Making the most of chaos
One of the characteristics of the IT industry over the decades is that it has tried to come up with plain language terms for general categories or related sets of technology, especially business software.
But by the time those terms are reduced to the appropriate three-letter acronym and pushed through sales and marketing filters, they tend to shift in meaning. By that stage they are also likely to have become part of the barely distinguishable forest of ICTacronyms that dominates its linguistic landscape.
Enterprise content management (ECM) is certainly one of those terms. It is like enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business process management (BPM) and business intelligence (BI) and so many more.
The 65-year old Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) defines ECM and its broad remit as “. . . the tools and technologies that capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content in support of business processes’‘.
By now it is clear to everybody concerned that ECM is a broad term. With no omnibus answer, most organisations will have a set of specific technologies answering each one’s specific needs and priorities.
ECM is aimed at what has been aptly called’ controlling content chaos.’ Some commentators have taken to talking about ‘the ECM ecosystem’ in the context of a wide range of niche products for specialist point solutions.
The long-established market leaders Documental and FileNet are now part of EMC and IBM respectively, while Adobe is not far behind with others like Microsoft, Oracle, Xerox, Open Text and Alfresco and Saperion in Europe.
“We see the challenge and the market requirements in three main areas,” said Gareth Meatyard, EMEA specialist in EMC information governance products.” There is information access, how information is used and shared, and information governance, which involves everything to do with taking the appropriate care of all of the information in the enterprise.”
Meatyard said challenges and progress were both evident in the newer areas of governance and xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP), a technology which enables you to rapidly build and deploy case-based solutions at a lesser cost and with fewer resources. Meatyard sees this as the creation of new content that is natively bound up both with business processes and with the requirements and rules of governance.” We are trying to achieve pervasive but non-invasive governance,” said Meatyard.
One Irish insurance company recently acknowledged that a third of its IT budget was focused on compliance.
“The core idea is that we build composite business applications that are governance-enabled through all of their processes,” said Meatyard.
Meatyard pointed to data retention as a good example. Content management applications can be retention-enabled’ with the appropriate business rules embedded.
“But we are building process, not data repository, so it is easier to apply automation.”
The Documentum XCP technology is being applied in a range of specific vertical sectors, such as the public sector or financial services.
“Case-oriented solutions have been built in, for example, grant applications,” said Meatyard.” Not only have the ECM and governance requirements been built in, but the process improvement has been shown by much better completion times from application to approval and payment.”
Similar processes are being built in retail banking and insurance through partners like Accenture, Deloitte or Cap Gemini. Meatyard said that these had generated templates for these and other vertical markets that could be tailored for specific business process needs.
Oracle is another of the major software players which has been in the ECM space for some years, notably since its acquisition of Stellent just over three years ago.
The well-regarded Stellent is aimed at ‘universal content management’ and works with Oracle Content Database to offer a variety of management solutions for documents, web content, information rights, digital assets, records and retention and imaging across the governance, risk and compliance obligations.
Andrew Gilboy, vice president enterprise 2.0 of Oracle EMEA, said that there were new varieties of information and new content creation channels coming in to play.
“Instant messaging, Twitter and many new forms of social networking are coming into the corporate world and generating content that does not lend itself to traditional forms of taxonomy,” said Gilboy.
“Do you treat a tweet as a record, for example? If so, how do you tag and index?”
Lots of interesting questions will arise, but is clear so far is that governance rules have not yet caught up with content other than documents and other orthodox corporate data.
While there is as yet to clear or universal answer to that challenge, in the mainstream Gilboy sees ECM being embedded in corporate applications.
“At the same time, content should not be’silo-ed’ with the specific applications,” said Gilboy.
“The idea would be that there is one version of the truth with as many renditions as required. In that sense, content is delivered on demand to whatever application activity needs it.”
The theory is logical, the practical challenges huge. Gilboy said that Oracle’s Stellent systems currently converted more than 450 different file types.” The value of data is almost always directly related to the content,” said Gilboy.
“That is why the consequences of lost data and lost laptops can be so severe. But what if the security protection and rules were related to the content, not the device or the application? Essentially, that would be a universal and sophisticated form of information rights management. But it could well offer a better solution than the approaches technology has taken so far.”
Mike Roche, chief technologist at IBM’s Dublin Software Lab, said that we continued to miss out on a lot of information that could be of value in any organisation.
“We have had various forms of social software for a decade,’’ said Roche.
“Web 2.0 is flourishing and more and more casually created content is happening within and around the enterprise, from instant messaging to wikis. Finding ways to deal with it is very similar in many respects to enabling and capturing content from the electronic collaboration processes that people use within the enterprise.”
That is the impulse behind Lotus Quickr, collaboration software that integrates with IBM’s ECM solutions. It also integrates with all of the standard office tools like Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint and any desktop applications (it is not exclusively for Lotus Notes users). “The core idea is that if you do not build ECM into the processes it will be difficult or impossible to find or use content in the future,” said Roche.
“There is a lot of what ‘tacit knowledge’ in the enterprise. From a systems point of view, you don’t know you have it. From a business perspective, could it be of value? That is a huge area of potential into which ECM has to extend.”
In the 1990s, getting at unstructured content was a process of discovery, said Roche. Today there are many technologies to build content capture or indexing into business processes and workflow as well as to allow interoperability between the various tools for ECM, especially between centrally managed ECM systems and individually empowered users.
Microsoft was effectively a late starter in ECM, but has pushed to the front in the market, in large measure because its range of desktop and server products are de facto standards in most organisations. SharePoint offers a multi-purpose platform to integrate content and collaboration across the enterprise.
“We are able to manage digitally-created collaborative information across the requirements of document and records management, structured or unstructured,” said Richard Moore, business manager for the information worker market in Microsoft Ireland.
“There is front-end work: sharing information inside and outside of the enterprise, including pushing it out to websites. At the back end, ECM looks after the compliance requirements including fully-fledged document management and all of the storage and retrieval.”
SharePoint 2010, to be launched soon, will offer a unified and deeper infrastructure across all collaboration and ECM tasks. It will also link with similar functionality in the next release of Office 2010, also due soon. Another pillar in Microsoft’s ECM Solutions set is FAST Search and Transfer, a highly-acclaimed Scandinavian enterprise search product which Microsoft acquired in 2008.
“There may be some confusion about the terms, but in truth I don’t think there is that much fuzzy about the different applications of content management,” said Piero Tintori, managing director of Dublin-based Terminal Four.” We see buyers focused quite clearly on buying particular software tools for specific jobs they want looked after.”
Tintori said this was because there was no single omnibus solution and that organisations were looking for solutions to their own priorities.
“Our own experience is that it is best to invest in practical projects that offer clear benefits in a short time scale,” said Tintori.
“Over time, the integrated system will develop organically and in fact very often you will be adapting a proven model for the next process.” Tintori said that the ease of linking the many ECM systems has improved.
“The new Content Management Interoperability Standard (CMIS) will certainly help when it is fully ratified shortly and there are other web authoring and Java standards that have become valuable,” he said.
“Today the approach is to link systems together so that content can be dynamically pulled in when it is needed for the current task. You will always get the latest version of a document you need, for example, yet the master copy stays in its native home application and any changes are tracked and auditable.”
There will be specific systems to look after content related to its nature or its origin, such as tools to manage images or multimedia, for example. The connectors between systems have improved enormously so that enterprise search is more powerful and can span across all of the content repositories in the organisation.
“What has been happening in enterprise applications of all kinds is that they have been driven into the browser,” said Tom Skinner, managing director of pTools, the Dublin specialists in ECM software and systems.” Organisations have more or less come to a consensus that everything has to work in a browser for ease of use.
“ECM can often be hyped as very strategic, and it is certainly so in many organisations, but essentially it is about having some overarching system to drive content into the browser or desktop. We are attempting to build a soft infrastructure that allows seamless sharing of information by applications and processes as necessary. But at the end of the day the aim is to empower the point solutions for specific line of business tasks.”
Content management can be crucially important in the delivery of content to web sites and intranets, said Skinner.” A case in point is the Irish Stock Exchange, which has carried through its document transparency initiative to make thousands of documents available online that would otherwise have been locked away from the market in in-house systems.”
Much more than the conversion of existing business processes to online systems, Skinner said, the IOSE developed a clear ECM plan that allowed it to expose information appropriately and securely online.” As well as access and transparency, the new ECM system establishes a framework that is being further developed for significant back-office systems. It is an easily managed and user friendly tool that could be utilised throughout the ISE.”
The emphasis on newer forms of ECM can perhaps obscure the fact that so many organisations and the activity within them is still based on documents.
We have extended the meaning of a ‘document’ somewhat, so we have added newer digital formats like e-mail or image and video files to traditional letters, spreadsheets, presentations and so on.
In many organisations today, document management is the core ECM tool. Dublin-based Paperdock is a specialist in this area and the Irish partner of the highly-regarded Laserfiche, which has a worldwide user base.” Scanning incoming paper is still a key need for any ECM solution. Once everything is digital you can set about managing the content,” says managing director Peter Osborne.
“That in turn principally depends on automating business processes, the way information is exchanged or pushed around the enterprise to support the specific tasks.
That means taking it into a structured ECM system that make sit available where required or creates new information by combining content from different sources.”
Document management is particularly important in regulated industries such as financial services, which account for much of Paperdock’s client base.
“Compliance is a major driver and that is essentially about processes and the auditable tracking of digital information,’’ Osborne says.” Smart document management today can automate the information capture process to make ECM work better.”
“Think of the myriad forms involved in business and government which are filled in with limited ranges of variable content, from web enquiries to paper-based claims for grants or insurance. It is only that unique content which is needed for subsequent processing.”
Osborne points to a significant general issue when he says that millions of unnecessary pages are printed and postedö and then often scanned into systems if the recipients are business or state offices – because while Irish law has taken in the concept of a digital signature but in practice it is not yet a reality.” So we continue to produce paper, exchange it and then scan the content back into electronic systems. Then we scrap the paper, very often. It does not make much sense.”
Digiscan is another Irish company that is founded on the document management side of ECM, where it began as a bureau scanning service and equipment vendor.” For content management we combine Zylab ECM with Abbyy Flexi Capture OCR to build effective solutions for clients,” says managing director Pat Farrelly.
“You are trying to become as automated as possible, to reduce the staff workload. So incoming paper is digitised and set business rules push the content into designated workflows. That’s an invoice, it goes to the financial system.” Farrelly points out that today’s smart scanners can process 200 pages per minute so the RoI in terms of reduced staff time can be very high.
“Documents are automatically classified, so whether your concern is document management, records or an overall ECM system the efficiency of the front end is what those systems depend on.
“An apparently small but significant detail is that many organisations still have to deal with handwritten documents or completed paper forms.
“Handwriting recognition is very accurate today,” Farrelly explains,” and it really is the only solution to getting such information into a digital system.
This is one of the instances where the full scanned image must be instantly retrievable in the ECM system but he points out that any ambiguities at the initial processing stage will flag such a document for human attention.
“There is a very high accuracy rate for classification, which allows it to be sent into the workflow. Anyone dealing with the case detail can click onto the full image if necessary.”
Inforama is a two year old Dublin software company that has identified what it calls document automation as an important niche area within the ECM ecosystem. Inforama is an open source software company and the Irish partner of Alfresco, the market leading open source ECM solution vendor.
“It is sometimes forgotten that smart ECM should be able to create content as well,” said managing director Val Cassidy.” Our specialisation is in generating personalised documents by pulling together content from any data repository within an ECM system according to any template and following pre-set business rules.”
One of Inforama’s working solutions is in place in 123.ie, the online general insurance company.123.ie wanted a document automation system that would allow letter templates to be created by non-technical users. The ability to make changes without the intervention of the IT department, which had been necessary in the past, was important.
They also wanted to pre populate Acrobat application forms automatically from their main policy database.
According to Geoff Boyle, IT director of 123.ie, “Inforama has made the task of creating customer documents easy for all users and has integrated seamlessly with our other backend systems. Not only that but it has also allowed us to make significant savings on our day to day operational costs.”
The new system has also saved on paper and postage because a much higher proportion of documents are now e-mailed to customers.
All in all, 123.ie confirms that the document automation solution has actually paid for itself within months.
