Managing content across the enterprise

Information Management defined - keeping it simple

People can – and do – write long tracts debating definitions of "Enterprise Information Management". Here, we want to keep it simple, yet maintain integrity, so we have selected Gartner's definition, (with our italics added):

"EIM is defined as the set of disciplines, technologies, and solutions used to create and maintain consistent interpretation of business data by all stakeholders (users, applications, processes, enterprises). It is a holistic framework for structured and unstructured data. EIM is a semantic "blanket" across the business that is developed independently of any one application or IT, project. It provides a consistent, "always on, always available" stakeholder-interpreted information layer describing all forms of reference data across the company".

How should EIM be addressed? – A high-level view

Whilst confirming that "EIM is not a single technology or even approach", Gartner* avers that "The dialogue about EIM today, however, centres mostly on structured data – the data that resides in business applications. Gartner believes that EIM should include unstructured data" and distinguishes between the two in an interesting way:

"Structured data is most well-used where machines are the prime consumer of information; unstructured data where people are the prime consumer – management of this data is most generally known as enterprise content management (ECM). There is no reason why you should have separate strategies to ensure semantic consistency across these two domains and great synergy should you have one (strategy)."**

So there we have it – if you really want to manage (public or private) enterprise information well, you need to encompass structured information (your enterprise database business applications) and unstructured information – the latter is rarely estimated at below 80% of the total.

Before we move on, let's also clarify what comes within the scope of unstructured data. This incorporates anything from "Office" documents to forms to website content, corporate records, emails, drawings, scanned images, rich media, and emerging content types like, wikis, blogs and other social media.

So – How well are most organisations doing?

On this topic, you needn't take the word of a software vendor like Open Text, or even an analyst. Instead, refer to a recent report by AIIM** that sets out the aggregated views of close to 400 of their members in a web survey between 27th January and February 9th 2010, more than 80% of whom were from North America or EMEA.

**AIIM White Paper – Connecting the ERP and ECM, "© AIIM 2010 www.aiim.org / © SAP 2010 www.sap.com"

A key finding was that: "27% of respondents who ranked themselves at a mature Level 4 or 5 for the completeness of their ERP installation only reached maturity Level 1 or 2 for their ECM practices."

Furthermore, although 32% of respondents felt they were at level 5 for ERP installation, only 19% gave themselves that level for ECM.

So, crudely speaking, deployment of ERP is further ahead than that of ECM, which is arguably, therefore, where the greatest catching up needs to be done.

Some real life examples.

If this all still sounds a little academic, let's explore a few real life examples.

In the retail banking world, as in many others, multi-channel delivery is key. So while structured data represents customer transactions, we may need to capture unstructured data like scanned images of proof of identity (PoID) or employment, along with customer correspondence, in whitemail or email and perhaps scanned in or web-filled forms, initiated by our own mail or website content, resulting in a customer contract - all of which needs to be available in contact centre or branch, through one interface, at customer service speed. Increasingly, this unstructured material must proceed via a workflow, seamlessly from customer to Front Office (web, branch, contact centre, intermediary) to back office and back out to customer. And of course, in more complex cases or transactions, internal documents, workflows, emails etc may all have been written to prove appropriate decision making by empowered individuals. That, too, may need to be part of an overall case folder. And be a record, managed for full regulatory and statutory compliance – as a whole.

In Local Government, scores of processes have much in common with the above.

And whilst ERP is the commonest system type, with perhaps the largest scope, with which integration is required, it may not be the only one. For large asset managers, like utilities or oil and gas companies, assets are often hierarchically categorised by location. So whilst the fixed asset register is in the structured world, assets will have associated maintenance instructions, drawings and technical specifications, directly located through integration with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and CAD viewers. And of course, the people who design a major asset will not be the people who build it, who will not be the people who maintain it. And of course  all of these processes, assets and accompanying documentation will evolve. So if standardised processes, data structures (real or "virtual" file plans) and documentation methods are not in place, how will documents make the journey from design to construction to maintenance operations? And if they don't, what does it cost to re-document, even re-survey, or re-visit an asset because the documents fell behind the reality or simply could not be found? So ECM brings not just a join between structured and unstructured worlds, but necessary structure to vital, albeit unstructured, information.

In yet more cases, unstructured material must be produced in a highly structured and consistent manner – product labelling and documentary submissions in the intensely regulated Life Sciences industry are a perfect example of this.

Compliance – Inescapable obligation or IM by-product – or both

That  raises another key raison d'etre for ECM – compliance. Whether it's controlling employee or customer information for Data Protection compliance, meeting US FDA (Federal Drugs Administration), US DoD or European MoReq records standards, SOX or simply regulatory standards for customer service, ECM is a pre-requisite for an effective compliance solution.

So whilst compliance can be an inescapable obligation (or fines and reputational risk accepted as a cost of doing business), ECM can make not just for more effective business but also ensure compliance – and reporting thereof – almost as a by-product of business improvement.

Leveraging existing investments....

The utilities examples also highlights another key benefit of ECM – it enables content to be accessed through the interface of choice – perhaps a CRM system in front office, other ERP interface in the back office, via the intranet/extranet for direct employees or subcontractors in the field, or via Microsoft Office, Email and SharePoint interfaces. So it leverages your existing investments not just in systems and their supporting infrastructures, but in your people's ability to use them, by surfacing the information in the right context, in the application they use day to day.

...and new media

Senior (mature!) executives can look back on a truly momentous expansion of media for the creation of content and even those in their late twenties can sense some of this. Word processors freed us from the typist, faxes from the post, email from physical documents, CAD from tedious physical drawings, GIS from old fashioned maps, web content from print or broadcast publishing. Several trends have persisted in an era of ever accelerating change:

• Each new medium is faster, more spontaneous
• No old medium ever seems to completely die - handwritten letters, paper forms or copies of utilities meter readings persist - so media proliferate
• Each new medium seems harder to control - can any medium have seen a more seismic threat to control than email?
• Each new medium seems more demanding in storage terms whether through file size (like video) or sheer volume (email, again)

Interestingly, the newest media have been led not by business but by consumers - the social media – which have brought not just speed of authoring but of networking – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, wikis. Out in the ether, these have shown huge potential as models for business, but also huge potential for risk, in their seemingly, almost complete, lack of control.

The sheer oppression of the inbox has quickly shown email's limitations as a collaboration tool. What organisations really need is the speed, spontaneity and avid adoption of social media with the control they must assert over content for which, albeit vicariously, though employees – they are responsible.

A challenge too far? Well, even in that most regulated of industries, Life Sciences, companies are already working on accelerated collaboration between larger companies and subcontractors in such issues as clinical trials. That collaboration both lowers costs and increases agility and leading practitioners in the industry have implemented ECM to  provide social media-like capabilities to the Enterprise yet still apply corporate controls, audit trails and records disciplines.

And of course, ECM has brought new manageability to what were once the most expensive type of media – appropriately called "rich media" – that's high resolution pictures and video – now more often than not delivered via the 'rich web'. This is a high growth area with photos and video becoming dominant communications and collaboration media for a new generation. And it is increasingly finding its way into the workplace. Asset owners are moving to video or photo-capture of asset condition or even precise asset location. A European Utility, using structure segmentation metadata, seeks to show older customers – on said customer's bill – a photograph of their local meter-reading man, to avoid dangerous fraudsters. Health and safety managers readily grasp the potential for distributed video training on hazardous tasks, complete with audited access of such materials by people doing those jobs.

Ubiquity of application

And that last example is just one of many that show ECM is applicable to almost any organisation of size – all need quality management systems, all manage people records, all want both efficient and effective accounts payable processes to name just a handful of areas.

How can CXOs judge their own ECM maturity?

Two rather simple acid tests might be as follows:

• Ask the CIO if there is an overall enterprise IM or ECM strategy and - if so - how many different platforms support it. A plethora of platforms suggests a strategy not formulated or not yet implemented.
• Identify a core business process, encompassing different information types in an end-to-end flow, perhaps across different departments, then assess how many systems support that process, how seamlessly it flows, how well it's reported and how easily employees can access all related information through one interface - which could well be your ERP, desktop or mail interface if that's most appropriate. Any major point of failure suggests integrated IM/ECM not yet in place for that process.

Of course, completed achievement is not the only pointer to at least a mature, if not completed, programme for ECM investment. At Open Text, we also offer a free maturity assessment, which organisations can use either to self-assess or to complete with the help of our experienced staff. Visit www.ecm-strategy.com to take the assessment.

So how do we justify investment? 

The same AIIM White Paper, in its key findings just limited to ERP and ECM integration, noted amongst its key findings:

"The biggest business benefit given by our respondents for linking ERP and ECM is the productivity gained by linking document and process workflows, followed by improved customer service and then knowledge sharing.

"68% considered that linking ERP and ECM gave a better or much better return on investment than other IT integration projects."

This paper also noted realistic challenges and we advise our reader to read it in full.

We'd advise looking for benefits in five major areas:  process efficiency (unit cost/speed of execution), process effectiveness (right first time, process compliant), "soft" but usually larger than expected benefits, like avoidance of duplication or re-work and less wasted time finding authoritative information, risk management (compliance with internal and external regulations and laws) and reduced overall IT TCO (total cost of ownership) arising from fewer systems (some from active "legacy decommissioning"), reduced storage, licence and maintenance costs.

Sum up?

We believe that, for many if not most organisations, an Enterprise approach to Content Management, integrated with ERP and other core systems, may be the largest if not the last major component yet to be added to the corporate information eco-system and a vital means to control and marshal the "corporate memory" of the past, the business of the (present) day and the burgeoning new media of the future.