Tag: Consumer Products

Design Thinking: a foundation for Business Innovation

Submitted by PBenedicto on Wed, 02/13/2013 – 22:09

“Innovate or Die” is a popular expression among thought leaders to describe the economic and cultural climate we now do business in.  Technology’s impact on people and business continues to evolve the way we communicate, work and live at a disruptive pace.  Businesses need to respond by innovating their business models and experimenting with new methods of doing business.

Innovation today requires a creative way of thinking, Design Thinking.  We need a foundation to experiment with new ideas that apply emerging tools and models to existing methods of doing business.  Design thinking is not new, though its popularity has grown in the digital age as a practical methodology for leveraging emerging technologies and modernizing business models.

Applying design thinking to innovation adopts a solution-focused mindset that combines empathy, rationality and creative insights into business, technology and people.  This is important because integrating emerging technologies is simply not enough to achieve competitive advantage and sustainability.  We must not only innovate the tools we use, but the methods in which we use them.  We must understand that current business cultures and practices can be a barrier to innovation.  We need to recognize that consumers are more tech-savvy and social than ever before.  We need to enable people as much as we enable the business.

Design Thinking model illustrating the innovation zones and relationships between business, people and technology:

Design Thinking Model

Popular words of caution, “It’s not about the technology…” reminds us to be empathetic to be innovative.  Empathetic to who? People. The people that work for your business and the people that buy your products and services.  When we understand how culture is evolving inside and outside the business, when we understand the behaviors of consumers, we will be better equipped to innovate.

The challenge today is to break free from our comfort zone to unlearn and rethink how we do business and foster new competitive advantage.  Our world is in a state of great change, we need to take a step back and be willing to open our mindsets.  I believe the methodologies of Design Thinking can be applied to business innovation and guide leaders in the right direction.  There is as much opportunity as there is threats in the digital age and businesses will either “Innovate or die.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6axgrZUrqH8

Part 2 – Design Thinking: methods to business innovation

References:

What’s the difference between Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR)?

What’s the difference between Business Continuity (BC) and Disaster Recovery (DR)? This is a question I have had to answer multiple times. It is a very good question and the answer is not simple! So, as a good lazy ‘techy’, I tried to find the answer on the web. That way, when I am asked, all I would have to do is send a link.

I have used this approach multiple times for other questions I have received. It is convenient and a great way to avoid re-typing an answer. However, this time, I was not very successful in my quest to find an answer. I searched the web, multiple times, for hours without finding the perfect “pre-written answer” I was looking for. So I decided to stop being lazy and write it myself.

Now, if you are like me, and you’ve been looking for an answer to this question, feel free to use this one.

So, let’s start with a few definitions from the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) Glossary:

Disaster Recovery (DR): “The strategies and plans for recovering and restoring the organizations technological infrastructure and capabilities after a serious interruption. Editor’s Note: DR is now normally only used in reference to an organization’s IT and telecommunications recovery.”

Business Continuity (BC): “The strategic and tactical capability of the organization to plan for and respond to incidents and business disruptions in order to continue business operations at an acceptable predefined level.”

First, I’d like to say that I have a slightly different view of DR than BCI. Now, who am I to disagree with what BCI is saying? Well, bear with me a little longer and you will see how my interpretation of DR might help people understand the differences between DR and BC better. So here’s my definition:DR is the strategies and plans for recovering and restoring the organizations (scratch technological) infrastructures and capabilities after an interruption (regardless of the severity).

Unlike the BCI, I don’t make a distinction between the technological infrastructure and the rest of the infrastructures (the buildings for example) and nor I do differentiate between the types of interruptions. In my opinion, either a system is down or a building is burnt or flooded, both should be considered a disaster and therefore both require a disaster recovery plan.

Therefore DR is the action of fixing a failing, degraded or completely damaged infrastructure. For example, the 2nd floor of a building was on fire; the fire is now out so the initial crisis is over. Now the damage caused by fire must be dealt with; there is water and smoke on the 2nd floor, the 3rd floor has damages caused by smoke and the 1st floor has water damage. The cleanup, replacement of furniture, repair of the building and its structure, painting, plastering, etc. are all part of the disaster recovery plan.

What is Business Continuity then? Business Continuity is how you continue to maintain critical business functions during that crisis. Back to the example, when the fire started, the alarm went off and people were evacuated from the building. Let say you had a Call Center on the 2nd floor and this just happens to be a critical area of your business. How would you continue to answer calls while people are being evacuated? How would you answer calls while the building is being inspected, repaired or rebuilt? Keeping the business running during this time is what I call Business Continuity.

The same approach can be taken with a system crash or when the performance of a system has degraded to the point that it has impacted business operations. So fixing the system is DR and the action of keeping the business operations running without the system being available is BC.

In conclusion, BC is all about being proactive and sustaining critical business functions whatever it takes whereas DR is the process of dealing with the aftermath and ensuring the infrastructure (system, building, etc.) is restored to the pre-interruption state.

Should Business Strategy be Influenced by Technological Considerations?

Submitted by phay on Fri, 11/04/2011 – 09:01

Can business strategy be created in isolation of the technology considerations? There is a widespread belief in the Business Community that Business Strategy comes first and then technology follows in some way to support that business.

In my experience the common perception among organizations is that Business defines its strategy first and then technology enables the strategy.

Strategy Development Process:

In order to explore the role technology plays in shaping and supporting the business, let’s look at how strategies are developed.  There has been a significant amount of research done and published in understanding how strategies are developed.  Here are some relevant highlights.

There are two main dimensions to strategy development.

  1. Visionary thinking based on intuition, a sense, an ability to make bold predictions and define goals.
  2. Strategy development is largely based on scientific analysis, considering options and recommendations based on the analysis followed by implementation.
    • Strategic Analysis guided by scientific approach understanding your markets, competitors, value chain, bargaining power of the key stakeholders.  It also entails understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your organization against the opportunities and threat that the external environment presents
    • Strategy Formulation guided by analytical findings, alignment to the vision and overall goals of the organization to create a strategic road-map
    • Strategy Implementation is of course converting the strategy to real results by successfully implementing the strategy

It is the strategy development that is the focus of this article. Specifically, strategic analysis which then guides the strategy formulation and implementation.

Is there a place for technological consideration in strategic analysis? The answer is quite apparent as demonstrated through examples next.

Technological Influences on the Business Landscape

Examples of technologies that have had transformation impact on business value chain and have redefined markets and distribution channels are all around us.

The globalization phenomenon enabled by the internet is one of most profound. The Internet has impacted all the traditional dimensions of business strategy (reduction in barriers to entry, increased market size across the globe without limitations of geographic divide, increased competition etc.).

Financial services industry is a prime example of an industry where technology has transformed the value chain, redefined competitive forces and given the consumers tremendous amount of bargaining power.  Entry barrier have been declining, new competitor have emerged. Some financial products and services have become more transparent and commodities making the market more competitive. Internet as a tool to create a new service delivery channel (reduced channel costs, 24 by7 availability) has put pressure on the more traditional branch based channels. The resulting service delivery cost structure has changed. ING is operating on the model that bricks and mortar are not required to sell its banking products and services.

Healthcare value chain has been transformed by technological advances, linking healthcare records through electronic information exchange, diagnostic imaging from traditional film based to digital imaging has redefined the value chain and changed the balance of power between the suppliers, buyers not to mention the very nature of the products and services being delivered.

Retail Industry is another such example where technology has changed the business landscape.  Amazon’s strategic business model was completely defined by technology.

Relationship between Business and Technology

Given how profoundly technology has influenced our business and personal lives, it is hard to fathom how a successful business strategy can be defined without considering technological influences and enablers.  By creating a partnership between Business and Technology at the Strategy development stage, you are creating a strategy that is well formed and can maximize business value and competitive positioning by embedding technological considerations from the very start (and not an after thought!).

So why is it that there is a significant divide between the Business and Technology?  In subsequent articles, I will focus on why there is this barrier (real or perceived) that creates this divide between Business and Technology.

If you have examples to demonstrate the benefits of business/technology partnerships, please share your thoughts on this forum.

The Implicit Value of Content is Realized Through Business Process

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Mon, 03/07/2011 – 12:14

As I have noted before, much of the historic discussion in the document management field has concerned the cost of producing content, or the cost of finding existing content.But the value of a document, or any other piece of content, is seldom the same as its cost of production.I was chatting about this the other day with my colleague James Latham. He used an invoice as an example of a piece of content that may be managed by an enterprise content management (ECM) system. James noted that, ‘There is inherent or explicit value in an invoice’. In fact the value of an invoice is fairly tightly linked to the cash it represents.A $10 bill has an explicit value of $10. Likewise a delivered invoice for $10 has a value of about $10 to an organization. Arguably it is not quite as valuable as $10 cash given the delay and perhaps uncertainty of payment, but it is close enough in most cases and will be treated as such in an accounting system.There is a case where a $10 bill is worth much more: if it is a rare, old $10 bill, it may have a lot of implicit value (e.g. to collectors it may be worth hundreds of dollars) above its explicit value of $10.Tangible value (explicit plus implicit) is established by sale of the item itself or the recent valuations of comparable items. But it is hard to think of invoices, especially electronic invoices (i.e. digital content), as having any implicit value.Are there other kinds of enterprise content besides invoices that clearly have implicit value? I think so. Here’s a good example: documents that support a patent application for a product with large market potential may have huge implicit value that greatly exceeds their cost of production and their explicit value at a given moment. This implicit value may become more explicit over time with the issue of a patent, together with product and market advances. At some point an intellectual property sale could attribute very significant tangible value to the documentation.In this patent documentation example, the application of process over time helps to create tangible value. In ECM discussions we often speak of the context of content as helping to give it meaning, but clearly we also need to consider how process can give it value.

Enterprise Content Architecture – my take on the Metastorm acquisition

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Fri, 02/18/2011 – 14:45

I’m particularly excited by today’s announcement acquisition of Metastorm by OpenText, but not perhaps for the same reasons as many others.What excites me is the potential of Metastorm’s strengths in Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Analysis (BPA). As noted in the release:“Metastorm is a leader in both BPA and EA as recognized by Gartner in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis Tools, published February 22, 2010 and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture Tools, published October 28, 2010.”These capabilities play to both the ‘Enterprise’ and ‘Content’ in Enterprise Content Management (ECM).Organizations depend on a growing proportion of knowledge workers as I discussed in a previous post (Value for Knowledge Workers), but as noted in the McKinsey study I covered (Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers),  most organizations do not understand how to boost the productivity of knowledge workers or indeed the barriers to that productivity. As I noted:“What struck me in reading the article is that while an increasing proportion of staff in companies are knowledge workers, it is not clear what knowledge work is and how to best enable it to drive productivity gains. Given that, it is hardly surprising that people struggle to define the value of those software tools best able to support knowledge management.”Content is the currency of knowledge work. It supports the exchange of knowledge during business processes, and is very often the work product of such processes (e.g. a market analysis report, an engineering drawing or a website page). Too often in the past discussion of the value of content has centered on either reducing the unit cost of producing, finding or using content, or mitigating compliance risks created by poor content management.This is not a new theme for me, indeed last August I expressed my enthusiasm for why Content Matters. I noted:“It’s no surprise to people that you can understand a business by ‘following the money’ or ‘following the customer’ and that is the basis for ERP and CRM systems. On the other hand most people are only just coming to realize that ‘following the content’ is just as important, so while we’ve talked about content management for many years, that conversation is starting to be important to business.”The potential to apply Metastorm’s ProVision tool set to elucidate and illustrate the critical role of Content to the achievement of Enterprise Goals is an exciting one which offers new value to our customers.

Blocked Community Arteries

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Fri, 02/11/2011 – 13:03

Online communities can form around many different technologies. But once they have formed, they can be very difficult to update, convert or move. The problem is not one of technology conversion, but rather user habits and preferences, which seem to become more solidified the longer the community has existed.I’ve been reminded of this as I started to get involved with some online automotive forums. Recently I purchased an old car that I am refurbishing as a hobby. There are now fantastic online resources, with detailed illustrated procedures that are far better than the factory manuals.You can also ask for help and people respond almost immediately, provided you don’t violate the many customs and expectations. The most important of which is that you must have searched first. Since the forum I use has been around for a decade and the cars it covers are from 16 to more than 30 years old, most issues have already been covered in previous posts, often many times. This also means the veterans are intolerant of people asking the same old questions. So I search really carefully first and only if I don’t find what I’m looking for make an apologetic posts along the lines of: “I have searched, but can’t seem to find out how to…”The community is very centered on classic, threaded discussions and search. Just how centered was recently illustrated by a post by a brake vendor offering to provide free brake pads to the person who posted the best explanation of why they should get free brakes, as judged by ‘like’ votes on Facebook. The resulting furor was really fascinating to watch.There were a succession of ‘Fail’ posts. The first started:

  • “I don’t have a facebook account so can’t enter. Don’t you have your own business website?”

Others chimed in with incrementing posts; very quickly 18 negative votes were posted. The comment about a business website certainly illustrated that the poster has missed out on current trends. Other anti-Facebook comments included:

  • “Rarely use the FB. Don’t Like”
  • “What’s a facebook?”
  • “I have no plans on signing up for facebook at all, ever”
  • “C’mon, without FB how am I going to check out all the girls that wouldn’t date me in 1985 and feel better now about the bullet(s) that I unknowingly dodged?”
  • “I don’t “do” facebook either, and it might be a long, long time before I find a reason to sign up for it.”
  • “I have some semblance of a life…”
  • “I am worthy of getting the brake pads for the simple fact that I don’t use facebook.”
  • “No interest in joining MyFace or any of the other ones. I’m waiting for the ‘winner’ to emerge. This one is probably just another fad like parachute pants and jackets with zippers all over them. Boy am I glad I passed on those.”
  • “News feature today mentioned employers and now banks using FB and twitter to help evaluate the qualifications of business/job/loan candidates.”

One poster was particularly incensed that the vendor had posted on more than one such site (which is a typical social marketing approach):

  • “When he posted this I went to his FB page and was pretty put out that it looked like they spammed every car forum out there with the same offer. Needless to say, I didn’t “Like” this.”

After this tirade, there was a tentative response from a few Facebook users. I was one of the first to point out that there was a Facebook page dedicated to this particular car, but supposed they would not be using it, which was quickly answered with an, “uhhhh… no.” There were actually a couple of positive posts:

  • “I actually love facebook. It is a very useful way for me to stay in contact with many friends that I would have otherwise lost due to lack of free time. I have re-connected with old friends and use it to schedule real life get togethers. It’s actually a pretty amazing site.”
  • “Wasn’t saying anything negative about FB, I’m on there entirely tooooooo much.”

One of the final posts directed to the vendor was spot on (if sexist):

  • “Don’t worry (not that you were) about the crotchety old hags on this forum somehow connecting your company to the terror threat of FB. Its just new and different, and not many here are early adopters.” And the last one:
  • “I found this funny on a forum dedicated to owners of 16-34 year old cars.”

So they are not open to change. Which is a pity because there are newer technologies that would actually help the community:

  1. The illustrated procedures would be far better in a wiki format that could be refined over time, rather than depending on original posts with some threaded discussion additions that are hard to follow
  2. Likewise, some of the threads are really just social conversations that have little to do with the subject car. A microblogging application would be far more suitable

This well-entrenched community is very much wed to a traditional, content-centric model (threaded posts and search) and most members don’t understand the people-centered, social model of collaboration. Although comprised of technically-savvy people, their preferred technology is old, as are their cars. I don’t think this community is ready to change.

Content Management Systems as Cities – I feel like a Mayor!

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Mon, 09/20/2010 – 09:40

I recently realized that large enterprise content management (ECM) systems are like a city, but most ECM practices treat them as if they were a building. There’s a big difference in complexity that impacts the operation of an ECM system.Architects can design a building to suit its intended purpose and building management can maintain it. In the same manner an ECM expert can design a system to manage digital content in support of particular business processes. Much of the ECM literature talks of the benefits of clear system architecture and good governance.As an ECM system is deployed across an organization the breadth and number of applications grows rapidly – often into the hundreds – with many different business sponsors and champions! It becomes increasingly hard for any one person to understand all of the different ways that a system is being used, and to exert any effective control. The flexibility accorded users through collaborative, social tools further increases the heterogeneity of an ECM system.Not all ECM application deployments meet with equal success or longevity. In many ways the applications in an ECM system resemble buildings in a city – different sizes, different ages, different investments and different degrees of success. Some buildings are abandoned and some never get off the drawing board!No one designs cities – they are just too complex. Sure there are examples of attempts to do this – the initial design of Brasilia or the redesign of the center of Paris by Haussmann – but over time the efforts and activities of many other people determine how a city develops. In fact cities are very much an expression of human behaviour, culture and society.Overall city management falls to the Mayor and City Council, and their most important tools are Building Regulations and Permits, Ordnances, etc. While you can’t and shouldn’t control everything in a city, you can nevertheless provide some direction and minimal standards. The architects of the many buildings need to get approval for their plans before a building is constructed, and the building operators need to comply with other standards.When ECM was a new concept, the focus was on how to best design and operate a first application for the new system – a new ‘building’ standing in a ‘green field’ if you will. As ECM matures we need to think about how to operate large, multi-application systems. For me a better role analogy for the person with overall system responsibility is Mayor, not Architect. It’s not that we don’t need ECM Architects – in fact we need many of them – but we also need a Mayor and Council to provide a framework for oversight and long-term strategy. And we have to accept at least a degree of disorder that results from the activities of many different people that are only loosely coordinated – Mayors are necessarily politicians, unlike Architects!

Value for Knowledge Workers

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Thu, 09/16/2010 – 16:01

Demonstrable value goes a long way to supporting the deployment of new software tools.

For structured business processes, return on investment (r.o.i.) is comparatively easy to estimate. Where unstructured or semi-structured digital content items (e.g. documents, spreadsheets, faxes, etc.) enable a given structured process (e.g. accounts receivable) their contribution to the overall value created is also typically quantifiable.

Where the process itself is unstructured the measurement of value is much harder. Perhaps the largest class of unstructured processes in a company fall in the category of knowledge work. The difficulties organizations have in understanding knowledge work is highlighted in an article just published in the McKinsey Quarterly entitled: “Boosting the productivity of knowledge workers”.

  • Aside: Unfortunately a subscription is required to read the full article – hopefully you have one.

The article starts with the proposition that few senior executives can answer the question: “Are you doing all that you can to enhance the productivity of your knowledge workers?” This is unfortunate because, “Organizations around the world struggle to crack the code for improving the effectiveness of managers, salespeople, scientists, and others whose jobs consist primarily of interactions—with other employees, customers, and suppliers—and complex decision making based on knowledge and judgment.”

The authors, Eric Matson and Laurence Prusak, describe five common barriers that hinder knowledge workers in more than half of the interactions in surveyed companies:

  1. Physical
  2. Technical
  3. Social or Cultural
  4. Contextual, and
  5. Temporal

Physical barriers include geographic and time zone separation between workers, and are typically linked to Technical challenges – where workers lack the necessary tools to overcome the physical barriers that separate them. As the article notes, there are a many software tools available that can help – these would include the various collaborative and social media tools, as well as the more classic document management applications that are encompassed in the broadest definitions of Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

Of course the availability of software tools does not guarantee that users will use them effectively; indeed, Social (e.g. organizational restrictions, opposing incentives and motivations) and Contextual barriers (e.g. not knowing who to consult or to trust) play a large part in hindering adoption.

The fifth barrier is Temporal. Time, or rather the perceived lack of it, is also a critical factor. In my experience knowledge workers do not consider time spent using social media and collaborative tools as important as other activities. Under time pressure they will stop using these tools if they need to spend more time on other activities they perceive as “real work”.

What struck me in reading the article is that while an increasing proportion of staff in companies are knowledge workers, it is clear that what knowledge work is and how to best enable it to drive productivity gains is not clear. Given that, it is hardly surprising that people struggle to define the value of those software tools best able to support knowledge management.

Content Matters

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Thu, 08/12/2010 – 12:31

I was chatting with a colleague yesterday and he related how he interviews people to join our company. We quickly dropped into role playing – with me as the job candidate. He had a compelling proposition, but as I told him, he was missing the thing that excited me = Content Matters!

As I started to tell him why content matters I found myself getting excited. I realized I’m actually quite passionate about it! Not content itself, but what it enables and how it’s used.

Content matters to companies in a way that changes how they work, how they create value and whether they succeed. It matters whether they recognize that fact or not.

If you want to understand what drives a company look at their value chain – how they create value – and how they are organized to execute each stage in the value chain. Within each stage there are typically many processes, each with many steps. At almost every step there is some content that is created, reviewed, followed or otherwise used; how well this is done makes a difference to effectiveness.

It’s no surprise to people that you can understand a business by ‘following the money’ or ‘following the customer’ and that is the basis for ERP and CRM systems.

On the other hand most people are only just coming to realize that ‘following the content’ is just as important, so while we’ve talked about content management for many years, that conversation is starting to be important to business.

Calculating the Value of Content in ECM

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Fri, 06/04/2010 – 08:47

It’s only worth expending effort to manage something if it has value – usually positive, but sometimes negative. So the concept of content value is implicit in enterprise content management (ECM).On the other hand, the value of a given content object (i.e. digital file) such as an email or document generally declines over time – or at least this is the common wisdom. I have seen graphs drawn mapping ‘value’ over ‘time’, with a smooth decline of value tending to zero. However, such a representation is clearly an average of value across many types of enterprise content.If you look at individual pieces of content, then you’ll find different profiles:

  • In compliance, a piece of content may retain 100% of its value for a defined period of years and then abruptly drop to having no value, or even having negative value (liability) that should trigger its destruction
  • In knowledge management, a piece of content may have declining value over time, but then because of some new event may suddenly have increased value

But this perspective is of the Inherent or Independent Value of a piece of content – the value is assessed entirely based on the information contained in the object. But it seems to me that there are at least two other factors that impact value:

  • Context – when correctly combined with other prices of content a given piece of content may have greater value. For example a specifications document is more valuable together with the associated requirements document. Value can often be realized by the way in which context is presented between content items – how they are grouped, ordered or ranked.
  • Impairment – Ironically, the value of a piece of content may be impaired by efforts to manage content. If you mix valuable pieces of content with large amounts of irrelevant materials, that should have been destroyed, you reduce the chances that the valuable content can be found and its value realized. Keeping everything is usually a bad idea. And often users impair value when they misclassify content.

So the available value of a piece of content to an organization may be expressed as follows:Available Value = Inherent Value x Context / Impairment What this says is that content management efforts can be beneficial, but if not done well can actually be destructive.

Taking the Pulse of your Business Content with microblogging

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Fri, 05/14/2010 – 10:29

When many users first encounter microblogging they don’t ‘get it’. Twitter is of course the classic and most widely known microblogging site, and its style has been taken up by many others such as Facebook in a broader set of social media approaches. A common initial reaction is something to the effect: “I don’t care if your cat just threw up – in fact, I’d rather NOT know!!”Once people start to microblog, they find many different ways that it can provide value, beyond answering the question: “What’s happening?“ that twitter poses. Commentators have described endless ways of using twitter such as: 5 marketing approaches, 10 diverse applications, 50 different topics, etc.But how does microblogging add value within an organization? Most of the discussions about business value have been on better ways to reach outside an organization to customers and partners by breaking down barriers, increasing transparency and the like.At first blush making the case for microblogging in the workplace might seem to be hard. People often comment that they are too busy to engage in ‘chit-chat’ while at work. But over the last couple of years the use cases that have real business value have become clearer.For me there are two general styles of internal business microblogging:

  1. User status updates – close to the twitter model, but with a distinctly different topic set
  2. Content status updates – fairly unique to business and keyed to the fact that many work processes produce and manage content (i.e. documents and other business files as understood in content management)

At Open Text we recently released the Pulse module for Livelink 9.7.1 that adds microblogging capabilities to support both styles (available for free to customers from the Knowledge Center).Status updates are pretty much what you’d expect – you can make a post about anything, although some of the most useful ones are:

  • “I’m looking for…”
  • “Anyone interested in…”
  • “Have we…”

These have value because they help people to be more effective through better networking in an organization.You can select specific users to follow and you can follow the stream from all users. We have a very similar Pulse capability in Open Text Social Workplace.BUT, I think the real advance in Livelink/Content Server Pulse is to follow the status of content irrespective of location in a range of very powerful and comprehensive ways.Sure you can post a link to content in twitter, and many microblogging services allow you to attach documents or other kinds of files to your posts. But the advance here is to have the act of adding or changing a piece of content anywhere in an ECM system create a status post. The feed is reporting a content action by another person. If I’m following Joe and he adds a new sales presentation anywhere I can see it in the status stream – provided of course I have permission in the repository to see the added content. All of the important support for compliance is maintained.There are many ways to slice-and-dice: by following specific people or all people, and following changes in user status, content or both.You can also ‘pulse’ specific content objects, so all changes and all comments about a piece of content are seen in the unique Pulse stream of that object. It’s like a filtered window into the stream looking at just one object, even if the ECM system contains millions of documents.And Pulsing is not just limited to files/documents, but is applied to containers like folders and places such as project workspaces and communities. You can imagine the power of an accumulated stream of all content and status activity related to a project!Livelink has had a notification capability for many years, but it requires users to first identify existing documents and containers that they would like to follow. Pulse adds the human dimension – you can be notified of changes based on the people you follow and what they do with the content.To honest I’m still ‘figuring out’ all of the ramifications and power of Livelink/Content Server Pulse but I’m very excited!  If you’d like to learn more:

  • Initial description in the May 2010 issue of NewsLink
  • Free Webinar Thursday 3 June 2010
  • Software and documentation in the Knowledge Center
  • And if you are an Open Text Online Communities member you’ll be able to use Pulse very shortly (announcement)

Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

What’s in a name? Or do you mean what I think you do? Implications for enterprise content culture

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Tue, 04/06/2010 – 20:04

Most people love a good rant, especially when it is well-founded, and I’m no different.And so it was that I really enjoyed Laurence Hart’s recent, self-admitted rant (http://wordofpie.com/2010/03/04/a-rant-against-cms/). In his Word-of-Pie blog, Laurence railed against his perceived miss-use of the term ‘Content Management Systems’ or CMS. It was topical, well-informed, and most importantly to me, resonated on several fronts.In brief, Laurence’s position is that:“…All you Web CMS people need to give the term CMS back! It doesn’t belong to you. A long time ago you took it while the broader content community was trying to futz with the term ECM [Enterprise Content Management]. By the time we realized what was happening, you had taken the term…”His issue is that while web content management (WCM) is a valid description, it is too often abbreviated to content management (CMS), even though there are a wide range of content types beyond web pages. The common use of CMS is much narrower than is implied. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) was coined in part to describe all content that an enterprise might have.I’m not interested in the semantic debate about what each term means and what is the correct term to use.I am interested in what this discussion says about culture and the difficulty getting people in an enterprise to take a broad view of content.There seem to be at least ‘two solitudes’ in content management – ECM and CMS.It is interesting how specific technology applications shape and restrict expectations.Last year my employer, Open Text, acquired Vignette (history), one of the oldest and most established CMS vendors. Most of Open Text heritage is from document and record management (Livelink and Hummingbird eDOCS for example), process management (IXOS) and collaboration; in other words ECM. We published a trilogy of books on ECM in 2003-2005. While some staff came from acquisitions prior to Vignette that had expertise in WCM (notably RedDot), they represented a comparatively small portion of the Company. The Vignette acquisition brought a much larger group of CMS-oriented staff to Open Text.I think Open Text is richer for the breadth of perspectives, but we have had to work through the challenge to merge the different cultures. Note I’m not talking corporate cultures, as indeed the companies were quite similar, but rather the application culture of how best to manage content to meet all the needs of our enterprise customers. Each of us has tended to think mostly of some content types, some approaches to content management, and some business needs.Take Open Text’s own Intranet as an example. Open Text has been running an Intranet called ‘Ollie’ on Livelink technology since 1996. Fundamentally the Livelink model is one of web folders containing ‘documents’ of any type. This model works really well when individual and team work products to be shared are typically documents – so it’s great in supporting teams and managing records. However, linked webpages are a much better vehicle to support the dissemination of centrally managed content, especially information from an organization to its staff. So last year we broadened our Intranet Systems to include a true WCM capability in parallel.For some in Open Text, the internal use of WCM came none too soon, while for others it was a surprise! I had to make a video to ‘educate’ staff on why we had both approaches and how to choose the best system for their specific needs. It turned out to be easiest to provide context by talking about the parallel evolution of ECM and WCM technologies over the course of the last 15 to 20 years.The application of social media in an enterprise has also challenged cultural expectations.Those with a WCM background have generally talked about the advantages of working closely with customers through external websites. Most of their value propositions of breaking down barriers and being more transparent are absolute anathemas to those ECM practitioners who have focussed on internal process and records management for compliance.Traditional document management approaches provide another example of cultural expectations nurtured by specific technology experiences.As I mentioned above, Livelink used a web folder paradigm to organize content. It also had rich metadata capabilities, but users tend to think of these as supplementary or optional ways of organizing content. It is fair to say that most users tend to think first and foremost of folders – so it can be a challenge to collect metadata from them. In contrast, with our eDOCS content management system (from Hummingbird) there are no folders – everything is organized through metadata. eDOCS users find browsing folders can be frustrating. Going forward these alternate approaches are merged in our Open Text Content Server 2010 under our ECM Suite.Defining effective taxonomies to organize content can be one of the biggest challenges for an enterprise.Generally people in specific departments, and using specific systems, tend to define taxonomies that meet their immediate needs, but the taxonomies they create are generally too limited for wider use. Similarly, other groups create incompatible taxonomies often to address similar needs. These limitations ultimately contribute to failure. Creating new taxonomies seems to be a recurring theme in many enterprises as most are never broad enough, scalable or robust.Ironically then, what a person means by ‘content’, the ‘content taxonomy’ they think is required for their organization, and their perception of the critical features of a ‘content management system’ are all highly subjective!

Google’s impact on enterprise content management

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Tue, 02/23/2010 – 12:54

Without a doubt Google has had a huge impact on the enterprise perspective on content management (ECM).

The pluses and negatives were highlighted by two blog posts yesterday:

On the plus side, John Mancini of AIIM listed three, “fundamental assumptions about information management that affect the ECM industry,” in his “Googlization of Content” post:

  1. “Ease of use. The simple search box has become the central metaphor for how difficult we think it ought to be to find information, regardless of whether we are in the consumer world or behind the firewall. This has changed the expectations of how we expect ECM solutions to work and how difficult they are to learn.
  2. Most everything they do is free…
  3. They have changed how we think about the “cloud.” Google has changed the nature of how we think about applications and how we think about where we store the information created by those applications. Sure, there are all sorts of security and retention and reliability issues to consider…”

On the negative side, Alan Pelz-Sharpe made a post today in CMS Watch titled, “Google – unsuitable for the enterprise”. Alan introduced his piece by saying:

“For years now Google has played fast and loose with information confidentiality and privacy issues. As if further proof were needed, the PR disaster that is Buzz should be enough to firmly conclude that Google is not suitable for enterprise use-cases.” He went on to say, “It is inconceivable that enterprise-focused vendors… would ever contemplate the reckless move that Google undertook in deliberately exposing customers’ private information to all and sundry with Buzz.”

Google is a hugely successful company, and they are extremely profitable. However, they are not a software company. Fundamentally they are an advertising placement company and everything they do is motivated by maximizing advertising revenue, whether directly or indirectly. 99% of their revenue comes from advertising that pays for every cool project they do and every service they offer.

While Google services to consumers have no monetary charge, they are not free:

  • You agree to accept the presentation of advertisements when you use Google products and services; most people believe these to be easily ignored despite the evidence of their effectiveness.
  • More importantly, you agree to offer provide information about your interests, friends, browsing and search habits as payment-in-kind. Mostly people sort of know this, but don’t think about it. If you ask them whether they are concerned that Google has a record of every search they have ever performed, they start to get uncomfortable. I expect most of us have searched on terms, which taken out of context, would take a lot to ‘explain.’

While most consumers in democracies are currently cavalier about issues of their own privacy, enterprises most certainly are not. Indeed, the need for careful management of intellectual property, agreements, revenue analyses and a host of other enterprise activities captured in content is precisely why they buy ECM systems.

The furor over Buzz points out that Google did things first and foremost to further its own corporate goals, which clash with those of other enterprises.

In contrast, Google’s goals require it to align with user needs, especially for good interfaces. An easy-to-use interface encourages and sustains use. That ought to be obvious to everyone, but when the effects of the interface on usage are easily measureable and directly tied to revenue (as in the case of Google Search), it becomes blatantly and immediately evident. In contrast, the development of an interface for an enterprise software product may take place months or even years before the product is released. Even if detailed usability research is done with test users, and in-depth beta programs are employed, the quality and immediacy of the feedback is less.

Besides easy interfaces, enterprise content management users expect ‘Google-like’ search, and are disappointed. There are generally two reasons for this:

  • Search results have to be further processed to determine if a user can be presented with each ‘hit’ based on their permissions
    • Typically 70-90% of the total computational time for enterprise search is taken up by permission checking
  • Enterprises don’t invest as much in search infrastructure as they should if the rapid delivery of search results was seen as critical

The second point is probably more important than people admit. In my experience significant computational resources are not allocated to Search by IT departments. I suspect that they look at average resource utilization, not peak performance and the time to deliver results to users. To deliver the typical half second or less response that Google considers to be essential, hundreds of servers may be involved. I am not aware of any Enterprise that allocates even the same order of magnitude of resources to content searching, so inevitably users experience dramatically slower response times.

In summary, the alignment of optimal user experiences with Google’s need to place advertisements has advanced the standards of user interfaces and provided many ‘free’ services, but the clash of Google’s corporate goals with the goals of other corporations has shown that the enterprise content has value that is not likely to be traded.

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The ‘Second Coming’ of Renditions – Video

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Sun, 02/07/2010 – 21:27

Long time ECM veterans will remember the concept of document rendition – a transformed alternative. I think we’ll see renditions again.A rendition is essentially another form of a specific version of a document. There are two common types of renditions based on format and content:

  1. The same information content as the original document, but a different file format
  • For example, a spreadsheet file can be renditioned as a PDF
  1. The same file format as the original document, but different content
  • For example, a MS PowerPoint Document written in English can have a rendition that is also a PowerPoint file, but whose content has been translated into French

Renditions for limited bandwidth in the 90’sIn the 1990’s, one of the common use cases was to deal with the limited bandwidth available at the time. It often took a long time to download and open a document just to see if it contained what you were looking for. Accordingly, Open Text Livelink automatically made HTML renditions of many common formats such as MS Word that were much smaller files and so could be downloaded much faster for quick review.I remember presenting the use case to customers: “If you want to look quickly at a file without opening the full thing…” Back then bandwidth was so limited it made sense. Now it seldom does, although there are specific use-cases like renditions that contain added content like secured signatures that still have value.Bandwidth issues are backBandwidth is becoming limiting again – not for ‘simple’ text documents, but for rich media files such as videos. In fact bandwidth issues are so acute that the shape of the Internet has changed radically in the last few years. The explosive growth of video sharing has lead to the rise of Content Delivery or Distribution Networks (CDN) such as Akamai Technologies, Limelight Networks, CDNetworks and Amazon CloudFront to enable effective distribution.Akamai recently claimed they handle around 20% or the Internet traffic by volume – most of this traffic is rich media which must be delivered very quickly as users expect pages to load extremely quickly even if they contain a video. A recent Forrester report says the expected threshold to load has become two seconds.For video files to be useful to end users they have to start to play almost instantly. This is usually achieved by:

  • Locating a copy in close network proximity to the end user
    • CDNs use many distributed sites around the ‘edge of the Cloud’ to ensure that is at least one site close to an end user preloaded with files that are expected to be required
  • Reducing the size of the video through transcoding and compression
  • Streaming – starting to play before all of the content is received

The increasing use of mobile devices with narrow and unstable bandwidth connections, and different format requirements creates further hurdles to serving users rapidly.Enterprise needsSo what about the enterprise or corporate user? Trained by the web, he/she expects to click on a link and have a video start playing within two seconds. But most internal ECM systems (e.g. for document management) are designed to download a complete file before it is available to the end user.A story – Here’s a scenario I experienced recently. A Finance department prepared a new expense form. To show staff how to use it they prepared a five minute video. The trouble was that their WMV format video was over 300MB. For most staff in a global company, especially remote staff, downloading a 300MB file to view it is just not practical. What Finance needed was to be able to upload the video, and have the system take care of making a rendition that was transcoded and compressed, made stream-able and hosted on a CDN.There are just too many manual steps and too many options for most newcomers to video creation. Systems should take care of most of those steps. And one excellent way to execute several steps is to have the ECM system create a rendition of a deposited video that contains embed code to start a player and stream video from a CDN. The consumer users can then simply click on the object name in their ECM system and a streamed video starts to play almost instantly – as they have come to expect with sites such as YouTube.So renditions have a place in the new enterprise again to deal with bandwidth limitations!Syndicated at http://conversations.opentext.com/

Really looking forward to Virtual Content World – other ways to be ‘virtual’

Submitted by Martin Sumner-Smith on Thu, 01/14/2010 – 14:57

You’ve probably heard about the first Open Text Virtual Content World (www.opentext.com/virtualcw) on Tuesday 19 January 2010. Hopefully you can attend. I’ll certainly be there in a virtual sense. It’s not too late to register, and if you attended Content World 2008 you’ll have received a code promotional code for free registration.

For those who can’t attend, there is an even ‘more virtual’ and dare I say free option – watch the many postings on twitter and Facebook.

The twitter hashtag is #otvcw.

The volume of tweets will really pickup on Tuesday if the Content World 2009 experience is any guide, not just from the ‘official’ event twitter account (@OTContentWorld) but of course from other OT staff like me, and most importantly, customers.

It should be a great event. There as certainly been a lot of organizational activity. Colleagues have told me this virtual event has been as much work as an in-person one.

‘See’ you there!

Twitter: @MartinSS

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