index in order to manage your unstructured information separately from your structured data and to the IT department - you can use the same management tools and methodologies you love to look after the 85% of information your organisation generates outside of the database. Think about a world where you don't have to worry about persistence of backups in order to prevent data-loss when recovering a system.

Doesn't the diagram to the right look simpler? We'll be covering more around the 11g architecture and time progresses but for now - consider simplifying your lives and providing richer functionality to your users through a single ECM solution.

Paul

[Addendum]
Information Security

Oracle has a great capability in this area using 11G to store all three of the core data sets inside one instance ( Text, metadata and objects) this makes tracing illegal access both viable and practical which to us is the key to good security policy. The single-repository approach promotes this and provides some obvious benefits.

Patching with Confidence!

I was reading this recent article regarding the latest security patches released by Oracle, and it had me thinking about how to best manage patching cycle.

At the outset it addresses a frightening reality:
“In many cases, companies, especially large ones with many databases, are reluctant to bring down production databases to implement new patches. Many are also wary about deploying untested patches in live environments or need to wait for their packaged application vendors to test and certify the patches before they can be deployed"

“As a result, there usually is a considerable lag time between when a patch becomes available from Oracle and when it gets deployed. In some cases, the lag can be months. Other users simply skip entire patch cycles and choose to deploy the patches on a yearly or twice-yearly basis.”

Furthermore, the article said: “…of 305 Oracle database administrators from 14 Oracle user groups between August 2007 and January 2008 and found that two-thirds of Oracle DBAs apparently are not installing Oracle's security patches at all, no matter how critical the vulnerabilities are.”

This drew the author to the make the following stark but obvious conclusion: “…such practices can leave companies dangerously exposed to attacks directed against database vulnerabilities.”

Patch Management is no that difficult. So why are organisations still struggling? Many DBA’s and Operations Managers I’ve spoke to mention three recurring themes.

1. Application Regression Testing- often, because of 3rd party application certification dependencies, there is a requirement to wait for the next application refresh cycle so that appropriate regression testing can be completed prior to upgrading.
2. Confidence is often low because - regardless of the fact that an update has gone through certification - many DBA's have a story to tell about when a tested patch in dev worked differently in production as a result of environmental differences.
3. The timing and time required to apply an update. DBA's need to allocate time to apply and test the update in a test environment, then they need to find a slot in the upgrade schedule to apply it in production. All of this needs to multiplied by the number of environments that need updating and the number of updates to be applied. Clearly, mechanisms are required to cut down cycle times and automate recurring tasks.

Patch Management requires planning and change management to ensure that each updateis priorotised and scheduled accordingly. The DBA should review each vulnerability patch and make a determination on the criticality and impact on their specific environment. Often not all patches need to be applied based on the broader security setup and criticality of the system.

As it stands today, Oracle provides a robust set of tools under our System and Application Management (SAM) portfolio.Real Application Testing, an innovation in Oracle Database 11g, allows database workloads to be efficiently captured in production and replayed for testing purposes. The facility faithfully replays transactions with order and timing preserved. It then reports on the performance of the test and highlights areas of change. Using Oracle Testing capabilities, confidence is increased are tests are based on real production workloads rather than synthetic test scenarios. Testing cycles are therefore shortened, not only because the test is largely automated, but also because the increased confidence associated with using real production workloads.

Furthermore, Oracle Enterprise Manager Provisioning Pack provides automated provisioning and patching facilities that make it easier to locate and apply patches. It also drastically reduces the effort required to patch multiple systems, which is great news if you’ve got scores of databases to manage.

Finally, when it comes to applying updates to production environments, 11g “Hot patching” means that it will be possible to apply an update to the Oracle binary while the database continues to run avoiding small downtime windows.

The article goes on to say that of DBAs and IT Managers at 300 organisations surveyed by the Independent Oracle Users Group, “…20 percent said they expected their databases to be breached in the coming year”.

Fortunately, these and other innovations in 11g, if utilised will take the pain out for DBA's, Application and System administrators which in turn will make their life easier.

Marc Caltabiano
Director, Enterprise Architecture

The Perfect ECM Architecture - Part 1

It's funny trying to explain the perfect ECM architecture to people representing a business-unit or even to IT on occasions. I often get asked 'What is the perfect ECM architecture' and of course, the answer is normally based upon the perceived requirements. So, to make things easy to understand, I'm writing this blog in 2 parts. The first part, that you are reading now, will focus on the imperfect architecture - really to explain what you should be avoiding and the second part will talk about the architecture that you should look to deploy.

I'm going to start with an analogy. You walk into a car dealership and talk to the sales person about your requirements for transport. You talk about the need to carry 4 people, in-car entertainment, performance and economy etc. etc. etc. The salesperson shows you a picture of a brand-spanking new vehicle that looks absolutely perfect for your requirements - it is the right colour, has 4-wheels, seats and a radio and the specifications for the vehicle show the right levels of performance and economy. You negotiate on price and come to an agreement, shake hands and set a delivery date. The day arrives when you are to have your new vehicle delivered. You arrive early at the dealership and get walked through the terms of the agreement, you drink some nice coffee and eat some chocolate biscuits. The time arrives and you are shown your new vehicle......

To your surprise, in the car park, is a pile of boxes from very different manufacturers - some of which you even recognise the names of. The engine has been shipped from Germany, the doors come from Geelong, the wheels from the UK, the chassis from the USA, the radio from Japan.... The sales person explains that what you brought is the best-of-everything meeting your precise requirements. What he failed to explain during the sales process is that you needed to spend an inordinate amount of time wiring and bolting the car together and that getting the vehicle serviced once complete would require visits to multiple providers. The salesperson offers the names of several mechanics and auto-electricians that can help you put together your new vehicle - at additional cost of course.

What do you end up with....?


As casual as this seems - this happens every-day around the world with ECM solutions. You think you know what you are getting from the vendor but more-often-than-not - you actually get something different. The document management solution doesn't talk to the WCM solution. Records policies cannot be applied to collaborative content. The WIKI and BLOG environment is separate and based upon unsupported open-source code. The user-interface looks clunky and the solution delivers not one, but many silos of information that you need to manage.

Your organisation doesn't need this, if it happens you will end-up spending more money that you ever imagined and the promise of an enterprise content management environment may never materialise! Your users will face an interface that doesn't provide any value and impacts their ability to perform their role on a daily basis. Of course, the inverse of this is a nice-looking interface that sits on top of a messy back-end that just causes headaches for the IT department to manage.

What you need is a nice-looking, functional user-interface based upon a complete, integrated and open-standards based back-end that provides the ECM capability that your organisation needs. This is simple, surely?

The perfect ECM architecture, I'll introduce you to that in the next article!

Paul

Oracle Fusion Middleware Forum

The recent OFM Forum was a great success in Sydney and Melbourne with around 150 people attending each event.  The event covered all facets of OFM with particular attention on the WebLogic Application Grid, Governance, SOA Best Practice and product roadmap information.  Presently also were several key Oracle Fusion Middleware partners including Intelligent Pathways, Integral Technology Solutions and Renewtek.

Thanks to all who attended. Below are links to the various presentations and podcast recordings of the speakers.

First up was Matt Wright (ANZ Product Marketing). Matt spoke about the Application Grid and how the concept of pooling compute resources and the services and data layers can result in much greater efficiency and scalability for applications.  Below is Matt’s presentation.  The podcast for Matt's presentation is here.

Matt Wright - Oracle - The Application Grid

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Next Ryan Close (CIO of Australian Vintage Limited) spoke about the use of SOA within the AVL. This focused on the automation of Order Management and the use of BAM to get greater business visibility.  Ryan’s presentation below and the podcast is here.

Ryan Close - Australian Vintage - Customer Case Study

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The next presentation came from Alison Foster (Managing Consultant at Integral Technology Solutions) who spoke about the how Business Process Management can enable a more dynamic business environment. Alison’s presentation is below and the podcast recording here.

Allison Foster - Integral Technology Solutions - Driving the Dynamic Business 

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We then shifted focus to governance and had Aaron Blishen (Solution Architect and Intelligent Pathways) talk about how to avoid becoming and SOA statistic through using the appropriate methodologies, tools and skills to ensure high quality delivery of projects.  Aaron’s presentation is below and the podcast here.

Aaron Blishen - Intelligent Pathways - Avoid Becoming a Statistic with Oracle SOA Governance

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After a great lunch we had Peter McTaggart (CTO of Renewtek) speak about the use of Agile Methodologies and the relationship of these new project approaches to SOA.  Peter’s presentation is below and the podcast is here.

Peter McTaggart - Renewtek - Achieving Hero Status with WebLogic Server

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Wrapping up the day was Saul Cunningham (SOA Business Development, Oracle) who spoke about SOA Adoption and Best Practice.  This presentation looked at the SOA Maturity Model and the typical progression and best practice at the various levels. Saul’s presentation can be found below and the podcast here.

Saul Cunningham - Oracle - Best Practices for Scaling your SOA Infrastructure and Projects

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Real Application Testing Certified with E-Business Suite

One of the significant new options of Oracle Database 11g, Real Application Testing, is now certified with Oracle Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11i and 12. This means that for E-Business suite customers who wish to upgrade their database layer, from 10gR2 to 11g in preparation for an apps R12 upgrade.

Or migrate from a single siloed, monolithic infrastructure to a RAC cluster, as part of a consolidation strategy. You now have a tool that will greatly assist in all that expensive, mundane and repetitive testing that needs to be done when migrating a business critical application.

For more info take a look here:-

http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2008/11/real_application_testing_certified_with_ebs.html

Once you have migrated your EBiz to 11g you can then start looking at the benefits of Advanced Compression.

http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2008/10/using_advanced_compression_with_e-business_suite.html

Barry

Federating or Consolidation - A buyers guide to REAL ECM and what it means to your existing solutions

If you've recently purchased or are thinking of purchasing a REAL ECM solution from a software vendor - there is one challenge that you will face. What do you do with the information in your current systems?

Firstly, let me qualify 'REAL ECM'. There are not that many vendors in the market who offer a REAL ECM solution - that is, one that is Complete, Integrated and Open and able to be deployed to the enterprise as a whole. I can count the number on the fingers of one hand so you will gather that I'm excluding vendors who offer either a point solution (WCM alone for example) or those who profess to the complete solution but don't actually provide such an architecture.

Now to the problem - if you're going down the path of ECM you have more than likely taken the specialist path historically or have acquired an organisation that had their own solution. Either way, you're now looking at managing your unstructured information effectively and in a controlled manner and want to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology and capabilities on offer from the top-vendors. If this is you, congratulations as you've taken the first step towards successfully addressing one of the biggest challenges facing organisations today - the growth of data that lives outside of the database. Within an ECM project, and I've been involved in around 100 significant depoyments in my time as an ECM consultant, you will look at two things....

1. The usability, functionality, capabilitiy, benefits etc. etc. etc. to be realised by the organisation through the deployment of ECM and if you're following a defined methodology - will take the business requirements, functional requirements and solution design stages for each and every project you run. The output from these projects will be new abilities for the business to manage their own information freeing up valuable time and resource from the IT department. If done well, you'll also save a lot of money and streamline your business processes to the point where you'll sit back and wonder how you managed things before you started!

2. What are you going to do with all the information in your current systems? You will probably have a records-management solution that looks after the physical warehouse and all the paper stored in boxes, a document-management solution that you started to deploy but realised that the end-user change management was too hard, a web-content management solution that didn't meet the needs of the business and ended up costing you more in integration services than the software in the first place and a collaborative environment where your users can talk to each other in small groups/teams but not as an organisation as a whole. Buying a new ECM solution isn't going to solve world-huge (although I've seen it sold this way in the past) but it should help resolve the issues listed above if deployed in the right way. I've spoken at length in the past about successful projects - find the article and read it if you're still not too sure about what approach you need to follow. From a functional and capability perspective, a modern and integrated ECM solution will provide you with the ability to manage your unstructured information as easily as you manage structured data in your relational-database solutions. From a historical-data perspective, there is a challenge however.

You have legacy solutions that manage your unstructured information in a fragmented manner - lots of solutions and lots of silos of data, none of which talk to one-another. Do you migrate the information to the new ECM solution or leave it where it is and federate the information?

Migration presents it's own challenges. Whilst you may end up with a single solution long-term you will go through a lot of pain (and dollars) in the process. Migrating information to the new solution isn't particularly easy and certainly is not risk-free. You will have to replicate metadata, move the content, ensure consistency of information and guarantee compliance in the process. You will spend time and money on this approach and probably cannot guarantee success - and this is not the vendor or SI's fault, sometimes things are just too hard to accomplish. So that leave federating functionality from the new system to the old-solutions....

Federating ECM capability provides two core capabilities....

1. Finding information - enabling a secure enterprise search capability from the new solution to the old repositories means that your users have a single search-interface that can deliver results from a multitude of sources. Providing this capability within an ECM solution rather than a pure-play enterprise search-tool means that information is delivered in context AND relevance to the user through a system that understands (and has been configured) to deliver the business requirments for ECM.
2. Managing information - enabling you to set-up and manage policies that impact retention and disposition of information as well as storage-locations and applying these to information in existing legacy solutions means that you have a centalised control over your entire enterprise information-set and use common and consistent management techniques.

Effectively, with a Federation approach you leave the data where it is and stop using the existing UI's for content consumption and contribution. You switch over to the new ECM solution for content-management across its capabilities and manage/leverage your historical silos of information. Most of your legacy solutions will be database-based and while you can switch off support for the package itself - you own the data and the database management solution and don't have to switch this off.

Of course, the Federation approach won't work for all organisations - each company has its own requriements and in some-cases a migration approach of all information to the new ECM solution will be a mandatory requirement. Also, there may be some solutions that you won't want to switch off - drawing management for example - as the actual requirements are pretty specialised and the health-and-safety of employees and customers maybe affected through the migration to a system that compromises on functionality.

Paul