As the days go on, the general public seems to become more and more concerned with being “green.” Especially because in many cases being green means saving some money. And the best part is that creativity has been put to work, and many brilliant ideas about energy (and money) savings have emerged. I truly believe that tough times make us better people because it is by solving problems that we create great solutions. And one place where content management is doing its part is not only in saving on paper but on recycling words!! I’m talking about reusing content, approved content that is; which saves one of the most precious non-renewables elements on the planet, time.
How much is your time worth?
From my perspective, the Industrial Revolution has had one major cause or purpose: saving time. The beauty of online shopping is that you save the time of going to the store. But reusing content moves this concept to a brand new level. It is true that we had been using the “copy and paste” before the first typewriter was invented. But, wouldn’t it be nice if when you update the “original” file then the file to where you copy that section gets automatically updated too? Let’s say you have a contract, and you copy sections 2 and 3 into another contract you’ve been writing at the same time. Then you realize you made some misspellings. The bad news is that you need to fix the typos. The good news is that the second contract got automatically updated! The question is: Is there anything out there that would make auto-update possible?
XMetal and the true power of XML
Any software engineer knows that XML is one of the most powerful tools that we have available to us today. However, most users don’t realize that XML is being used in almost every application helping with communication protocol, database systems, configuration files, presentation, etc.
Until l started working with XMetal I was pretty sure I had seen XML doing everything it can do. XMetal brings the uses of XML to a brand new level.
XMetal allows you to reuse content, the popular copy-paste functionality, while keeping the use of physical space to a minimum. For the user “it works like magic”, allowing you to simply grab and drop existing content into a template using a user-friendly graphic interface. What amazes me the most about the product is not just how easily it integrates with Documentum, nor the possibility of creating content on the fly by linking existing files which allows for auto-update, but more importantly, the fact that after a couple of weeks of having this product installed, a full demonstration was being performed by a non technical person, and she was was actually enjoying it!
What content authoring and collaboration tools, similar to XMetal, allow you to save time, drive efficiencies, and reduce waste? How are you being “green” with your content management processes and systems?
This Thursday, Chad Johnson of Perficient and Nathan Rader, Regional Manager for Google Enterprise products, will meet in St. Louis, MO for a breakfast with IT professionals and business owners to discuss “Realizing Greater Return on Information with Google Search Appliance.” I spoke with Chad about how the GSA can benefit any organization and about his personal experiences with clients.
Why are Google’s Enterprise Search solutions beneficial to the Enterprise? How have you seen organizations use it to cut costs, drive efficiencies, etc.? Google provides a one-box solution that is very easy to install and maintain. It can be up and running, indexing your content in about an hour, but inside the bright yellow box in the same proprietary relevancy algorithms that make Google.com so successful. And even better, the GSA provides the ability to tweak and tune relevancy and add special content in a way that cannot be done with Google.com alone. The GSA brings all of these features inside the corporate firewall and lets you index your data, your way.The cost savings become very apparent as the size of the implementation increases. Google has a very unique technology that allows you to combine multiple GSA’s into larger and larger networks with ease. To accomplish the same thing with other vendors requires more and more complexity. With Google, the complexity stays low, no matter how big the installation.
I am attending the IBM Smart Governance Conference this week. This is my second Governance Council meeting and I am thrilled to see that Council has evolved to look at governance not only from a data perspective, but now understands that unstructured information is equally important to a good governance program.
The discussions this week have centered around the fact that decisions are based on both structured and unstructured information. The need to insure that this information is accurate is critical to making good decisions. A sound governance program will address the policies and procedures required to insure that the information maintains its integrity and authenticity so that the users of the information can be assured that the information is reliable and can be used to drive the business direction.
One of the things that always amazes me is how often companies change content management platforms. I am not talking about consolidation as I feel that this is a very different topic. Companies spend a lot of time selecting, educating their teams, and implementing Content Management Systems and then sometimes within a mater of 2-3 years they rip it out never realizing their ROI. Why is this the case?….. Here are my thoughts on this:
Shift in IT Strategy – In a number of cases, I have seen companies move off of one vendor’s CMS to another one’s as a result of a major strategic change such as a new ERP system (SAP, Oracle, People Soft…). This is probably one of the most common causes. Many ERP vendors have made strategic alliances with CMS vendors and will push the company to also purchase the allied CMS. This is typically done with the promise of tighter integration.
Ability to Support the CMS - The second most common cause in my experience is the inability of the company to support the CMS. Sometimes it is the underlying technology such as Java vs. .Net. In other cases it is the size of the team required to support a large CMS.
Failed implementations -For some companies it is a failed implementation that places the nail in the coffin for a particular CMS vendor at a company. When poorly implemented, end users may revolt against the CMS and in many cases the blame is attributed to the CMS product whether it is really an issue with the product or some implementation problem such as lack of training. Wgen the user community associates a failure with a product, the only thing that some companies can do is look for another CMS vendor. In my experience companies have gone to great extent to hide the true product vendor from the user community to head off this type of issue.
Is there something companies can do? I think so… The key is making sure companies select a product that they can actually support and spend the right amount of time and frankly money, to implement the product correctly. In terms of dealing with changing strategy, it is always a best practice to look hard at integration capabilities with other systems such as ERP’s with a forward look in mind.
Chad is Google Practice Manager and Technical Director here, and he’ll be speaking with Newell Falkinburg, Regional Manager for Google’s enterprise applications team.
The level of detail available at this meeting about GSA looks pretty strong — plus, they plan to cover ROI estimation. If you live in or around Denver and you’re just getting into picking out an enterprise search solution, you won’t want to miss this one. More details.
When:
January 14, 2010
7:30am – 9:30am
Where:
Holland and Hart
555 17th Street
Suite 3200
Denver, Colorado 80202
In today’s business environment, time and information are arguably our two most precious resources. Yet most businesses squander both on a daily basis.
Do you know:
How much time the average worker wastes just looking for the right information?
How much time is spent by IT professionals storing, organizing, and locating information?
How much time employees spend creating spread sheets and documents that will match the exact criteria of high-overhead information retrieval systems?
The amount of information that cannot be found; especially when you need it right now?
The amount of information that stays locked in employees’ heads or on their desktops because the time it takes to publish where colleagues can find the information and use it?
And, most importantly, how much revenue is lost due to delays in time-to-market caused by all of the above?
The high costs to a company of not finding information, or of finding it too late, include faulty decisions, duplicated efforts, lost productivity, and missed opportunities. Their impact can cascade throughout an organization. The personal frustrations involved are also considerable – as anyone who has tried and failed to find a slide or a spreadsheet in time for a vital meeting can testify. The costs can be even higher in fields such as health care, the pharmaceutical industry, and life sciences, where up-to-date information and time-to-market are competitive essentials.
Yet, given the economy, organizations simply don’t want to spend an enormous amount of money deploying an enterprise search system. And outside of procuring the system itself, the real cost in many cases can be in integrating the system to the various content repositories and business applications.
During this program you will:
Gain insight around the importance of search architecture to aid in quicker retrieval
Hear how due diligence steps are involved in deploying enterprise search
Learn about Google’s ‘ROI JumpStart’ program
Hear about Perficient customers achieving a greater ROI on their information
To address these issues, Google has a two-fold solution. First, they’ve architected the Google Search Appliance in such a way that it is extremely easy to deploy, and brings Google’s internet search expertise to the enterprise. Second, they’ve brought in key partners to quickly onboard organizations and provide a ‘JumpStart’ to their deployment and achieving an ROI. One such partner is Perficient, a leading information technology consulting firm serving clients throughout the United States. As a key Google partner, Perficient uses their expertise in designing and delivering enterprise search solutions to help customers gain competitive advantage, improve productivity, and reduce information technology costs.
Speakers:
Newell Falkinburg, Regional Manager, Google Enterprise Newell’s primary focus is helping strategic customers, in the Pacific Northwest and Desert Mountain Regions, to optimize there technology investments, through search and collaboration solutions. He has been an award winning member of the Enterprise Team for over 2 years. Previous to Google, Newell was a Strategic Account Manager at Microsoft and a Director of Business Development at Hewlett Packard. Originally an engineer, Newell has a degree in Physics and a Masters in Electrical Engineering, having worked as a software developer at Bell Laboratories.
Chad Johnson, Google Practice Manager, Perficient Chad Johnson is Google Practice Manager and a Technical Director at Perficient. As part of Perficient’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) practice, he has designed and implemented a wide range of solutions, including content capture, scanning, search, and workflow. In his seven years with Perficient, Chad has worked with numerous ECM software partners and has integrated these tools into complex business processes. His clients span an array of industries, including IT, oil & gas, food services, shipping, healthcare and education. Chad has a computer science degree from Rice University. He currently resides in Houston, TX with his wife and has become a dad twice over in last year.
Ticket Information
$15 Members; Premium Members receive two complementary tickets
Enterprise Search Solutions: The Google Search Appliance (GSA)
As we move into 2010, it may be a great time to evaluate what your team is doing to ensure your organization’s documents and data across the organization are as organized, indexed and searchable (retrievable) as possible for employees, customers and potential customers. For many years now, companies have been implementing enterprise search solutions across applications and databases and have realized benefits in the form of saved time & resources, increased efficiencies, enhanced conversion rates (leading to revenue impact) and more.
“Enterprises that can manage, index, archive, locate and then react to seemingly overwhelming amounts of data are gaining real competitive advantage in today’s marketplace.” – Jeff Davis, chief executive officer and president at Perficient.
In my first post, I was asked about spam and how ECM can help with it. If you are not familiar with the term spam, it is any information which is delivered to you which you don’t really care to know. Today, email servers’ administrators/providers are doing a good job preventing spam from filling inboxes, compared to a few years ago; but regular mailboxes are still defenseless against spam attacks. Even worse, companies keep printing hundreds of postcards and coupons that in 90% of the case end up in a shredder or waste can. I believe that ECM can help with this problem. (more…)
I recently published an article in AIIM on SharePoint Governance. Successful SharePoint implementations are less about the technology and more about the business functions that are delivered to the end users. To insure that the delivery of the SharePoint solution is consistent and meets the needs of the users, a robust governance program should be established. Governance programs are one of those areas that can cover different topics depending on the focus of the organization. Successful SharePoint solutions require a governance program that covers the business aspect of managing the SharePoint implementation
Sometimes it is good to state the obvious, because we tend to not see what is in front of our eyes. So here I would like to start by saying ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is not only about storing content, but also about being able to efficiently use the content. It is common knowledge that in order to use something you need to be able to find it. When talking about ECM, in a world where most content is digital, the first thing that comes to mind is full text indexing. Full text indexing works well in many cases, but after many years of using this technology I still see problems when applying this concept to engineering drawings, scanned receipts, pictures, and even some “fully OCR” pdfs. So what else is out there to help users find their documents?
Just completed a webinar that addressed the automation of the paper capture and integration into SharePoint. This is an interesting concept as it is critical to the conversion of a paper based system into an electronic, paperless office. I am not a believer that the paperless can actually be accomplished but by integrating a capture solution into your ECM strategy, you can come closer and have most of your information available in an electronic format. This will allow for an information architecture that facilitates the ease of retrieval and ultimately the ability to use turn the information into knowledge.
As a follow up to my post last week about the 
