enterprise content management: yesterday’s lessons & today ... · lesson 1: define your ecm...

EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2010

Enterprise Content Management:Yesterday’s Lessons & Today’s Challenges Himakara Pieris

Himakara PierisECM ArchitectDaedal [email protected]

2010 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2

Table of Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 4 Lesson 1: Define your ECM strategy ...................................................................................................... 5

An Overview ............................................................................................................................................ 5 Rules of Engagement ............................................................................................................................ 6 Identify ...................................................................................................................................................... 6 Define ....................................................................................................................................................... 8 Devise .................................................................................................................................................... 11

Lesson 2: Build a Cross-Functional Team & Select an Implementation Methodology that Works for You ........................................................................................................................................................ 11

Finding the Balance ............................................................................................................................. 12 Selecting an Implementation Methodology ...................................................................................... 13

Common Implementation Methods ................................................................................................ 14 Choosing an implementation method for an ECM Project ......................................................... 18

Lesson 3: Pick Wisely .............................................................................................................................. 19 Overview ................................................................................................................................................ 19 Things to Consider During the Selection .......................................................................................... 19

Platform vs. Product ......................................................................................................................... 19 Open vs. Closed Platforms ............................................................................................................. 20 Scalability........................................................................................................................................... 20 Availability of Skills ........................................................................................................................... 21 Vendor Stability ................................................................................................................................. 21 Infrastructure Needs ........................................................................................................................ 21

Challenge 1: Standardization ................................................................................................................. 23 Why Standards are Important ............................................................................................................ 23 Standardization Attempts related to ECM ........................................................................................ 24 Industry’s Response for Standardization .......................................................................................... 25

Challenge 2: Rethinking How We Create Content .............................................................................. 28 Overview ................................................................................................................................................ 28 Key Drivers for Use of Structured Content ....................................................................................... 29


Key Challenges..................................................................................................................................... 30 Challenge 3: Moving Towards Enterprise Information Management ............................................... 31

ECM Today ........................................................................................................................................... 31 Harnessing the value of your content ................................................................................................ 31 Why think of Enterprise Information Management? ........................................................................ 32 Redefining EIM ..................................................................................................................................... 33 Implementing EIM ................................................................................................................................ 33

Work Cited ................................................................................................................................................. 35

Disclaimer: The views, processes or methodologies published in this compilation are those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes, or methodologies


Introduction Enterprise wide Content Management has grown from a vision to reality in less than a decade.

Every large organization owns and operates some level of content management systems.

Industry has overcome phenomenal challenges during this period of growth and adoption

primarily influenced by regulatory measures, business value, cost savings, and business

continuity efforts.

Key events of the last decade have shaped the way we live, travel, and do business. This is

also true for enterprise content management. Events such as the Enron scandal have

profoundly altered the cause of enterprise content management, and any recent and future

events such as the mortgage crisis will continue to shape the way we do business and how we

manage content.

There are plenty of past lessons; industry and its customers have grown to recognize the value

of open platforms and have fought the notion that picking the right product is all that matters. All

of us have come to appreciate the value of using extensible frameworks instead of application

silos with similar core operations. We have learned what roles constitute an ECM

implementation team and what skills are required. Implementers have realized an “all IT” team

would not implement the most usable system and have learned the importance of cross-

functional representation during all stages of implementation. We have learned what

implementation methodologies work and don’t work and we have come to appreciate the

regulatory, legal, and business implications of ECM systems.

The road ahead for content management is nevertheless challenging. The practice of enterprise

content management has become an integral part of business. It is important for systems to be

scalable, conform to standards, and inter-operate with a host of other internal and external

systems. The future signals the use of standardization, structured content initiatives, knowledge

mining, and more distributed systems.

Acknowledging Enterprise Content Management’s progress, it is important to prepare for the

challenges ahead. This article discusses the key challenges such as standardization, structured

content initiatives, knowledge mining, and a few key lessons from the past including the

importance of an ECM strategy, cross-functional project teams, and right technologies. We will

also analyze the industry’s response to some of these challenges such as content management

interoperability services.


Lesson 1: Define your ECM strategy

An Overview

What is your organization’s ECM strategy? Think again if your answer includes a product name

or a specific technology. ECM is about regaining control over the digital landfill that buries our

intellectual capital, managing the content-centric business processes, retaining what we need

and discarding the unwanted, making the right information available, and staying compliant. My

ECM definition may be different from your ECM definition, and it should be. What your content

means to you is influenced by many factors including your industry, regulatory requirements,

and types of content. How to manage your content is also dependent upon these factors, even

though you could use the same set of technologies molded to achieve your specific goals.

Enterprise content is the new frontier; ECM can help your organization to function effectively

during day to day operations, disasters, and legal and regulatory investigations. A Published

AIIM survey reports that 57% of organizations with a strategic approach to ECM are “more” or

“much more” profitable than their competitors, a number 46% higher than the response for those

with only tactical ECM experience. ("Strategic ECM Boosts Profits." 14)

Unfortunately, organizations often approach content management from a technology or vendor

standpoint. Businesses use boilerplate definitions and strategies from vendors and analysts.

Automating how we manage our content at the workplace requires a paradigm shift. It is very

important to understand the premise, user needs, and goals that are specific to your business.

This will reduce the issues related to end user adoption of the new practice and success of the

implementation. You can refer to standard and generic ECM definitions and strategies to seek

guidance; however, your organization’s strategy should be unique and meaningful to its users.

Otherwise, it would be similar to a half-page long mission statement that no one understands.

Defining a strategy, setting objectives, and devising an action plan doesn’t have to be a multi-

million dollar consulting engagement. Analysis-paralysis does more harm than good, especially

during a time when everyone is trying to do more with less. Who understands the pain points,

challenges, and the requirements of your organization better than the knowledge workers? The

first step toward defining your ECM strategy is to assemble a team from the lines of business,

legal, and risk management groups.


Rules of Engagement

Figure 1: Defining an ECM strategy

There are three essential phases to define your ECM strategy.

Identify

The first phase is to identify content assets, processes, sources, controls, and applications

within the organization. This lays a foundation that you can build upon. Some of the items

identified during the process, such as a content-centric workflow that includes duplicate record

keeping may need improvements. Processes to support new regulations may need

implementation, and there could be other observations such as duplicate information sources

that need to be systematically discarded.


Tip: Consider and evaluate all content related requirements together

At a high level, how you manage your website’s content and how sales proposals are

approved and released are very different processes. However, at the core, they are both

content related requirements that involve storage, classification, security management,

and approval.

Tip: Treat all content equally immaterial of their type or form

Different types of content may have different business, legal, and regulatory requirements, but those requirements identify content for “what they are”, not for “how they are presented”. When we discuss client correspondence for example, it is important to treat faxes, emails, and letters equally, as long as they are client correspondence.

Tip: Remember, technology is the last piece of the puzzle

Identify the business, regulatory, and legal issues as they relate to content management. Steer clear of any technology at this point. Doing so will help keep everyone on the same page, understand and address the key issues, and not try to fit in to a premise set by one product.


Define

Knowledge acquired through the identification phase leads you to define ECM objectives and

goals. ECM goals should be agreeable to all departments across the organization to avoid

exceptions becoming the new norm. While objectives should be unique and tailored to fit your

organization, here are few common objectives.

Objective: Easy and efficient document storage, classification, and access

Organizations acquire more and more documents by the minute. The amount of digital

content is expected to grow ten times from 2006 to 2011. (IDC, 2008, p. 2) This trend is

reflected in the business world. Storage and management of this content and information

can be overwhelming. These documents may be generated internally (product

proposals, job descriptions), received from external parties (contracts and agreements,

invoices), or produced in collaboration with external parties (operating procedures, legal

contracts). Easy and efficient document storage, classification, and access or document

management is an important component of any organization’s ECM goals.

There are a few essential elements that you need to include in your document

management goals.

Common metadata model

Metadata – information about information – identifies content. A common metadata

model focuses on capturing a set of properties, or document attributes, immaterial of

where it is created or how it gets into the organization. A key objective of a metadata

model is to establish unique identities for types of content within the organization. This

enables you to enforce business rules, and single source documents within the

organization.


Hierarchical and compartmentalized security

Digitizing content creates new security challenges and threats. To effectively face these

challenges, hierarchical and compartmentalized security mechanisms that follow security

models such as the Bell-La Padualla and Brewer-Nash models need to be put in place.

Proven security models help organizations secure content, establish user confidence,

and remain compliant with regulations.

Scalable content repository

It is vital to plan for a scalable repository as you consider the growth of information

volumes and retention needs. Your organization’s growth is essentially reflected through

the volumes of information. Processes and systems must be scalable to support these

potential demands.

High availability and disaster recovery

In a post-9/11 and Katrina world, global organizations have a great interest in sustaining

operations through and after a disaster. Your ECM systems could serve as a vital

component of the organizations’ disaster recovery strategy. The systems and processes

you put in place should be “Disaster Ready” to play this role and save vital intellectual

capital.

Objective: Strong Compliance

Organizations have to deal with an increasing number of regulations that mandate how

they manage content. Rules and regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, SEC Rule 17a,

HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, the EU Data Protection Directive, and FRCP Rules 26 and

34 are examples. Technology plays a significant role in assuring strong compliance and

providing evidence to the level of compliance. You can narrow your ECM objectives for

compliance by industry to provide clarity to the users and management.


Objective: Efficient Web Content management

Your website is most likely the primary source of information for your stakeholders.

Managing a website involves facing content management, security, and in certain cases

regulatory challenges. How is your organization’s website managed today? This leads to

an array of questions: What is the lag time between an update being available to being

published on the web? Does IT manage and update all the web content or do you have

identified content owners from the business making the updates? Are there any

regulations governing how and what types of content are displayed on your website?

What is the workflow to get information published on your website? What is the

relationship between the identified content types and the web content?

The content of your website should be separate from the technology that powers it. This

enables content owners from the business units to manage the content efficiently.

Objective: Efficient Collaboration and Business Process Management

Roll-out of your enterprise wide content management system could provide a great

opportunity to foster and enhance collaboration. You have the opportunity to improve the

content-centric business processes identified during the previous phase, or reduce the

paper flow within the organization through ECM technologies.

Objective: Separating Content Management Responsibilities from Vertical Applications

From your custom built business unit level applications to your email systems, all

applications acquire and store information. This information is governed and controlled

by the same business and regulatory requirements as the information stored in your

ECM platform. In certain cases, externalizing the content management operations of

your vertical applications to the central ECM framework may be feasible, while in other

cases you would have to follow more of an archive approach. Whichever approach you

select, externalizing content management responsibilities to the ECM systems can

greatly reduce the duplication of work and cost.


Devise

The ECM action plan should break down the tasks to successfully implement it. This plan

should distribute responsibilities for implementing, managing, and sustaining ECM within your

organization.

Lesson 2: Build a Cross-Functional Team and Select an Implementation Methodology that Works for You

Technology is the plumbing of an ECM project; it is there to support the flow and management

of information within the organization. Implementers should select the proper tools and

technologies and use them to facilitate business processes. Unfortunately, we often see

business requirements interpreted through software products. There are even ECM definitions

that describe ECM as a set of technologies. Even though software products can introduce best

practices to an organization, if mishandled, the potential disconnect it creates between the

implemented systems and how your users do their everyday business could cause the entire

implementation to fail.

Figure 2: ECM Implementation Issues © AIIM 2009, www.aiim.org


Figure 2 depicts ECM implementation issues as identified in AIIM’s 2009 state of ECM industry

publication. Many of these issues can be attributed to the “disconnect” between IT, the users of

the system, and lines of business.

Finding the Balance

A successful systems implementation requires finding the right balance of three elements:

expectations, capabilities, and constraints.

Figure 3: Three Elements

Available features

Every ECM platform available in the market today provides a rich set of features; some are part

of the foundation and others as add-on vertical applications. You may choose to add additional

functionality though vertical applications or in certain cases restrict functionality to make the

system easy to use.


Business Requirements

Goals of your ECM system implementation – some of the requirements may be available out of

the box, some may require additional development, or there could be requirements that are not

feasible under the current budget or technology circumstances.

Feasibility

Every implementation team has different constraints caused by the budget, organizational

policies, laws, technical limitations, resource limitations, etc.

Alignment of the three elements requires a combination of skill and perspective that one

business unit alone would not posses. Absence of the user perspective, for example, could

sway the project in the direction of sacrificing essential functionality to reduce the cost even

though the functionality is feasible given the constraints. For that reason, it is more effective to

have cross-functional project teams that bring resources from lines of business, legal, risk

management groups, and IT together to build an optimal solution. This also reduces the

possibility of things getting “lost in translation,” a common cause for misunderstood

requirements and issues.

Selecting an Implementation Methodology

The success rate for IT projects remains low. Based on the 2009 Standish report “CHAOS

Summary 2009:”

• 32% of all projects were successful (on time, on budget, with required features and

functions)

• 44% were challenged (late, over budget, and/or with less than the required features and

functions)

• 24% failed (cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used)


Proven or well thought-out implementation methods are necessary for IT project success. Your

choice of method depends on multiple factors including team size, team skill level, nature of

technology involved, and the work environment.

Figure 4: Project Success Rates Source: The Standish Group - CHAOS Summary 2009

Common Implementation Methods

The majority of software development and implementation methods are decedents of three core

software development patterns.

Waterfall Method (Royce, 1987)

- Follows a clearly defined, phase-based approach

- Enforces tight controls over the process through extensive documentation

and sign-off requirements at each milestone

- Emphasizes planning the entire system at one time


Prototype Method

- Systems are evolved through a series of prototypes

- Higher level of end user involvement

- Prototypes are developed with the expectation of discarding them after the

demonstrations

Spiral Method (Boehm, 1986)

- Introduces a risk-driven approach

- Each cycle progresses through the same sequence of steps

Figure 5: Core Software Development Patterns. Source: Wikimedia Commons


During the last few decades, we have seen the development of many new hybrid software

development methods that aim to harness the best of all core implementation patterns and be

effective in the dynamic world of systems implementation. However, we still see the use of

traditional methods such as waterfall that dates few decades back, or its direct descendents,

such as the Department of Justice’s “Systems Development Life Cycle Guidance Document.”

Agile Development Methods

Agile development methods deliver solutions fast, in small manageable units. Success is

measured by the releases. Agile development produces less documentation compared to other

implementation methods. One of the key features of agile development is that developers are

trusted to get the work done on their own. There are fewer formalities and the groups may be

self-organizing. This method responds to changes well and is more accommodating than any

other implementation method. According to the agile manifesto, the method values (“Manifesto

for Agile Software Development”):

‐ Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

‐ Working software over comprehensive documentation

‐ Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

‐ Responding to change over following a plan

Extreme Programming and SCRUM are examples of agile software development methods.

Rational Unified Process (RUP)

RUP provides a disciplined approach to software development while maintaining agility during

the process. It is based on following best practices ("Rational Unified Process - Best Practices

for Software Development Teams") “

1. Develop software iteratively

2. Manage requirements

3. Use component-based architectures


4. Visually model software

5. Verify software quality

6. Control changes to software

RUP processes are expressed in two dimensions: the horizontal axis represents the time in

iterations, and the vertical axis represents the activities. The software lifecycle is broken into

multiple iterations that consist of different phases including inception, elaboration, construction,

and transition. The conclusion of each phase is marked by a well-defined milestone. An iteration

of development produces a new generation or version of the system.

Source: Wikimedia Commons


Choosing an implementation method for an ECM Project

You must consider a few characteristics common to a majority of ECM projects when selecting

a method.

Small team sizes

ECM project teams are usually small, less than ten resources. Small teams are often co-

located, or organizations can co-locate the team members. This provides the opportunity for

easy communication and problem resolution when compared to a much larger project team.

Higher consultants-to-employee ratio

In a project situation where everyone is working toward a common goal under the same

constraints, the ability to ignore the corporate hierarchy could help people work together

effectively. In most ECM implementation teams, external consultants outnumber employees.

This creates a somewhat flat project organization structure.

Less development, more configurations

Major ECM frameworks like Documentum provide most of the required functionality through

vertical applications. During the implementation cycle, the project team has to configure the

functionality to fit the requirements and develop to bridge any gaps. This, to a certain extent,

reduces the documentation and testing requirements compared to customize a software

development project.

Considerable changes in business processes

ECM systems usually alter or eliminate some business processes. This may create user

adoption and change management challenges. The ability for users to closely collaborate

throughout the project lifecycle helps.

Need to work with nearly all verticals of the IT establishment

ECM implementers need to collaborate with server administrators, network security personnel,

database administrators, desktop support groups, and risk management teams in your IT

organization. Some of the decisions made by the ECM team affect budgets, schedules, and

systems maintained by these groups.


Considering these common traits of ECM projects, modern development methods like Agile-

based methods or Rational Unified Process (RUP) could be more effective for an ECM

implementation. These modern methods are better equipped to handle the evolving nature of

requirements, change management related risks, and complexity introduced to the project by

team diversity. However, strict organizational policies, controls, and culture may mandate the

use of a more traditional approach.

Lesson 3: Pick Wisely

Overview

Selecting a technology is an important milestone in ECM implementation. The ECM market and

products have undergone an era of strong growth and maturity. It is becoming increasingly

difficult to differentiate between the functionality offered by market leaders. However, for an

ECM implementation to be successful, it needs to deliver more than product features. ECM

systems need to co-exist and integrate with an array of other business systems, manageable

without having access to proprietary knowledge, scalable to support the growth in volumes and

requirements.

It is no secret that many organizations own and operate more than one ECM system. A new

ECM deployment is a good opportunity to consolidate or extend existing ECM technologies.

Things to Consider During the Selection

Platform vs. Product

Major ECM vendors are more focused on providing a platform, rather than an “end all,

be all” product. Platforms provide a foundation service and vertical add-ons, with the

flexibility to extend, scale, and develop as your requirements demand. The foundation

provides the basic content services common to any application that produces and

manages content. Basic content functionalities include storage, classification, security,

and library features (i.e., check-in/check-out). Vertical applications provided by the ECM

vendor, third parties, or built by customers can utilize the central repository provided by


the foundation service. This approach provides the means to implement an enterprise-

wide content management solution that facilitates the enforcement of business and

regulatory rules from one place based on content types, rather than duplicating and

managing the rules at multiple applications, leading to a universal repository that could

reduce the duplication of content, administration, and management activities.

Open vs. Closed Platforms

Taking a look ‘under the hood’ during product selection is essential. For an ECM

platform to support an enterprise-wide implementation, it should be an open platform,

compliant with technology standards of the day. An open platform would make it easier

to find expertise, or transition some of your in-house resources to support the new

platform, compared to a highly proprietary black-box system. An ECM platform should

make functionality available through native and service based interfaces to support

integration with other content enabled systems in the organization.

Scalability

Scalability is another important aspect to consider during technology selection. The ECM

platform and all the required infrastructure components should be scalable to support the

growth in content and transaction volumes. How does the product support multiple

geographical locations? Is there any numerical limitation of the number of users or the

number of documents? Can it support high availability? These are just a few questions

you may need to consider during the selection process.


Availability of Skills

Any enterprise-level software deployment needs technical support to maintain system

operations. Often new deployments are faced with the challenge of recruiting or

transitioning internal resources to maintain the system. Compare your organizations’ skill

set to the skill set required to maintain the platform. The key is to understand the gap

and the cost of the transition.

Vendor Stability

Large scale software implementations are a costly exercise and a commitment. Making

that investment with a vendor who is planning to be around long-term is important.

During the selection process, evaluate the vendors’ financial strength, customer

portfolio, and presence in your region and industry. Consider the product roadmap and

the support structure. An established product roadmap and a support structure are

strong signs of the vendors’ commitment to the product line.

Infrastructure Needs

Any enterprise scale ECM technology depends on third-party system components.

These include application servers, databases, OS platforms, load balancing

technologies, security frameworks, etc. Find out whether your ECM vendor supports the

infrastructure components and versions used at your organization. It is important to plan

for potential conflicts during the early stages of the project.


Tip: During the process it is important to keep in mind that cost of the ECM software is

only one of many cost factors in your project. Next immediate cost is the software

maintenance cost, which runs in the range of 20% of the software price. Other cost

factors include hardware, infrastructure and pre-required system software,

implementation services, and training.

Tip: Product selection is a milestone of an ECM project. Choosing a scalable, open

architecture product from a vendor who has strong presence in your region and industry,

with a track record could save you a lot of time and money.

Tip: Include the business units in the decision making process. This promotes a sense

of ownership and stake in the implementation, while providing much needed user

perspective.


Challenge 1: Standardization

Why Standards are Important

A technical standard is an established norm or requirement. It is usually a formal document that

establishes uniform engineering or technical criteria, methods, processes, and practices. A

simple example of a standard is the "righty-tighty, lefty-loosy" rule, a result of the ASME/ANSI

B1.1 Unified Thread Standard. (Codes and Standards - Milwaukee School of Engineering)

Why do we need a “righty-tighty, lefty-loosy” rule for content management? ECM has gone

mainstream over the last decade. Organizations use their ECM systems as the source for

business-critical information; some of these documents have retention requirements that may

very well go beyond the lifetime of the system implementers. As an example, some of the

organizational documents need to be retained for the life of the organization. What if the

technology provider goes out of business after a few decades? Is there a way to continue to use

the system or migrate the systems’ content?

Many departments use specialized systems within business unit boundaries, Human resources

and finance / accounting departments are prominent examples. However, these systems

produce great volume of records that need to be retained and maintained. Leaving this content

at the originating systems would mean having to manage content life cycles at multiple

locations. Ideally, all these systems should use the organization’s ECM system as the back end,

where records managers can easily manage the life cycles of the produced content. Lack of the

standard interoperability interface, in this case, would result in an integration that is unique to

the current system. Any system change in future may require a complete overhaul of any

existing systems integration.

Organizations with different content management systems need to share their content and

collaborate. If ECM systems do not comply with a standard architecture or do not follow a

standard communication interface, it could require building point-to-point connections that are

unique to each system, at the expense of great time and cost.


ECM systems have become established as business-critical applications, from their former

status of mere document archives. This creates the need to build systems that gracefully co-

exist with a host of other critical systems in the corporate data center. ECM systems must follow

accepted industry and technology standards to make them easy to manage and operate along

with other systems.

ECM standards provide customers with peace of mind, and assurance that their content will be

available immaterial of market dynamics so they can continue to build and expand on the ECM

initiatives with confidence.

Standardization Attempts related to ECM

ECM standards are a hot topic. However, market diversity has prevented the evolution of a clear

winner in the standardization race. A number of different technologies and platforms available in

the market and in some organizations means a standard should aim for the lowest common

denominator, significantly degrading the available functionality. We will now discuss the

commonly known standards before moving on to discuss the newest and most promising

contenders in the standardization race.

Java Content Repository API - JSR 170

JSR 170 aims to provide a uniform Java-based programming interface for all content

repositories. This approach eliminates the need for a programmer to learn different

application programming interfaces (API) from different ECM vendors. JSR 170 API

could communicate with the ECM system natively or through a driver where native

support is not available.

However, despite the advantages, the JSR is language dependent (Java), and the native

support is not so widespread.


Web Based Distributed Authoring and Versioning - WebDAV

WebDAV was proposed in 1996 as a way to make the web a collaborative space rather

than a static read-only space. WebDAV provides a HTTP extension that offers the

following capabilities.

‐ Overwrite protection

‐ Metadata

‐ Namespace management

‐ Version control

‐ Advance collections

Many leading ECM vendors support communicating with their repositories through

WebDAV.

Atom

Atom is an XML-based standard for web content syndication. Atom feeds are comprised

of entries and metadata that describe the entries. The purpose of the protocol is to solve

some of the issues inherent to RSS, the popular choice for syndication.

Industry’s Response for Standardization

Standards like JSR, WebDAV, and Atom have their niche areas of success. Strong support and

buy-in from both customers and vendors is needed for an ECM standard to be effective.

Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) aims to be the solution. It is a result of a

collaborative effort from major ECM vendors, including EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco,

OpenText, etc. It is a standard, a technical specification developed through OASIS that

describes an interface that any CMIS supporting ECM system should implement. While certain

functionalities described in the specification must be implemented by an ECM system in order

be compliant, others are optional. Specification aims to address the most common denominator

of the ECM functionalities.

CMIS provides a strongly typed object model, with four different types of objects (i.e. Document,

Folder, Relationship, and Policy). Two protocol binding options are provided, SOAP/WSDL for


service based binding and REST/Atom for resource based binding. Specification includes query

support, type hierarchy / inheritance support, and document versioning support. Authentication

is handled by the protocol. However, the user’s level of access is governed by the repository.

Challenges

Even though CMIS has strong vendor backing and a neutral forum, it is not immune from the

common challenges that include platform or technology bias, scope, lack of support, and the

core differences among application platforms.

Platform or Technology Bias

A technology or platform bias can hinder the adoption and growth of a standardization effort.

This is especially true when the standard discusses interoperability among products from

different vendors. In the case of CMIS, it is interesting to note how leading vendors in the

marketplace have come together to develop a technology specification without any platform

bias. CMIS doesn’t favor any technology platform, integration mechanisms are implemented

using standard open technologies.

Scope

Properly identifying the scope is crucial. Limited scope would make the specification less

effective, while a broader specification would render the standard too complex, affecting

stakeholder buy-in. CMIS addresses the challenge by aiming to support a very common set of

features. Specification provides two categories of features: mandatory and optional. A content

management system must expose all mandatory features to be treated as a CMIS certified

system; a client or consumer would be able to discover what features are supported by the

target repository after making the connection.

Lack of Support


It takes commitment from technology providers, buy-in from customers, and an acceptable

governing mechanism for a common standard to be effective. Lack of interest from any of the

parties will result in the effort falling far short of its goals.

CMIS is unveiled at a perfect moment; interoperability is a hot topic for ECM customers.

Vendors are realizing that the future of content management would be brighter if systems would

interoperate, allowing customers to pick and choose vertical applications from different vendors

to build a unified solution.

OASIS provides the much needed form of governance that a common technology standard

needs to sustain. The standard OASIS model facilitates growth, and could help it remain

unbiased.

Platform differences

Content management platform differences range from differences in features to choice of

implementation technology. These platform differences add to the list of challenges when

coming up with a standard that is expected to cover different system arrays.

CMIS handles this by not getting overly involved with any individual system or technology. How

an ECM system supports CMIS is up to the vendor; users have the ability to use their proffered

technology to consume the services making CMIS a technology-agnostic standard.

CMIS in a nutshell

Content Management Interoperability Services provides a strong technology framework that

ECM customers can rely on to address content management system integration challenges.

CMIS eliminates the need for point solutions or plug-ins to communicate with or among ECM

systems. Strongly typed object models, platform/ technology independence, and use of common

technologies are noteworthy.

CMIS, by design, limits itself to the basic content services under the current scope. This is

important to ensure the adoptability of the specification as a common standard for ECM

systems. However, we can expect to see more features introduced as optional functionality with

subsequent updates of the specification.


Challenge 2: Rethinking How We Create Content

Overview

We produce massive amounts of content each hour and each minute. The level of intellect and

knowledge captured in some of these documents can be cutting edge; however, the way we

create content is essentially the same as it was a thousand years ago. Yes, we are using

computers and word processing systems, but at the end of the day we are writing on a surface,

and filing it away the same way you would a scribbled piece of paper. There have been many

advances in how we handle our content, but the ways we create content remain primitive.

The result is mountains of unorganized or unstructured content. In the electronic world, content

is usually assembled into small units – documents or files and then into groups – folders.

Content is described by a document / filename and a few keywords. However, lack of a

standard within organizations or business units make this perceived organization unusable.

The industry responded with two solutions. Search engine is the first. Search engines crawl and

index massive amounts of unstructured content to find a text pattern that may be relevant to

what a user is looking for. However, an end user still has to determine whether a piece of

content returned by the search engine is related to the search text or not. Even though there

have been many advances in search algorithms, this is still true. Considering the amount of tacit

knowledge associated with making that determination, it is hard to believe that search engines

could acquire the level of artificial intelligence needed, at least in the foreseeable future. This is

also tied to the context. Consider searching for reviews on neighborhood pubs vs. responding to

a subpoena, you may not want to 100% rely on a search engine to filter out the privileged

information, regardless of how cutting edge the search algorithm may be.

Enterprise Content Management is the other solution. It is focused on introducing a model or a

structure to unstructured content. ECM systems can enforce taxonomy and capture a standard

set of keywords that are uniform for a given type of content. However, the structure introduced

by ECM systems is still limited to the document level. You may have a 10,000 word document in

your ECM system that is identified by only high level category and date, information that is not

all that useful if you are trying to effectively re-use the content.


Key Drivers for Use of Structured Content

Structured content, where a model or structure defined within the document has been in

practice for many years now, exists in the realm of publishing, technical writing, and life

sciences. Despite the challenges, there are many drivers and business cases for introducing the

structured content concept to broader use.

Sharing and Exchange

Efficient information sharing and exchange is essential for any business to remain competitive.

From mortgage applications to arrest warrants, information needs to flow through various

partner entities, which may not necessarily treat or identify the content in the same way as

another entity in the chain. There needs to be a commonly agreed structure within the content to

effectively manage and share it. An established structure within a document would identify

information, and provide the ability to control access to sections of the document based on the

receivers’ credentials.

XBRL was adopted by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and SPL was adopted

by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). These are examples of standards that are currently

in use. There is much research and development underway at the federal level through the

National Information Exchange Model (NIEM). These early examples have provided clear

evidence as to the effectiveness of structured content for information exchange. It remains a

challenge to bring the concept to wider commercial use.

Various Content Outlets and Formats

We are seeing significant growth in content delivery platforms and formats from the web,

networking tools, iPhone, Kindle, and now iPad. Therefore, there is a need for widespread

separation of content from the format and presentation style. Individually formatting content for

each delivery platform is unmanageable at best. Consider writing an employee profile for a fund

manager that needs to be displayed through various outlets and formats such as the fund fact

sheet, prospectus, company’s web site, etc. The need to individually manage all these outlets,

while assuring the content is current and in sync across the board, can be a tedious task.

Broader use of structured content within the enterprise can minimize these issues by

maintaining a single source of content and using transformation technologies to create and

publish to multiple outlets inside and/or outside your organization.


Content Re-use

We often produce content that is included in many different documents or publications; consider

a legal disclaimer or a frequently asked question document for an example. If you want to

maintain this content in an unstructured format, it needs to be duplicated across multiple

documents. Soon, tracking and managing different documents which are supposed to include

the same content could prove to be a nightmare. On top of the time and effort of managing, and

potentially re-authoring existing reusable pieces of information, there may be significant

penalties at stake, based on the industry or type content.

Key Challenges

Counter-intuitiveness

Arguably, human thoughts and expressions are unstructured, and take more of a linear form. If

you attempt to speak in a structured way, you would describe each part of your speech, letting

the listener know the beginning and the end of each part. The same is true when you write; it is

more of a linear process, rather than a structured and well-defined process. One of the

workarounds available in producing structured technical manuals is separating the responsibility

of defining the structure from the content author to another dedicated resource. In this way,

someone would go through a document, separate and tag each section as it conforms to a

predefined data model. However, this approach is not practical or feasible on a larger scale.

Imagine having to set-up an entire department that would tag and process the content produced

by all the other departments. How to adopt this counter-intuitive, yet effective model for

composing content remains a challenge.

Developing standards

Schemas are at the center of structured content initiatives. They define the grammar for your

structured content including available tags, attributes, and data types. A key challenge is to

establish these schemas within an organization or an industry. Such an initiative requires

investment, effort, and buy-in from senior levels of an organization. Such a schema needs

widespread use and adoption, at least within a given industry vertical, to be effective.


In the government sector, the National Information Exchange Model strives to facilitate the

process. Perhaps non-profit bodies for different industry verticals funded by major players and

potential vendors could be the solution for getting through this challenge.

Lack of efficient content authoring applications

An array of tools exist for authoring structured content; however, most of these tools arguably

lack the user friendliness that we have come to expect from a word processing application.

Further research and development is needed in this area to narrow the difference between

authoring a document vs. authoring a structured document.

Challenge 3: Moving Towards Enterprise Information Management

ECM Today

Enterprise content management has helped to introduce some structure to our unstructured

content. When successfully implemented, ECM provides a data model and the ability to locate

content from a central source. However, the approach organizations take with ECM and their

content is rather reactive. If not for all the strict rules and regulations we are facing today, most

organizations wouldn’t bother with ECM. ECM technologies provide a sophisticated and cost

effective mechanism to stay compliant and reduce cost; however, the value of your ECM

initiatives could be much greater.

Harnessing the value of your content

What if we could be more proactive with our content? Intellectual capital that you could harness

is captured in the documents in your ECM systems, shared drives, databases, and even the

individual hard drives. If you have ever used a template from a common template gallery such

as those offered by the Microsoft Office suite, you have experienced the amount of time, effort,

and cost that it saves. These templates capture best practices and accumulated knowledge

over a period of time. As an example, the resume template guides you to place your most


recent experience first, and provides a professional look and feel that is suitable for its purpose.

What if we could follow the same process when we author a standard operating procedure?

What if we have captured the format, content structure, repeated content blocks, and themes

from hundreds and thousands of procedures written by your colleagues and mold them into a

re-usable template? That could be just the beginning of an effective initiative to harness

intellectual capital from your content.

Why think of Enterprise Information Management?

“As commerce becomes more complicated, and companies look to increase automation and

collaboration, data is now emerging as a major market battleground. EIM will become critical as

companies move toward architectures that support business efficiency and agility by design.”

Gartner Research

Enterprise Information Management is about making the paradigm shift from looking at your

content as a liability to looking at your content as an asset. EIM should focus on all information

within the organization, regardless of whether it is unstructured, semi-structured, or fully

structured. (I.e., network share, ECM system, and database)

Consider implementing a data model that spans beyond your ECM system, or one of many

databases; a model that is universal across your organization and could be easily translated

within the industry or in an even wider context. This model should facilitate current sharing,

collaboration, and regulatory needs enforced on content. Through the clarity introduced by this

model, organizations should be able to effectively harness knowledge through established

processes. EIM implies cleaner data.

Look back at the times you were amazed at how much data could be stored in such a small

device. We have progressed from using a 1.4 MB floppy drives to 8 GB thumb drives. Over a

few decades we have learned to talk in megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, and now commonly in

petabytes. The amount of data organizations produce and manage is only going to grow,

especially with the advent of cloud computing - the concept of dynamically and perpetually

growing storage. How many of us are fully aware of what is in our hard drives? Consider an

organization with many petabytes of storage. Unless all this data is fitting into a well thought out

and manageable model, your biggest asset could well become your biggest liability.


Redefining EIM

As many of you who have gotten their feet wet in EIM waters know, the definition of EIM is still

evolving and continues to focus on well structured data. However, semi-structured or un-

structured data and information amounts to a considerable percentage of your intellectual

capital. Hence, no EIM definition would be complete without addressing them.

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is a business practice that covers establishing

an organization-wide data model, organizing unstructured, semi-structured, and structured

content and data into the established data model and harnessing intellectual capital from the

generated information.

Implementing EIM

From a systems perspective, EIM is a marriage between your organization’s ECM systems and

data warehouse. Business intelligence tools can be used for knowledge mining, generating

intellectual capital that has business value. From a process perspective, EIM requires more

discipline that can be facilitated through the source applications.

The complexity and scope associated with EIM demands a “one step at a time” approach. The

beginning of your EIM initiative could be marked by a successful ECM and data warehouse

implementation where you would have already established data models for structured and

unstructured content.

The approach organizations should choose for implementing EIM is strongly dependent upon

the organization’s culture. However, there are a few key elements common to any organization.


Secure executive sponsorship

EIM requires a strong commitment from users since changes affect the entire

organization and require a significant investment. Without the commitment from top

executives, it is difficult to motivate everyone to participate. One of the key objectives of

the initiative should be to harness knowledge, improve processes, and find ways to

increase the organization’s competitive advantage. Without strong commitment from the

top, EIM projects are very unlikely to go anywhere.

Re-asses the present data models

Each and every system within your organization may have its own data model. There

may be multiple systems that store the same information with different metadata. A

comprehensive re-assessment of existing data models will help you to understand how

well they would lend themselves to a more common data model, and the type of data

acquiring, cleansing, and enriching activities needed to support such a model.

Establish working groups

The tacit knowledge of your knowledge workers is associated with each process and

each system of your organization. It is the know-how that is not documented or taught

but rather acquired through experience with the process that are key areas of interest for

an EIM initiative. Establishing working groups that consist of these process and system

gurus could drive the EIM effort to success.


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