ECM Matures Beyond the Models

Gartner’s ECM Maturity model from 2012 shows the simplified journey of an ECM implementation into a company through time. The trail followed is well worn into the trained minds of solution providers. What typically happens with this methodology mantra is that it infiltrates and pervades, then when fully dependent upon the software solution that touted it, the company buys more modules, more licenses, more storage, etc.

How mature is mature?

ECM implementations reach the goals put forth be the company’s director in charge of operations. Each time a “nice to have” is overlooked or pushed to further phase, it may reach a dead end. These dead ends accumulate, but are not factored into the overall implementation; they fester and show up again when the next cycle of solutions/consolidations/open source evangelists sweep in.

It’s easy to win with a Model

I’ve seen original solution documentation show this maturity model from the beginning. The instructions are outlined, budgeted, and milestones are set. All you have to do is do what it says to do and you will succeed. Any movement forward is seen as a win. Plus, you executed on the plan, never mind that dead ends were left along the way. You can’t please everyone!

The model is the model

The model’s steps of “Initial, Opportunistic, Organized, Enterprise, and Transformative” are exactly what happened to this model. It is an artifact of solution execution, but in the end it is just another way to sell product suites and Gartner products. This model matured. A new one is coming.

Implementation’s long tail

If you are looking at models make sure the last half the curve looks like a thick long tail. This shows the correct long term implementation of ECM. It takes mature team of people to fully realize its potential beyond initial expectations and bouts of disillusionment. Over time, if you are lucky there will be enough focus on the quality of information and its benefit to productivity.

ECM Moving Across the Silos of Information Management in Healthcare

Information silos are commonplace in every industry. They tend grow around concentrations of knowledge/experience collectors and “best of breed” applications. Because enterprise content management usually spans across these silos, we as ECM solution providers get a unique insight into how work.

Take scanning solutions in Healthcare for example, you get exposure into not only financial and HR applications, but EMR, interface, and lab apps. Once you have gained trust among the managers of these applications and have implemented ECM across them, you will begin to see the potential synergies. One potential synergy could be to combine Informatics, HIM, and ECM under one director to be able to fully realize the full patient information potential.

Let’s say for this example that Informatics is underfunded, HIM is well funded, and ECM is okay. By combining budgets and focusing on common goals, the patient as well as the hospital’s image will undoubtedly benefit. By providing ECM with a direction base on requirements coming from what patients need, the emphasis and objectives will be clear and hopefully funding will be well justified and measurable. 

Post ECM Modern New New

When John Newton, Alfresco CTO, talks about the “Modernization of ECM” he takes the biggest, most pervasive view possible of ECM at an organization. The issue I have with this view is that most solutions are point solutions which may be expanding into other departments, but are mainly focused on specific solutions, not necessarily solutions that impact the enterprise. He wants everyone to think big with “millennials” using “mobile” phones “collaboratively”, “sharing docs”, using “Instagram”, and “Snapchat”, etc.

Ok, great, CIOs think big, I get it, but what happens during the implementation? Did the big idea get implemented well, or are we blaming Users for “poor adoption”?  John says, “Employees don’t buy in because the systems are cumbersome, non-intuitive, or lack support for B2B sharing and remote access.” That type of statement side steps the many bad implementations made by his previous company’s professionals. You can’t leave a company, build a better solution, and then blame the old software for being inferior. For those of us who have seen their share of implementations, we know that ECM was first CM at many of these companies. The “E” depended on the professional services as much as the software.

The “extended enterprise” beyond the firewall concept has been around for over a decade. The issues of security and sharing information are evolving and involve way more than an ECM solution’s capacity and technology. The larger enterprise is under the gun here, not the content management system.

With the “Explosion of Digital Content” as quoted from IDC sources, the “big data” issue of finding and contextualizing content will always be an issue. The point should be that the “crap in, crap out” adage is the real issue, not the system. If you don’t take the time to add context to your content on the way in, the search results later, regardless of how heuristically brilliant the algorithm, will not be as accurate as you want or need.

There’s no doubt Alfresco has a head start with open technology, integrations, and UI simplicity. I just find it hard to believe that they still think ECM is everything to everyone when it comes to content. All applications have evolved to deal with content and metadata. ECM can help patch the holes and connect the dots, and even be everything to a small/medium sized company, but with large enterprises it takes many software solutions to deal with its content and information. Whether it be financial, human resources, healthcare, pharma, registration, etc., in each case there are specialty professional services and software solutions to fit the requirements. What ECM promises is to patch the hole when a leak occurs because a leak in the other solutions will eventually occur.

ECM Safety Net

The big promises of ECM solutions ten years ago could not have foreseen the importance of risk mitigation in today’s risk adverse business environment. ECM systems have turned into safety nets for many companies. Not that information or content is in free fall, but it is reassuring to know that the location and storage of content is safe.

Many ECM initiatives were underfunded or over-architected:

Underfunded Scenarios:  when a solution performs great, but does not have a disaster recovery solution. When the version you are on is four years old. When you have more paper be shuffled than when scanning started.

Over-architected Scenarios: when it takes a senior engineer to unpack a workflow. When there’s a custom solution that does close to what is out-of-the-box in the next version. When it takes an act of congress to change a form.

ECM is also a good place to land when political maneuvering in the company causes paralysis with some solutions, or budgets get swept leaving your great idea with no funds. Catching the falling projects and at least saving them for complete disaster is at least admirable. It may not push forward the mobile agenda, but it will soften the blow when it’s budget is slashed in half.

When your system has an outage and you have to resort to paper

The more we computerize our work, the more difficult it will be to recovery from unanticipated down times. In a hospital situation for example, when your system goes down, every task done on the computer goes into manual “paper” mode. Work is done and forms are used. At some point when the system is back up, you have to deal with the pile of paper that accumulated during the outage. This paper pile could consist of notes, orders, assignments, referrals, medication list, etc. What do you do with this stuff?

Did you plan for recovery from paper?

Everyone plans to recovery, but the real question will it go as planned? Did everyone follow the downtime documentation procedures accurately? For example, was the account number written on the form? Can barcodes be printed after the outage?  

Scanning

Automated scanning with barcodes for indexing paper can be a life saver, however with an outage there no barcodes, which can be a major hassle from which to recover. Also, what if the accounts are still caught up in the content management system?

Processing

If you have an automated workflow for coding diagnoses or approving invoices, is there a paper alternative for this, or do you just go home?

Overtime

To recover a system by back loading information from paper, it might take a temporary surge of contractors. This unexpected budget hit should be noted as a risk in your outage plan.

Fixing data

Sometimes during an outage, only one system is down, leaving up or downstream systems running. Users could go about their normal routines without knowing for a while. Data entry could get queued up as the integration is broken. So, one process is using paper and another one is still using a computer. When the outage is over, some data might have been corrupted. For example, a patient is registered and is being seen by a nurse. The nurse fills out the patient’s drug allergies on a paper form. The patient goes in for surgery and is recovery. A physician checks the EMR for allergies and sees none. The paper form for allergies is in the chart, but the physician assumes the system is up-to-date…

The Need for recoveries of recovery

Chances are good that the downtime procedures cover what should happen and are in compliance with the auditors, however when your system goes down and the paper comes out there are many more chances of mistakes. Of course the answer is a plan for system redundancy, however, this comes at a hefty prices that not every hospital or entity can justify. 

How to Triage ECM slowness

Who’s the first team a User calls when the ECM application slows down? The ECM team of course. But, nine times out of ten, slowness is caused by effects of other systems. Whether it’s the database, network, or the User’s open applications, sluggish performance has many sources.

Question: who’s working on what client, in what environment, and where?

Network: we were fixing something

From Who: multiple sites simultaneously, or one building?

Large companies with multiple buildings most likely have networks that are somewhat patched together leaving some Users with networks that are performance subpar. Also, some areas of the company may be hugging bandwidth with applications that are dragging the whole network down.

Database: This won’t impact the application…

From Who: All applications that use that db server, or one application?

Typically, the database server is a shared environment thanks to our buddies who consolidated individual servers at the expense of “decoupling”. This shared environment could at the mercy of reporting for BI initiatives slowing it down. If it’s an Oracle RAC, sometimes the nodes don’t reboot as advertised. The shared environment of tier 1 applications, could put the other lower tiers at risk because the lower ones will not be the priority if there’s a business outage.

Backups: we were trying to restore another application

From Who: One application or many?

Backups might happen late at night during “off” hours, but there’s still a performance hit on databases and file stores. There’s also the possible wave of activity after a recovery that clogs all downstream applications.

Security: we were hacked

From Who: One app, or many?

With new layers of security applied comes extra processing thus potential for slowness. This is usually agreed upon at the design stages, but complained about after implementation.

Virus protection: half of our share drive files are encrypted

I’ve had many times when I’m looking for causes of slowness on my PC or on a server, only to find out that the task manager is showing a huge percent of CPU being used by the virus protection software. Hint: Double check when the full scan is scheduled.

User’s 5k open applications: who me?

If one User complains, log onto their PC and check out what applications they are running (assuming they didn’t close some while they waited for you). Try closing and opening Outlook. What’s in their startup folder? Check their browsing history for views and downloads.

Service Desk: this is a routine patch

Even when the Service Desk is being proactive with mandatory testing of patches to Windows or IE, there are always issues, especially with interaction of multiple open web browser (“no footprint”) applications.

Upshot

When you get blamed for slowness of your ECM application have a script of questions to ask to triage the issue. Check the possible larger issues first and move toward the User at hand. Slowness happens because everyone wants information faster, that is, in our zealousness to always get faster we stumble occasionally.

Unpacking a Workflow

Unpacking the idiosyncrasies of a lifecycle/workflow can be daunting. Many times a well designed “1.0” workflow will turn into a “2.0” nightmare. I have seen workflows with so many connections between tasks and rules that it looks like all the tasks are connected with no rhyme or reason.

Documentation

Good documentation can provide an excellent resource and general direction of the workflow. However, with large process automation projects, the documentation is usually provide for the initial implementation and left stranded thereafter.  Determine how obsolete the information is before reading it too closely.

Structure            

Worse Case: Over time, workflows can turn into spider webs. Once they are built it becomes easy to make small tweaks and fixes. These work great and the business is happy, but in the long run can get out of control. How do you document “small” changes?

Best Case: A solid naming convention makes easy to traverse through the decision branches.

Look for repeating patterns of rules and actions. These could help minimize what looks complex but is actually a bunch of redundant activities.

Naming Conventions

Hopefully the naming of the lifecycles, work queues, rules, actions, properties, etc., makes some type of logical sense. A lot can be implied in a formal name convention, for example, a lifecycle name of “HIM - Validation” which shows the department (“Health Information Management”) and the objective (“Validation”). Depending on the workflow application prefixing with “smart” hierarchical keywords is best practice, so hopefully they did it!

Search

If your workflow tool has the ability to search for specific component names and presents the results in an actionable way, figuring out workflow specifics just got easier.

Rules and Actions

Rule names can be precise and consistent, or obsolete and sporadic. If you have the former, you are lucky. This goes for actions as well. Both of these may be copied (linked) to other locations, so be careful of making changes in one spot only to be burned by the other part of the workflow that just broke.

Properties and Keywords

Many workflows rely on saving status and regular expression values to the document’s attributes/keywords. It’s important to create a matrix on how these values are set and where they are used in the process. By “properties” I mean the temporary values that are used by the workflow for calculations and routing (and logged) by not saved to the document.

Logs of workflow actions

By viewing logs you may be able to decipher some of the paths that documents take into and around the workflow. Depending on the settings, these traces might show what actions took place, when, and by whom.

Decision Trees

These are made up of combinations of rules and actions. Rules usually have a true or false outcome. Building complex decisions can mean stacking many of these rules together to provide an eventual processing outcome.

Visual representation

Whether in a tree format or a more graphical view, following the progression of a workflow visually can be very useful. With complex workflows this view becomes too chaotic looking. Splitting up the visual representation into meaningful chunks may help figure things out.

Users, Groups, and Roles

Listing out groups and roles, and matching them to activities will show certain expectations of actions. Each group/role will have permissions and privileges which will provide a clue as to how the users interact with the processing of documents.

Document flows

Running documents through a workflow is obviously one of the most practical ways to decipher workflow behavior. As an admin user keep in mind that you will be able to do and see many parts of a workflow that Users won’t be able to see.

Figuring out what a workflow does can be a very frustrating activity. Hopefully, some of the above techniques will make it more tolerable.