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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

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

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.

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

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

I have just read a fascinating post by Bob Evans over at Information Week entitled Shoot The Mantra: STOP 'Aligning IT With The Business'. In his article, Bob talks about two core concepts...

1. Traditional approaches to IT projects result in solutions that address yesterday's needs for the business and not tomorrow's because of a primarily internally focused requirements-set
2. To be successful tomorrow, companies need to look outside of their business and address the requirements of customers (and partners).

This whole strategy lends itself well to Web2.0 technologies and an Enterprise 2.0 mindset. Enabling a collaborative environment where internal and external users can participate in the business operations and have information delivered in context will allow the company to get closer to what their customers (who pay the bills remember) actually want and help define the future-state strategy in a clearer manner than in the past.

Bob goes on to say that 'this is a subject to which we'll surely be returning in the months to come' - we look forward to reading what else he has to say on this topic. The future of companies today (based upon current economic pressures) can be directly linked to how these very companies view their internal and external operations and communication channels. A company that engages its customers will be successful, one that doesn't is likely to fail.

Paul