Yesterday’s acquisition of Day Software by Adobe should not come as a surprise. For those watching closely over the last seven years, Adobe has been trying to build their own Enterprise Content Management system. Some would argue with little success. What does come as a surprise is when. In a time where the validity of [...]
No, I haven’t converted into a SharePoint fanboi. I am merely acknowledging that it is here to stay, at least for two more versions. Realizing that, my company has been doing quite a bit of SharePoint work in the past few years. We have recently been looking at SP2010 and just upgraded a customer to the new version.
This dalliance with SharePoint has not gone unnoticed by some people in the local area. I was asked to co-present with Wyn Van Devanter to the Washington, DC Web Content Mavens group on what web managers need to know before making the move from 2007 to 2010.
I thought I would share my slides and offer a few additional notes for people. For the record, Wyn tackled the first part of the presentation and I handled the second portion. We could probably each speak to the other half, but we each presented to our strengths.
There were several discussions that spun out of the presentation. I think the actual discussion was a lot more valuable than the presentation.
There were more, but these are the ones that I remember clearly and that aren’t covered in the slides and notes. Feel free to drop questions.
These are the links from the Reference slide of the presentation. I am providing them here for easy reference.
Good luck.
Speculation on who will buy OpenText has been a consistent pastime for content management market analysts for at least the last three years. The latest reported on some of the financial wires is that Autonomy has amassed a $1bln war chest for a large buy with OpenText offered as a possible target. Who would have thought back [...]
I just wrote on why we need Content Management for effective Case Management. It really is more of a background into defining the challenges. Now I am going to focus on how Content Management vendors can help solve this problem.
This is a little like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. Most of the vendors out there have announced Case Management strategies. After my comments on EMC’s approach, many have felt that I thought that Content Management vendors should stay out of Case Management.
That is completely wrong. They need to be involved. So lets talk about the how…
So, what do we, the implementers, need from Content Management vendors. Two words. The first word is flexibility. The second word is where it gets tricky…simplicity.
You didn’t think this would be easy did you?
Why flexibility? Simple, I need to be able to leverage my existing investments and to configure the system to reflect the types of solutions I am building. As I’ve already discussed, for all their similarities, there is a lot of variety in the Case Management world. There is no one-size-fits-all.
Here are the problems I face regularly when I tackle Care Management:
As you can see, there needs to be a lot of poser and flexibility in those Content Management products. The thing is, a lot of companies have been providing that flexibility for years, many with more than enough power. The issue has been, and continues to be, simplicity.
This is where it all falls apart. In my experience, the client rarely knows exactly what they want the first time out. The first prototypes are usually torn apart in the review session. That’s fine. After I learned that this was actually normal for a Case Management system, I stopped getting upset.
One rule is this: If it takes a lot of work to create the first version of a Case Management system, then it usually takes a lot of effort to change the system. If you change a component system, you usually need to ask for more budget.
Things need to be simpler. More configuration, less customization. More standards-based integrations, less vendor specific APIs or interfaces. Do you know one of the beautiful things about using CMIS in to solve a technical problem? You don’t have to worry about deprecated calls or changing your code when the CMS changes. That is a very nice benefit for those of us doing the work (or managing it).
So that leaves the question, what do we want?
Let’s face it. There is no way that I can evaluate, personally, every Case Management offering out there in the CMS market. I have a day job that frequently spills into the evening. I have to look at approaches and strategies from each vendor, mix in the existing systems at a client, and createa short-list.
In general, configuration is better than customization. The ability to customize needs to always be there, but the more that can be done through configuration, the quicker the implementation and any subsequent changes. Configurations also tend to survive product upgrades which much less pain.
To classify approaches, here are some generic terms. It is important to note that some companies use a term for marketing purposes that may not reflect what they actually provide. This can be good or bad.
For those offerings, the key is that they are built upon an Enterprise Content Management platform. The need to manage the content is the reason that these vendors are in such a good position to capture this market. It is important that the focus of the company remain Content Management in order to continue to be a viable platform for Case Management and all of the other solutions needed by the community.
After all, not everything is a case.
One thing that I have observed in the last month or so is that people think that I either don’t understand Case Management or think that Content Management vendors shouldn’t be messing around with Case Management. Well, both those observations would be wrong.
I thought I would take a moment to share some of my Case Management experiences and why I think that Content Management vendors NEED to be involved in solving the problem.
As I’ve discussed previously, well over a decade ago I was the tech lead for a Correspondence Management system for the Secretary of the U.S. Air Force (SAF). The system was called SCATS (Suspense Control and Tasking System), and in the late 90s, it was the system for managing correspondence for SAF.
It was pretty simple. Incoming correspondence was scanned into the system. The content was then OCRed and indexed. Based upon the topic, it was assigned to an organization, who then assigned it to a sub-organization, and so forth. This continued until it reached the Action Officer.
The Action Officer would work the case, potentially asking sibling organizations for input, and craft the response. Once completed, it would work back up the chain for approvals, and depending on the signature required on the response, would go through a different review cycle before being printed, signed, and delivered.
Over the years, I learned that each piece of correspondence could be modeled as an individual case. I encountered many other types of “cases” and learned that while the terminology varied greatly, the overall approach to successfully managing cases were the same.
There is a lot of variations in this and there can be quite a bit of complexity. I’ve seen a process embedded in the Work stage, but in my years of experience, most cases can be boiled down to these four steps.
There are lots of little details for execution though. The user experience for the case worker needs to be different than the one for those involved in the management of cases. People don’t also don’t like changing between systems to work on cases. You have to track lots of data about entities (people, locations, items) that may exist across multiple cases.
These complexities are why the one-size-fits-all approach has failed so effectively over the last fe decades.
One thing that is common across a majority of case management scenarios is content. They pretty much all have content. This is because you cannot model every conceivable piece of data or identify/control every possible source of data.
When you have an car insurance claim, there are reports and inputs from third parties that don’t all collect the same set of fields. Your insurance company has several fields that they may need from the police report, but in the end, they still want that report faxed in as a supporting document so they have all of the data.
So, where do we store this content? In a BPM suite? Well, most of those do okay with content, but they don’t always do well when it comes time to perform true collaboration. They also have varying degrees of effectiveness in sharing common content, and data entities, between processes.
How about using a collaboration platform? That does work will for more collaborative cases that are lighter on the defined processes, but many don’t scale well. In addition, in order to have the ability to archive a case, you need to have all of the related artifacts in one unit, which usually translates into a workspace/site/room. The number of these work areas can quickly become a nightmare for case workers.
There are other systems, CRM, that can also be brought to bear, but they all have weaknesses.
This is where Content Management systems come into play. Most have decent collaboration interfaces, the ability to perform at least basic workflow, and Records Management. This will usually get you to the 80% mark. Some have full-fledge BPM capabilities while others have great collaborative workplaces. Most importantly, they usually support CMIS, allowing content to be accessed by external systems.
What this means is that Content Management can readily be used to support Case Management, and in many ways, makes it easier. Need a place for the gooey, collaborative “Work” for a case to take place, find a system with good collaborative features. Have a nice area to work, but need some more advanced BPM or RM capabilities, now you can find a system to leverage.
What to start all over and just tie into existing systems for data? A Content Management system may make a good starting point.
Obviously there are a lot of issues involved in making all of this work, but that is a topic for my next post…What we need from the Content Management vendors to support Case Management.
Alan Pelz-Sharpe always has a way of getting me thinking. His latest post, ECM Coexistence and the Vuvuzela, remarks how vendors and customers alike are looking to integrate new content systems with legacy content systems rather than replacing them. Connectors and API’s and standards are all the rage. What I wonder though is why the change and [...]
It has been a month since I talked about CMIS, and that was focused on celebrating the release of 1.0 and the AIIM Demo. Well, the time has come to look to the future and start thinking what we need out of CMIS to help where we need it…the future.
I’m just throwing a list of business cases that we need support for in CMIS. Specific features may not be all listed, but I will be listing some to give an idea. The goal here is to stimulate everyone’s collective mind and think about what we need in the next version.
I’m sure that there are more, but I think those are the important ones. It helps the web-heads, the ECM types, and the solution providers.
While the above section was written based upon what is sitting at the top of my head as important. I decided to look around and I found some of my notes on what is missing from my discussions with the aforementioned “interested parties”. There is some more detail beyond what is listed above. Share and Enjoy.
Fun notes. Thought I would add them here to share and build some thought basis.
Is something missing? Well, then you need to get involved. If you don’t speak-up and share, then you aren’t in a position to complain. The CMIS standard’s future is only as strong as
I read a great post yesterday by Alan Pelz-Sharpe “The Case for Case Management – and Business Intelligence.” One phrase however leapt off the page that I think is critical for those of us with ECM backgrounds. Alan says. Essentially Case Management means applying rules (either automatically or manually) to documents to ensure that they [...]
Check out my guest post on the case management vs. content management debate on the Fierce Content Management site. Another post on this topic comning soon title: “Just what is a case anyway?”
I’ve been talking about a lack of leadership and vision in the ECM industry. This is evident when you attend keynotes at various conferences. Most keynotes at industry conferences are focused on what has been happening and what is happening now. John Mancini’s keynote at the AIIM conference was as close as it gets these days.
Of course, AIIM can’t deliver the future, they can only point to it, so what do we do? We wait. What are we waiting for? Well, I’m not waiting right now. For your consideration, I present to you a keynote on the future of ECM…..
[Imagine some basic banter and a joke that only 20% of the audience will get, and only half of them will think it was actually funny.]
Ten years ago, the term Enterprise Content Management was created. There was no magic pill or working product. It was just a vision of one repository for all of the content in the organization. One place for web pages, documents, images, and records to reside and be managed together.
It was a solid vision. The industry seized upon the vision and charged forth. Over the next few years, through acquisition, development, and combinations of both, several companies built “complete” ECM platforms and proceeded to sell them to anyone and everyone.
As the vision was “realized”, vendors competed among themselves to see who could have the biggest and most complete platform. New needs would arise and they would all rush to “check-the-box”. There was, and is, a continuous race to be “more” complete than any other vendor.
The platforms grew and became more complex.
Not all ECM implementation succeeded, but lessons were learned and best practices were gathered. Everyone in the industry continued to move forward from pure momentum, thinking that the goal had been achieved and that all that was required was to get better at implementations.
Meanwhile, the world changed.
When ECM was first conceived, people created content, it was published, and then nothing else happened until it was time to update the content. Then came the 2.0 world. The world at large went from consuming content to interacting with content.
This was a new mindset for the Content Management world. Instead of one author, or a few authors working together, content now evolves over the course of years through the input of any number of people. Discussions about content has become information worth managing. The line between structured and unstructured information is fuzzy and no longer back and white.
As the nature of content changed, it has grown at an exponential rate. This isn’t a new phenomenon, but the sheer volume of increasing digital information is starting to push the boundaries of what is possible with existing ECM architectures.
The need to share this information has also increased dramatically. CMIS was created to solve the information silo problem. The problem is now changing scope. The question isn’t how do I have my 3 content systems interoperate, but how do I share my content with my business partners and vice versa? CMIS is great, but how do we manage security? Access and control of content is a problem when you don’t manage the identities of the people directly.
The ECM community hasn’t been unaware of these changes, but in the quest to do everything, we lost the one quality that is most necessary in the 2.0 world.
Agility.
Let’s take a step back, or to be more precise, a step forward.
Imagine, if you will, preparing for a meeting as a follow-up to a conversation that you just had with a prospect. You are working with your colleagues to create an agenda. You are doing this from the subway from your favorite tablet computer connected via your wireless, favorite or not, provider.
Once completed, the agenda is automatically shared with all meeting attendees. Attendees can comment on the agenda, but only you, your colleagues, and others that you designate have access to make updates. All of this is automatically determined by the relationship between the agenda, meeting invitation, and the meeting attendees.
The very act of creating the presentation with your colleagues will involve collaboration around the world on phones, laptops, tablets, and devices yet to come. Access to the content will be from any device, anywhere. The theme here is universal access. This doesn’t just apply to the applications and devices consuming the content. The content needs to be located in a place that can be accessed from any location. That place is in the cloud.
Content will no longer be centered around, and managed for, the Enterprise. Content Management will be everywhere and part of everything.
Omnipresent Content Management, that is the future.
Security will be key. Everything needs to be secured and in such a way as to not hinder users. Historically, there has been a direct correlation between security and complexity. Can you even imagine using a VPN on your cell phone?
Simplicity for the users will be important. That will take the industry, working together, to achieve. That means me, you, and everyone reading this keynote.
There is a fear in moving to the cloud. You may look at the companies providing cloud-based Content Management, and you think commodity. That is a superficial analysis. Even so, if you are managing Zettabytes of content, there stands to reason that there is a lot of money to be made providing a “commodity”.
Look deeper. By having all that content in a location where people can readily access it, the benefits grow. All the gains that are always pitched for Content Management still apply, but now those benefits apply to all content, not just the content siloed in my organization.
With the cloud comes processing power. The phrase Intelligent Content Management is starting to evolve as a component of Information Management. Imagine the power that can be applied in the cloud to analyze trends within the content itself. Add to it the benefits of looking at the scope content that can be accessed.
No longer are you just looking at the trends within your organization. Trends can be analyzed across trusted partners.
The ECM platforms as we know it will be living in the cloud. There will still be some industries that utilize private cloud structures, but the platforms will be globally accessible. Platforms will interoperate via CMIS, and applications will be developed independent of the platforms.
This independent development of applications will give us back something that is missing from the industry.
Agility.
That is the key to having a shot at surviving in the future. Without it, we may as well step aside. I don’t know about you, but I for one am not going to step aside.
We are at a turning point in the Content Management industry. The last turning point came with the advent of ECM ten years ago. We decided to end the content and organizational silos that were springing-up everywhere. While there are still separate systems, we now have the tools to have coordinated management of content within our organizations.
Now we have silos between organizations. Sometimes that organization is your family. The lines between work and people’s personal lives has been blurring for a long time. The line is almost imperceptible. To succeed in this world, we need to have the pieces meet so they can be accessed by everyone, anywhere.
So my question to you is a simple one. Are you going to just keep moving in the same direction, trusting that you will get to where you want to be, or will you step back, survey the landscape, and realize that the future is in a different direction?
