Fear and Loathing in Content Management

You know when an atmosphere of fear and loathing has a grip on an ECM team when no content gets deleted, all customization is outsourced, communication is restricted to your immediate manager, and there are no formal business requirements. Boiko’s “Laughing at the CIO” comes to mind. It could be my present to the CIO this year…

Nothing Gets Deleted

“Oh no, we can’t delete anything. The boss is afraid to delete anything, he came from quality and we really wouldn’t know what to delete anyway.” Have you heard this before? Are there too many issues to tackle before even thinking about records management and retention schedules? Fear of unknown reprisals should a vital record be deleted is very real if there are no principles and understood requirements around the disposition of them.

All Customization is Outsourced

This is a cover your ass maneuver under the guise of saving money. If you fear being responsible for actually understanding and building solutions to company specific issues like integrations and metadata management, why not outsource. The long-term effects of this are a skeleton crew of implementation and support workers who are board and loath the lack of process and career potential. When most technical design decisions are made outside of the ECM group, there’s usually one manager who knows most of the details and hoards the knowledge for fear of losing his job. His employees loath his shortsighted design decisions.

Communication Restrictions

“There’s a certain protocol here. If you have an idea on how to improve something, you talk to your direct boss, who talks her direct boss, who talks to his direct boss, and so on.” This is a symptom of fear of being made obsolete by contributors who are smarter than you are. Ideas and complaints, both should be shared freely. Communication is tipping in the desert at best.

Business Requirements

Are there requirements for the ECM system? Have they been updated? Have the business users been doing whatever they have wanted without any standards for metadata, templates, workflows, etc.? You’d be surprise how many ECM systems are still dumping grounds for whatever the business want to through in there. If users are complaining about performance and search then chances are very good that users should be self loathing because they’d brought these issues on themselves.

An Approach to Classification Change

Ease Change to Assure Adoption
Approach using the new classification on the homepage of the portal or ECM system an option rather than a mandate, that is, provide the old homepage in parallel with the new look and let the Users decide which is better. Users will either adopt it or not. Either way you’ve reduce the risks of a wholesale change. Chances are good that the new classification will be faster and more amenable to the way User’s think about the company’s information.

 

Align Classification Schemes and Labels
Research all of the classification schemes in your company and attempt to conform them to a matrix where comparisons can be made. Look at common values. Look at classification labels which repeat themselves. Weigh the priority of following the lead of initiatives that have momentum, for example, if SharePoint is being adopted as a platform, look at how the tabs are labeled and try to conform to those. The goal is to work together for a common label structure for many reasons beyond the portal or ECM system. The goal is to create a reference for integration of search, records management, security, etc. This is one way to slowly achieve continuity of classification.

Mapped Metadata to Metadata Repository
In large organizations there are many reports, spreadsheets, databases, websites, etc., which proliferate different ways of describing content and information. These cause confusion and turf wars among groups responsible for applications. The integration groups are caught in-between trying to map one value to another in attempts to patch and process content flows. Mapping metadata is a stop gap approach, but does not deal with the larger issues of working toward a central metadata repository.

 

Taking the Long-Term Approach

• Design and develop an enterprise metadata and classification model based on industry standards and integration requirements.
• Pick the project that has the most traction and momentum and make sure they are classifying and describing their data according to the enterprise model.
• Work in the adoption and changes to other applications as the latest "killer app" is maturing.
• Integrate all applications at the metadata and classification levels, assuring bi-directional change interfaces.

 

Records Management comparison of Sharepoint vs. Opentext vs. Documentum

Here's a rough records management functional and design comparison matrix based on Sharepoint 2010's offering out-of-the-box:

Function	SharePoint	Open Text Content Server	Documentum 6.x
Document IDs	New in 2010	DTree Dataid Docid in dversdata	r_object_id, i_chronicle_id
Document Sets	Tab in UI, custom page, properties of set and content list	Folders, Projects, Collections, Virtual Folders, Reports, Web Reports, Custom View	Folders, Change Sets, and WDK customizations Virtuals Docs Relationships
Auto Tag hierarchy	Library > Content Types	Folder > RM Classifications Categories	Folders > Object types
Taxonomy	Configurable, multi lingual, terms easily changed	Classifications and categories/metadata	Categories and translations
Content Organizer	A “transparent process” which routes content based on attribute values Folder Provisioning	RM Classifications	Customization or DCM or Taskspace or xCP solution Smart Folders File Plan in RM
Tag doc properties during creation	Transparent while writing in MSWord, term suggestions	Picks up basic MS Word properties	Picks up basic MS Word properties
In place Records Management	Declare from list	Declare from properties on standard UI	Declare from attributes or dropdown on standard UI
File Plan	Site level, content number, policy, content types	RM Classification on folders, categories, and content	Configuration in RPS or RM
Multi Stage Policy	Review Cycles Apply retention to folders (libraries?) or content types	Record Series Identifiers are configured to handle actions by certain criteria in doc properties	Lifecycle actions, folder inheritance, content type, TBO/SBO, webservices
Applying Holds	Search and apply In place or move	Part of RM module	RPS
Failover	Clustered, sticky session	Session is lost when a node goes down	Clustered, sticky session

Groupon and How We Work

I’m going to take Daniel Lyons’s Newsweek article, “Click and Save” which is an introduction to Groupon to the next logical level. Groupon has subscribers who sign up for a service or merchandise and save by the scale of how many subscribers are interested and the deal that the merchandiser makes. This type of give and take can be applied as new way to doing work within IT.

So let’s apply this type of methodology to our “agile” or “waterfall” projects in a corporation. The project would start out as an idea or pain point which would be described by the person who has a budget and needs work done. Its details would feed into a sourcing cycle which matches the pain point with subscribers who know how to build/deliver the solution. There would have to be a deal making component which could resolve the processes around the sponsor deciding on who should do the work, the scope, for how much money and time, and for the subscriber/vendor to answer the requests and seal the deal.

So you ask, where’s the manager in this process? There would be minimal need. The project sourcing app is directly focused on the needs of the business and the solutions of the vendors or in-house developers. There’s a certain amount of critical mass that needs to be involved with the whole application for it to work, but this is the portfolio distribution process directly connecting the dots -- no middle person influencing decisions, playing politics, back stabbing, protecting their jobs, etc. Man, I’m not jaded am I?

So Gartner where does this fit into your ECM quadrants? Transactional content management? Could be. There’s a real need within companies to streamline the whole process of sorting out content creation and building applications that resource and process them. Content Infrastructure? Maybe. Portfolio management built into workflows that push knowledge from the creative brains to the consumers. We’ve heard all of this before, but what is new is that a small company like Groupon can blend a need for efficiency with the collective motivation of the crowd cutting away the profits of the middlemen. If this could be applied to the many issues of why IT projects fail wouldn’t that be a step forward?

The IT Cycle of Optimism and Hubris

Once you have reach the twenty year mark in your IT career, look back, and chances are likely that you’ve experienced a few cycles of optimism from your leadership regarding using the latest software tools to become more competitive.

However, there’s a big difference when the optimism comes from the CEO vs. CIO. If it’s coming from the top it’s in the form of high level goals which are translated “logically” down to the tools to implement them. If the optimism comes from the CIO, the chances of it working are much lower and that’s because the CIO is throwing tools at a systemic problem that will eased a bit but not solved by them.

We’re at least at the second IT cycle of hype with “Knowledge Management” and Enterprise 2.0. As these cycles of optimism hit wide-eyed leaders who were not present during the last cycle enthusiasm breaks out on the presentation circuit with promises of curing the culture gap of knowledge sharing within companies.

Will Sharepoint solve the communication issues between different groups during the lifecycle of ideas, memes, and products? Did eRoom solve the issues in the late 90’s? Did ECM suites try for the past 10 years to make it easy for groups to share information? Wasn’t email or isn’t twitter going to help us? The point is that we need to go through these cycles to fail and get better at automating certain menial aspects of processing the information in our heads. The governance of engagement will prove to be a challenge with any attempts to fully electronically explore sharing of ideas within a company.

Dr. SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE talking about optimistic cancer “cures” that prove to a momentarily hubris in a long battle to finding cures:
“They said well, how can we possibly run a trial on something that we know has got to work? This story carries the memory of the kind of optimism that very quickly tips into hubris, which is so much part of the story of cancer.”

Tom Davenport, blogging a few years ago on Ent 2.0:
”I admit to a mild hostility to the hype around Enterprise 2.0 in the past. I have reacted in a curmudgeonly fashion to what smelled like old wine in new bottles. But I realized after hearing Andy talk that he was an ally, not a competitor. If E2.0 can give KM a mid-life kicker, so much the better. If a new set of technologies can bring about a knowledge-sharing culture, more power to them. Knowledge management was getting a little tired anyway.”

David Weinberger on Davenport’s 2007 blog above:
“But it's reasonable to think that the technology, when taken up and used, will affect enterprises directly and indirectly…”

Flip this ECM Stack

Mike Alsup’s SharePoint and Records Management presentation got me thinking why not take the traditional ECM application stack and flip it upside down. I don't mean to be flip, but it's time to morph ECM into another set of solutions altogether. You’d have storage, records management, and archiving control through rules on top. Now think of these applications as goals, requirements and metadata which make a blueprint for the enterprise. The principle of this flip would be to drive consistency and efficiencies down through the enterprise of applications based on rules.

There’s no such thing as an enterprise application, an enterprise of apps is governed by new mechanisms like Boiko’s entities which have metadata repositories, identity, and apps which run models of rules, all of which are mutually exclusive, yet related and agile. These islands of entities are related to each other and connected by services at varying levels of complexity. CMIS is focused on inoperability, but is an add-on standard to the existing stacks of ECM. It’s time to unwind the stacks even more and create flexible models for governance, retention schedules, rules like 21 CFR part 11, etc.

ARMA and Enterprise 2.0

Ron Miller is right on when he’s reporting on the ARMA and Enterprise 2.0 shows and how their relationship to each other is getting closer. I agree with most of his analysis, but as far as the responsibility and control of this relationship happening at the content management application level I disagree. ECM vendors have been trying to reign in this relationship for a number of years now and do not seem to the have the agility or will to invest in the fast moving Ent. 2.0 software realm.

Take, for example, Documentum’s records management offering. Their federated records management (FRM) solution is interesting and heading in the right direction, but falls short of commitment from EMC. The technology behind the solution was created by a third party. Tell me any storage management company that owns an ECM software suite has a strong records management solution which is backed by top quality professional services? It is in the company’s interest to provide half hearted attempted at solving one of the biggest issues that legal and information management teams have: how to find content and get rid of it in a rules-base, systematic way. Do oil companies really want to provide alternative energy solutions?