Enterprise Consistency

Picture (c) www.despair.com

So, let's start with a tongue-in-cheek question.

What's the difference between a political leader (substitute you own relevant PM, president etc. here) and an ECM Solution?

The answer is of course, consistency! Most people vote for their political leadership on the basis that what they promise in their pre-election program is actually going to be stuck-to whilst they are in office. Of course, we all realise soon after election that the promises made previously are rarely upheld in full and quite often - are reversed entirely.

Organisations know that a database provides consistency in the storage of structured information. If you are running an application like Siebel or eBusinessSuite (SAP if you're mad, bad, loaded and have the palette for years of customisation) you rely upon the fact that a piece of information stored in a particular field will always be there - and other users in other parts of the world who use the same information will store their data in exactly the same way. Now, imagine for a minute that the applications used by an organisation stored the same data randomly in the database with a complex algorithm to be manually followed in order to locate the information. Imagine if this information concerned the number of customers ordering a piece of kit, or the financial records for the organisation - how long would it take the accounts department to balance the books at the end of the month or year if every record of income and expenditure had to be manually retrieved from a random storage system.

CRAZY????????????

Funnily enough, there are a lot of organisation out there (and you know who you are) that manage their unstructured information is exactly this way! These organisations wouldn't consider themselves mad but I would question their sanity any day of the week. You see, things are changing rapidly in the world of enterprise information. We've all seen the slides that state how much data is being created daily and how much of it lives within databases as opposed to on file-systems etc. The thing is, it's all true and guess what - the stats show that it's only going to get worse; a LOT worse.

Think about structured data as being an animal's skeleton and unstructured information being the muscle, skin, organs and flesh. With just a skeleton, you could probably build a structure resembling closely what the animal looked like. With everything else, you bring that animal to life and allow it to live. This is the same as any organisation. Without the management of unstructured data - all you have is a skeleton, the flesh that brings life (or context!) is lost or simply REALLY, REALLY hard to find.

Organisations are being challenged to better manage their unstructured data. Here in Australia, the Federal Court has released its practice note that pretty much tells organisations that they had better get their act together else heavy fines and potentially jail-time can be placed on the organisation and its directors. ECM solutions can be really simple to implement and use effectively by an organisation. You don't need the overkill and complexity that a solution like Documentum or FileNet brings - in fact, the majority of these organisations customers only use a tiny subset of their overall functionality offered. Oracle's Unified Content and Records Management solution provides a simple to use, easily configurable, non-intrusive environment for managing unstructured information. Along with the Universal Online Archive, Image and Process Management and Information Rights Management solutions - an organisation can cover just about any requirement they have for managing what constitutes around 85% (and growing!) of their entire organisations information-set.

We are ready to sort-out an organisations enterprise information management craziness with real-world solutions for real-world problems. Consistency comes from using an ECM solution correctly - embedding the business-rules around information storage that make the location and retrieval of unstructured data as easy as for structured information.

Paul

The Perfect ECM Architecture - Part 2

Hopefully you enjoyed Part 1 of this article and had a giggle at the analogy!

How should an organisation execute on their ECM requirements - well, to draw upon a similar analogy you need a vehicle and visit your local showroom. You are shown a real-vehicle, go for a test-drive, negotiate the price and when you get to the delivery day - the vehicle you selected is waiting for you with a full-tank of petrol ready to drive away. All you have to do is tune in your favourite radio stations, put the drivers-seat in the right position and set the mirrors correctly. Buying an ECM solution should be as straight-forward - the solution architecture you get should be like the car you buy from a dealer - the parts come from one manufacturer, have been designed to work together seamlessly from day-1 and all you need to do is configure it to your requirements. There should be no need to bolt the solution together and hope it all works, you shouldn't need to spend time and money with 3rd party suppliers to help you get it running!

We believe that the perfect ECM architecture should look something like this....


So, how should this all work???

The ECM solution should provide the ability to manage ALL of your unstructured information as easily as you manage your structured information. Managing unstructured data across a relational database AND a file-store(s) AND an index is painful, time-consuming and costly. Managing unstructured data WITHIN a relational database is easy, cheap and occurs using the common database management tools and processes you have already developed and deployed for managing structured data. Unstructured data should be stored, managed and protected within the repository and able to be leveraged by other systems including enterprise search using a common set of open-standards tools and APIs.

The ECM platform should be singular in its architecture and approach. You should not have to use different tools and interfaces for managing different types of unstructured data. It should be easy and seamless to create a new HR policy, for example, through MS-WORD (and SharePoint?) review and approve the policy using a template-driven workflow, convert to PDF (or HTML), publish to your portal, intranet or extranet, apply a retention policy appropriate to the document-type and its context and apply digital-rights all through a single solution.

The ability to archive any information from any system should be a component of the ECM solution. A lot of data exists in file and email systems for example. The ability to ingest this data, leaving a 'stub' of metadata is a deliverable that most IT managers will be interested in as it provides back-end benefits. Integrations with ERP and CRM systems to archive data and deliver data is crucial in the improvement of business processes - an example of this is Accounts Payable/Receivable where delivering a digitised image of an invoice, for example, reduces organisational risk and speeds up the payment process. This is driven by image capture, which is ideally also provided as a part of the ECM solution and delivers the ability to acquire (the process that occurs immediately after capture/scanning/eFax-delivery) physical information, tag/categorise/classify, and ingest into the repository.

Underpinning a deployment of Microsoft SharePoint is another area where a complete ECM solution will provide real benefits to an organisation. We all know what SharePoint is good at and most organisations are rapidly becoming aware of its limitations. As a user-interface supporting office-level collaboration SharePoint is great. However, for a larger organisation - its deployability presents some concerns, typically around the number of repositories it can create to support scalability. Providing a true-enterprise repository to support these multiple silos of unstructured data means that common and consistent records and storage policies can be applied and that data can be shared and leveraged by the organisation as a whole.

An organisation may already have tier-2 or tier-3 solutions in place to manage components of ECM such as records or web-content. A complete ECM solution will provide the capability to integrate with these environment to perform one or more of the following functions. Migration, easily support the rapid migration of unstructured information into the enterprise repository enabling the legacy solution to be decommissioned. Federating ECM functionality, such as unified records management, into the legacy repository enabling the application of common and consistent records policies to be applied to unstructured data without the need to migrate information. Leveraging the legacy solution through enterprise search enabling the organisation to find unstructured and structured data through a single search regardless of the repository where data is stored.

Finally, end-user content consumption and interaction through the organisational web-presence environments is becoming a key-focus for businesses around the world. Recent reports have highlighted that in order for a organisation to be successful in the current and projected economic climate, a closer relationship with its customers and partners needs to be established. This occurs in two key ways - publish and interaction.

The first of these, Publish, predominately supports the Internet or any other web-presence where content-consumption is the lead requirement. Content is created and managed within the ECM solution and then, as a part of its lifecycle, published to a website. End-users access the site and either navigate or search for information and land at the published content. In order for this to be successful and for the organisation NOT to end up with a management overhead because they selected a separate app-server/portal-server and ECM solution from different vendors - the ideal solution is to have a single solution in place. This enables the website and the ECM solution to be integrated in such a way that management and administation occurs once. New content, with potentially new categorisation resulting in a change to naviagation, is created, managed and published and ALL changes required around the content occur naturally and automatically. New classification results in the navigation hierarchy being modified - the user, or administrator, does NOT need to create a new 'node' on the menu manually.

The second, interaction, enables multi-directional web-based communication between an organisation and its customers and partners. Recent developments in web-technologies resulting in the adoption of Web2.0 and the popularity of social-networking sites such as FaceBook and mySpace have raised questions with organisations around how this can be of real-benefit to the business. Qualification has taken place around the investments required to return value to the business and organisation like Oracle have invested in initiatives like SocialCRM and its Enterprise 2.0 offerings. The interactive environment will allow employees, customers and partners to consume and contribute information within an easy-to-use (i.e. minimal training required) environment and is totally integrated with the ECM solution. Information from varying systems should be accessible through this single environment - allowing the mashing together of data, e.g. from the ERP, CRM and ECM environment to provide better context around information and participation within the creation and review process.

All of this functionality and capability is available from a handful of tier-1 ECM vendors including Oracle. Tier-2 and tier-3 ECM vendors can offer part of the overall ECM requirement but do so through an imperfect architecture - often requiring multiple UI's or repositories to be deployed or compromising on functionality or capability in some way.

I look forward to reading your questions and comments about this article - I'm sure it will raise many amongst our readership.

Paul

The Seven Deadly Sins of Modern Information Management

I was doing some research recently into Web and Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and came across an interesting article written by David Galbraith on his blog concerning the 7 deadly sins of Web 2.0. In his article, David describes these as...

1. Obsession with rounded corners everywhere.
2. Pastel colors.
3. Linear blends.
4. Fonts bigger than 15 pixels.
5. Avoiding tables, when they are the best solution.
6. Stretchable text columns that are too wide to read comfortably.
7. Ajax use that makes things difficult to link to.

...which amused me somewhat as it focuses on the presentation aspects of Web2.0 rather than the fundamental underpinnings of this technology which is supposed to make information access easier for all. I thought about my area of expertise, information management, and started to jot down what I think the seven deadly sins of this area are (for modern information management systems anyway).

1. Thinking that Information Management is a one-way process. In today's society, collaboration and participation are relevant to information management. It is certainly a multi-way process and all efforts should be made to introduce this philosophy wherever possible.

2. Not implementing a truly-integrated solution. Most organisations have multiple solutions that partly address information management for the enterprise. A modern solution should be truly integrated - both internally and externally, meaning that within its own environment the varying aspects of functionality should seamlessly work together and outside, should enable information from various sources to be integrated (or federated) into a common, single-looking solution.

3. Ignoring security, privacy and intellectual property. With collaboration/participation comes the challenge of security - both from a perimeter and from an information-protection perspective. Again, these areas should be seamlessly integrated (or made available) from an information management solution.

4. Forgetting that you have end-users. Yes, end-users are crucial to any successful deployment as I've said a few times on this site. Addressing end-user requirements and involving these people within the project/deployment processes will ensure success when rolling-out the solution. Addressing a modern approach to information access (particularly Gen-Y) is the way forward - highlighted by Lindsay Tanner in his interview with the Australian IT today.

5. Focusing on navigation NOT search. We used to think that implementing an explorer-like interface for information management was the right thing to do. It isn't! End-users won't always know which folder information has been stored in or the metadata applied by the original author so search IS relevant for an information management solution. Automatically applying metadata and/or extracting relevant information from the content enables any user to find information quickly and efficiently.

6. Not addressing the paper-issue. 20 years ago managing paper (or physical information of any kind) was inexpensive. Today, it is costing a lot of organisations a lot of money on a daily basis. The cost of managing paper within a process can be huge and the risk-exposure unimaginable in a lot of cases. Get the physical information digitised as soon as it arrives in your organisation and use an electronic workflow to manage the process for review/approval etc. Store the paper temporarily (30 days or so) then rely upon an enterprise-class archival solution that addresses your compliance and retention/disposition requirements.

7. Not addressing your compliance requirements. Around the world, government and legal agencies are regularly introducing newer and stricter requirements for managing information within an organisation. The process for storage, migration, retention and disposition of information can be audited in a lot of environments and organisations can no longer rely upon ignorance after deleting vital detail from their information management solutions - and yes, I do include your email solution here as well!

Hope that helps...

Paul

Enterprise Information Management

On the 3^rd March 2008, Oracle announced enhancements to the Enterprise Content Management platform at the AIIM conference and expo in Boston. Amongst the new feature and integration capability information was the announcement that the UCM platform integrates with the Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher. This is a core part of an organisations Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy and it is exciting that Oracle has brought together two acquired technologies with its own to provide this solution for our customers. This is highlighted in the following graphic:


Oracle's BI server provides the ability to abstract, model, cache, calculate, optimise, analyse and report upon data from a wide-variety of information sources – including relational databases and applications. The UCM platform provides four key capabilities to the enterprise include document and records management, collaboration, process management and web-content management – all falling under the ECM umbrella.

ThThis announcement brings these two technologies together by:

1. Providing the ability for information (e.g. reports) generated by the BI server to be stored and managed in Oracle’s UCM repository leveraging this environment’s version management and security features.
2. Providing the capability for the information to be published, under tight content management control, to an intranet or portal environment

Of course, the integration provides for more than a simple repository and publishing mechanism for our BI customers. The UCM platform is able to provide an unstructured repository that itself can be analysed and reported upon by the BI application which leads itself well into the world of eDiscovery. Supporting information can also be published by the UCM platform to support a report or a dashboard view of the enterprise, e.g. a set of scanned invoices can be made available to a report detailing accounts payable transactions from the ERP system.

Paul