Content@Work

Oracle and Fujitsu - Transforming Company Cultures

2011-04-06T17:11:00.000-07:00

Robert Esquivel of Fujitsu has invited me to join him in his session next week at the annual COLLABORATE conference. The session is titled Transform Your Company Culture By Taking Your Processes Paperless. (We're on Wednesday at 4 PM EDT in room 308C).

This session will address how companies save as much as 90% of their costs by taking processes such as accounts payable paperless. And we'll also discuss some of the green benefits companies realize by cutting paper, shipping and storage costs. But we'll also talk about how a number of companies have actually realized cultural changes by moving to paperless processes. We held a roundtable on this topic with our AIIM Golden Gate chapter, and the folks from PG&E had a lot to say about it. Not only had they saved costs on paper, they had made it so they could access information anywhere. In the field, on the road, or even from home. And by enabling their work force to work from home, they were able to reduce traffic congestion and have less environmental impact. But they were also able to reduce their real estate footprint in the expensive San Francisco market. Less office space equalled lower overhead for PG&E, and they also lowered the real estate requirements for storing all that paper.

PG&E has been pretty progressive about culture and lifestyle changes. We were also told that they evaluate employee lifestyle impact as an element of ROI when they evaluate projects. And they were able to recognize a transformation in company culture by taking their processes paperless.

These companies still have paper coming to them from customers, employees and partners. But they scan and capture that information electronically where it enters their organizations, enabling them to make these big changes at their companies. You can learn more about some of the other companies we will profile on the Green ECM site: www.oracle.com/goto/ecmgreen
In particular, you can hear the Missouri Department of Licensing talk about their improved processes, green benfits, and cultural changes in this webcast.

Matching Content Lifecycle to Storage

2010-10-18T13:26:00.000-07:00

Documents, images, e-mails and other unstructured data comprise 80% of the information in organizations. Yet, this content is scattered across many different repositories, file systems and storage solutions. In many cases, your organization might not be aware of what information you are managing. Without knowing what you are managing, you cannot ensure you are using the right storage for that content. So how can you cut your costs and improve performance by managing this information effectively?

Some interesting facts about content:

* Content tends to get created and stored randomly in most organizations

* It has a tendency to rot - in the short term, it might not get updated, it might not get accessed. In the long term it might get stored on a medium that stops working, in formats that we can't read.

* As it lives in repositories or file shares, we often don't know what we are managing on these systems.

* We can't find the content that is useful, and sometimes we find the content that is detrimental.

* We spend thousands of dollars recreating content that is useful (See Monica Crocker, Corporate Records Manager at Land O' Lakes discuss how as a consultant she was often brought in to create content, only to find it had been created already but no one could find it).

* Sometimes we find content that is detrimental because it is old and out of date, and we act on it, which can also be costly.

* We often have no usage statistics on content. And without comprehensive usage information, it's hard to judge the relative value of content that is not usage tracked.

* Content is often stored on the wrong medium - archived content is stored on magnetic media where it is costly every day to store. Magnetic media is also not a stable medium over the long term.

* Key content cannot be replenished without a lifecycle plan.

Without knowing what we are managing, we can't know the value of any of the content we are storing. Part of this story is knowing usage statistics for content as it is stored and managed, and part of it is setting a lifecycle policy for content when it is created.

One of my favorite parts of Oracle Universal Content Management is Content Tracker. Tracker not only tells me what documents are being visited, it can tell me by who, by which department, and how often. I may find that a document I have written is constantly referred to. I may decide to make it more visible - put it on a page on the intranet. I may decide to add more to it, or I may decide to update it more often. Without it I am shooting in the dark about the content I create and how it is being used.

So we have all this content. The difficulty is in sifting through all the content to find the important stuff. In many cases you can base that upon metadata - the document type, the author - these can be key indicators of important content. But often you have to have other methods. A content use tracking system can be a good way to determine important content - less used content is less important. Some content is important only in the short term. A sales proposal might be important for 30 days. A marketing plan might be important for a year. Then there is some content that is not important on a day to day basis, but is important in the long term. You might not refer to your insurance policy for 40 years, but when you need it, it might be the most important document in the company.

One of my favorite stories about old documents in litigation comes from Simplot. Simplot is one of the largest private companies in the world. They make and sell food products (Sara Lee, McDonald's French fries) as well as fertilizers and pesticides. When the Fresno County water district found traces of a Simplot pesticide in the ground water that appeared to have been introduced in the 1950s, a lawsuit was ensued. Simplot's director of records management, Dave McDermott (former President of ARMA, and an Oracle Records Management customer) pulled all of Simplot's insurance policies. And upon reading them, he found a common clause that stated that "this policy covers this period of time in perpetuity" meaning that any claim against the company for that period of time was still covered. Dave served 52 insurance companies, and in a pre-trial hearing, in front of their attorneys, the judge grilled him on his records management program. The insurance firms challenged the veracity of his documents. At the end of the day, the judge conceded that it was probably the best records management program he had ever seen, and that he saw no reason to stop the suit. The following Monday, 50 of the insurance companies settled, and eventually the other two did as well, resulting in a $23 million payout to Simplot.

One reason I love this story is it depicts records management as a revenue generator. The other reason is because it illustrates how documents can be of no value day to day for decades, and then suddenly hugely important one day. Having a way to ensure you can get to them that day is a key part of our job. And that is where being able to set a lifecycle policy for content is important.

The ability for a content management system to apply its knowledge of the content to storage choices is very powerful. The content management system knows usage statistics, it also knows lifecycle metadata and retention schedules. By applying this knowledge to the storage system it can save valuable resources. If a web page is accessed frequently, it can go on flash storage. An old insurance policy can go on tape, but is still there, searchable, and can be brought back for reference in litigation. No reason to spend the electricity of keeping magnetic hard drives spinning for content that won't be accessed for 40 years.

And because these systems can automate moving content from tape to tape every decade or so, you can avoid the information rot that comes with magnetic storage. So the document will be accessible 40 years later.

To find out more about this topic, check out this week's web seminar Know Where Your Information Lives.

Enterprise 2.0 In Action

2010-07-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

Oracle began it's Enterprise 2.0 In Action event series yesterday in Houston. Each event has three presentations which include demos and customer testimonial videos regarding the use of Oracle products to implement enterprise portals, social networking implementations, application document integration, and better, more managable websites.

Each event will give you a chance to see the new release of Oracle ECM Suite 11g, as one of the sessions will go through and show new features of the release, as well as showing the 11g releases of WebCenter Suite and Imaging and Process Management. This session includes a number of short demos or viewlets so you can see the new user interface and ways that Oracle Enterprise 2.0 products are integrated to fit the way you work.

Each event includes a customer presentation or a partner presenting a customer's case study on their use of Oracle products to implement Enterprise 2.0 projects. Some of the profiles include:

Arbonne (and their implementation partner Bezzotech) regarding their implementation of a social media site for their customers and resellers at the Los Angeles event
Land O' Lakes (and their partner Fishbowl Solutions) will discuss their implementation of Oracle for managing their websites, and their integration of social media into their marketing programs
Canadian Partnership Against Cancer will be presented by Deloitte in Toronto, New York and Chicago
Keste will present Alcatel Lucent in Houston, Dallas, and San Francisco.
Idhasoft will present on Manheim's use of Oracle's Digital Asset Management in Atlanta
ImageSource will present on the integration of Oracle Imaging and Process Management with Epic Electronic Healthcare Records at Swedish Hospital in the Calgary and Vancouver events

To register, find the city you are interested in below and click the link:

7/13/10 Houston
7/14/10 Dallas
7/14/10 Toronto
7/14/10 San Francisco
7/15/10 Los Angeles
7/15/10 Atlanta
7/20/10 Boston
7/21/10 Minneapolis
7/21/10 Calgary
7/21/10 New York
7/22/10 Vancouver
7/22/10 Washington DC
7/27/10 St.Louis
7/28/10 Kansas City
9/29/10 Chicago (registration not open yet)

We look forward to seeing you at one of these events!

Oracle Content Management and WebCenter Customers are Eligible for Many Awards at Oracle OpenWorld 2010 - Winners Receive FREE Passes!

2010-07-14T08:09:00.000-07:00

Oracle OpenWorld 2010 is just over 2 months away and more and more excitement is building every day. This includes the opportunity for customers to highlight their successful Oracle Content Management or WebCenter deployments and receive 1 of the many awards being given away at the event. Here are the descriptions for each award with links to the nomination forms:

Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards
Highlight your innovations in using one or more Oracle Fusion Middleware products with one or more Oracle Applications. Winners of these awards receive a FREE pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2010 in San Francisco (September 19-23) and will be honored during an awards ceremony at OpenWorld.
To be considered for this award, simply fill out the Enterprise 2.0 nomination form (Oracle Content Management, WebCenter, WebLogic Portal, and Oracle Portal customers). Nominations should be submitted to Innovation-Middleware_us@oracle.com on or before August 6th.
More information on these awards can be found here: Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards 2010

Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blazers Awards
Companies nominated for the Oracle Fusion Middleware Innovation Awards - Enterprise 2.0 category - will also be eligible for this award. These awards will be given away at the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Customer Reception on Tuesday, September 21st, which is being hosted by Oracle partners Keste, Idhasoft, Bias, Team Informatics, Fishbowl Solutions and Fujitsu.
Winners of these awards will receive an Oracle Enterprise 2.0 Blazers Awards plaque. A list of past award categories as well as the Oracle Content Management, Portal, and User Interaction products that customers must be using in order to be eligible can be found within the Enterprise 2.0 nomination form.

Oracle Enable the Eco Enterprise Awards
Is your company using Oracle products to reduce their environmental footprint while reducing costs? Perhaps your company has implemented Oracle Imaging and Process Management and Oracle Document Capture to reduce document shipping and printing or Oracle WebCenter Suite to deliver management reports electronically? These are just a few examples of ways that Oracle Content Management and WebCenter products are improving business efficiencies through green processes.
Winners of these awards also receive a FREE pass to Oracle OpenWorld 2010 and will be presented with the award during the event.

The deadline for submitting is Friday, August 6th. For more information and to fill out the nomination form, please visit this page: Call for Nominations: 'Enable the Eco-Enterprise' Awards
A list of last year's winners can be seen here.

Oracle Keynote Panel at AIIM - The Movie

2010-04-25T09:28:00.000-07:00

I've uploaded the video of the Oracle keynote panel at AIIM. It's broken into a number of segments, and I've put some of the quotes in the comments area so you can follow the topics as you decide which one to view. You can see the video here.

A big thanks to our panelists for their time and insights - Cindy Bixler of Embry Riddle Aeronautical Univerisity, Tom Showalter of JP Morgan Chase, Irfan Motiwala of Moodys Investments, and Monica Crocker of Land O' Lakes.

AIIM 2010 Keynote Panel Recap

2010-04-22T23:38:00.000-07:00

I wanted to recap the executive keynote panel we did at AIIM, and thought the Twitter feed might be the best source of running commnetary.

jmancini77: #oracle expert panel at #aiim10 - Land of Lakes - ECM priorities - 1st high volume, repeatable - now moving to knowledge capture

jmancini77: #oracle expert panel at #aiim10 - moodys - lines between structured and unstructured blurring - viewing cohesively

jmancini77: #oracle expert panel at #aiim10 - it's too late to launch ECM AFTER a natural disaster

jmancini77: RT @mjsq: Panel discussing whether the investment level of ECM is going up. #aiim10 - more info on panel: http://bit.ly/aiim10keys

mjsq: Land O'Lakes hired social media person on the E2.0 team. Challenges: How do build it w/in organization & also outside world. #aiim10

jmancini77: #oracle expert panel at #aiim10 - starting to look at social content as part of the content continuum - thank goodness!

PBconnect: RT @jmancini77: #oracle expert panel at #aiim10 - financial svcs vry conservative re #SocMed - moodys blocks social sites & doesn't allow IM

Biotic: Business continuity as a driver for digitization and accessibility.

jmancini77: #oracle expert panel at #aiim10 - next leap - when users can just click keep/don't keep and system takes care of everything else

Global360IncBPM: Remote access does not work with paper files. Land O' Lakes VP of Records Management. #AIIM10

mjsq: Funny! "I try to stay away from the acronyms because you say ECM & they hear $USD." - Motiwala, VP Moody's Investors Services MIT #aiim10

Big thanks to everyone who commented, especially John Mancini, President of AIIM.

AIIM Keynote Panelists - Content Management: Driving Your Business

2010-04-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

Next week at the AIIM conference Oracle will chair an executive keynote panel. (You can see video of the panel we did last year here.) This year the focus will be on elevating content management to make it a pillar of your corporate infrastructure, much like CRM or ERP. This event takes place at the Pennsylvania Convention Center at 8:45 AM on Tuesday April 20th, 2010.

Our panelists will be:

Cindy Bixler, CIO, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University
Cindy Bixler has over twenty years experience in Information Technology primarily in Higher Education. She has worked in various roles within IT from staff to leadership and in all areas of IT; project management, applications, services, and infrastructure. She is currently the CIO for Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. She continually works to align IT strategies with University business goals to ensure successful project outcomes.

Tom Showalter, Managing Director, JP Morgan Chase
Tom Showalter is Managing Director of Image Services at JPMorgan Chase. In his current role, Tom manages the Global Image Services group for JPMorgan Chase & Co. including archives, document capture and content management for checks, statements, scanned documents and line data in both the US and global markets.
With over 30 years in Financial Services, Tom’s accomplishments include managing the build of the check and statement archives, establishing Image Services as a global enterprise function, and consolidating over 60 disparate archives and content management repositories throughout the organization. Capture, content management and workflow applications have been added to the Image Services portfolio over the past several years, providing an integrated solution for JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s lines of business. Tom’s prior experience was largely in bank operations where he managed check and day 2 operations.

Tom holds an MBA from Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland Ohio where he majored in Management Information Systems and Finance, and he has a B.S. in Business Administration from The Ohio State University.

Irfan Motiwala, Senior Vice President, Moody's Investors Service
Mr. Irfan Motiwala is Senior Vice President of Corporate Systems at Moody’s where he is responsible for leading the technology strategy and delivery of their Financial, Business Intelligence and Moody’s Analytics Systems. In this capacity, he recently led and completed a global consolidation of their financial systems across 22 countries onto a single platform and is currently responsible for the global consolidation of systems for the Moody’s Analytics Business Unit. Prior to joining Moody’s in 2005, Mr. Motiwala held a variety of technology management positions spanning both the public and private sectors and brings 15 years of experience from the technology industry.

Mr. Motiwala received his MS from Columbia University in Technology Management and a BA in Mathematics from New York University. He is also a member of the Society for Information Management in New York City.

Monica Crocker, CRM, PMP, Corporate Records Manager, Land O'Lakes
Monica Crocker has been an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consultant since 1991. Monica serves as Corporate Records Manager for Land O'Lakes. , helping tailor ECM solutions to meet clients’ business needs. Prior to joining Land O'Lakes, Monica implemented an ECM solution at the Minnesota Department of Human Services that included 1500 users, 10’s of millions of documents and 46 separate document classes. Her expertise includes enterprise strategies for content management, records management, electronic discovery, taxonomy design, project management and business process redesign.

Now that Monica is no longer herding cats (figuratively) as a consultant, she applies those cat herding skills to her volunteer work at The Wildcat Sanctuary

She is Member-at-Large on the Minnesota Chapter of AIIM Board and has received AIIM’s Distinguished Service Award. She is accredited through AIIM with an Electronic Document and Image Management Laureate (LIT) and is a Certified Records Manager (CRM) and a Project Management Professional (PMP).

The panel will be moderated by:

Robert Shimp, Vice President, Technology Marketing
Robert Shimp is Vice President of the Global Technology Business Unit for Oracle Corporation. He is responsible for product marketing and sales support globally for Oracle's Database, Fusion Middleware, Enterprise Manager and other product lines. He has had a key role in bringing to market Oracle's grid computing and SOA technologies. He is also the architect behind several popular marketing campaigns for Oracle such as "Unbreakable" and "Get on the Grid."

Prior to that, Mr. Shimp was involved with the development and introduction of well-known brand name products including Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX operating system, MIPS microprocessors, and the UnixWare operating system.
Mr. Shimp holds a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering and in Engineering & Public Policy from Carnegie Mellon University. He also holds a Master of Business Administration degree and a Juris Doctorate from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

AIIM Expo 2010 Preview

2010-04-07T09:57:00.000-07:00

I've created a preview of the AIIM conference on YouTube. Hopefully this will give you some ideas on things to see at the AIIM Conference.

Also, our partner ImageSource will be speaking in the Oracle booth about their integration of Oracle Imaging and Process Management and Epic Electronic Medical Records at Swedish Hospitals. ImageSource will be presenting a longer version of this presentation along with Swedish and Fujitsu on Wednesday at 2:25 pm (session G08).

Look forward to seeing you there!

AIIM ECM Seminar Series

2010-03-15T16:06:00.000-07:00

I spent part of last week at the AIIM ECM Seminar events in Seattle and San Francisco. And besides seeing some old friends in Seattle, which was GREAT, I also enjoyed hearing what was on the minds of people who implement content management and records management projects.

We talked about the 8 Things You Need to Know About Enterprise Information Management blog post, since that was the theme of our presentation. And part of that addresses information that must be accessed from business processes such as accounts payable and employee onboarding. In some cases information must be shared between enterprise applications such as an ERP system and a CRM system. That caused the first question:

What is an ERP system? What is a CRM system?
ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. Systems that address ERP deal with inventory and shipping, billing, payments, and other core business processes. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and address customer contact information, sales processes, customer support, and marketing efforts. These systems often need to refer to documents such as invoices and sales proposals to enable users to understand the history of transactions.

Another question came up:

Does Oracle Content Management support subscriptions? Can you force updates? Does it support versioning? Can you control versioning?
These questions in the Seattle session were raised by customers who were dissatisfied with how SharePoint addresses these features. And the answers were yes, Oracle Content Management has the powerful features to address these issues in a way that is unobtrusive to end users. Users can subscribe to specific documents, or based upon metadata such as document type, keywords, author, department or other attributes. Users can be notified when a document they should care about has been updated. Furthermore, when a user copies a document to their desktop, they may not realize when that document has been superceded. But using Oracle Information Rights Management, users can be forced to update those documents when they open them.

We also discussed some of the upcoming and colliding trends in the industry, especially Enterprise 2.0 and e-Discovery. That drove a few questions:

What is e-Discovery?
Discovery is the process of finding information and evidence pertinent to a lawsuit or audit. E-Discovery addresses electronic information or evidence. The rules on e-Discovery for Federal Courts were updated in 2006. You can see this article on e-Discovery and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure that I co-authored for the Information Management Journal.

As part of that we discussed was Oracle’s offerings in the area of social media and Enterprise 2.0. As organizations address the need for Enterprise 2.0 offerings, they are concerned about scalability, security and compliance. Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 offerings address those issues by building the Enterprise 2.0 features on top of the full featured capabilities of Oracle Content Management. I asked the group how ready they were for social media and Enterprise 2.0 at their organizations. Did they have a social media policy? Many folks did not, a few said they were creating them. I was able to point them to a site that has some excellent examples of social media policies at companies like Cisco, Coca-Cola and FedEx:

All in all it was a great two days of exchanging ideas in the sessions and at the Oracle tabletop during the breaks. We have four of these events left in LA, Denver, Dallas and Houston. We hope to see you at them. If you did attend I'd love to hear your thoughts.

If we are not already working together, hopefully we can get acquainted on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn!

8 Things You Need to Know About Integrating Content Management With Enterprise Processes

2010-03-04T08:08:00.000-08:00

My current blog post is being hosted on John Mancini's Digital Landfill blog. I'll be presenting on this in more detail at the AIIM ECM Seminar Series on March 9th in Seattle and March 11th in San Francisco. For more information about integrating with enterprise processes, see our webcasts presenting:

Also check out the Oracle Enterprise Application Documents white paper.
And the Oracle Enterprise 2.0 blog.

Top Skills Webinar Review

2010-02-03T08:15:00.000-08:00

The AIIM Top Skills webinar took place last week. The webinar revolves around a survey where 656 ECM industry participants answered questions about the skills, training and compensation for people in the industry with an eye on what it takes to move forward in your career. Over 1100 people registered and over 450 people attended the event.

The event was also covered on Twitter using the #TOPSKILLS hashtag. The conversation on the hashtag continues as people ask Doug Miles further questions about and discuss the results.

A number of good questions came out of the event:

•    What skills would you most like to improve?

•    What is the most desirable title?

•    What % of orgs are planning their first implementation?

•    What % of webinar viewers will take training in 2010?

•    What is the average salary for a records manager, an information architect, an IT manager, an LOB manager?

•    Will my salary go up if I raise my skills?

It was interesting to note that for IT folks, the skills they most wanted to improve revolved around records management. Not many records managers indicated an interest in raising IT skills however!

The most desirable title was Information Architect. In my experience this role is someone who leads the entire content management effort for an organization. A great example is Nancy Richards when she was at Swedish Medical. There is a good write up on her achievements in this role in this Infonomics article.

Another stunner was the percent of organizations that are planning their first implementation. For those of us who have been in the content management arena for years, it is easy to think every organization has been through many of these implementations. But of the respondents, 23% were planning their first significant project, and 16% were rolling out their first significant project. That means a lot of folks in the AIIM crowd are still looking for the basic information on workflow, taxonomy, repository setup, user roll out - the things we take for granted in a content management project.

Also interesting was the parity between IT and LOB for salary - it was closer than most people think.

Oracle sponsored this research as part of our ongoing support for the content management industry and the people in it. We'd be interested in your feedback regarding future research you'd like to see. And in the same spirit, Oracle is sponsoring an executive keynote panel at AIIM Expo, for the second year in a row. For more information you can see the AIIM Expo keynote page.

TopSkills Webinar

2010-01-19T16:12:00.000-08:00

The AIIM Top Skills webinar will take place next week. This webinar is based on survey results asking content management practitioners “What are the Top Skills you need to move forward in your career?” It also talks about their organizations’ policies for training, and salary comparisons of a number of positions in the industry.

With over 700 content management respondents, there is some good data there. And with over 950 people signed up, a conversation on the event has begun – people are anticipating what some of the answers will be and sharing their own thoughts on what are the Top Skills needed – on Twitter at hashtag #TOPSKILLS. We will monitor the #TOPSKILLS hashtag during and after the event for questions and discussions, so join in the conversation!

Podcasting with Bex

2010-01-04T15:31:00.000-08:00

So, I guess the first question is, what is Infoglut? This question kicked off my podcast with Brian “Bex” Huff on his co-authored book, “Transforming Infoglut! A Pragmatic Strategy for Oracle Enterprise Content Management.” Most of you know Bex – he’s an Oracle Ace and was a key developer at Stellent, so he’s pretty qualified to talk about the status and direction of content management. And he’s very passionate about what is right and what is wrong, including content management practices. So, as you would expect, he got on a bit of a rant, and it was fun to sit back and watch his intellectual sparks fly.

A couple of interesting points:
•    Because the CIO reports to the CFO, technology is a cost center instead of a center for innovation. But this is going to change. Some studies suggest that data value will be seen as a line item in the balance sheet. So CIOs are going to be charged with more innovation.

•    Regarding social media, Bex states “I’m a serial-contrarian… Social media? As opposed to anti-social media?” What people are looking for are inspirational applications – applications that are “fun” to use.

•    Bex also provides his definition of Collaboration vs. Content Management vs. E20 - and three predictions for the industry in 2010.

You can hear it for yourself: http://bit.ly/6iTIXW

Forrester ECM Suites Wave 2009

2009-12-03T13:30:00.000-08:00

Forrester just published their 2009 ECM Suites Wave. Forrester notes that Oracle Content Management is "a compelling option for many enterprises, especially those seeking to leverage investments in other Oracle applications." Oracle has licensed this for download, so have a look on us and enjoy.

Accounts Payable: Three Pathways to Efficiency

2009-12-01T18:04:00.000-08:00

My colleague Jason Lamon just got his article published in Infonomics "Accounts Payable: Three Pathways to Efficiency." Jason has many years of expertise in document capture and imaging, and his article has a lot of depth in the details of how organizations can automate their processes.

1. Back-end Document Capture and Archive
While this level does not automate the process, it provides a solid base of content so that your processes are not disturbed if paper is lost. It also provides a good look up process when you need to refer back to an invoice - a lot better than going to the warehouse and dusting off some old boxes.

2.Front-End Document Capture and Data Entry
In this process, invoices are scanned and then routed for data entry. This still requires the manual process of data entry, but enables electronic review, which is much faster.

3. Front-End Capture and Workflow
This level provides full-blown workflow to route the processing and approvals. One additional area that can be included is document recognition and OCR, which can even automate the data entry process.

Jason also offers some guidelines for organizations to decide which level of automation they are a candidate for. It's a great read. You can follow Jason on Twitter @jasonlamon.

Putting Documents Into Business Processes

2009-11-12T09:30:00.000-08:00

Most organizations agree that a lot of time is wasted looking for documents. In the webinar I did with Jim Pearce of Tallgrass Technologies last week (I'll post more about this later), his customer Missouri Division of Professional Registration, reduced costs associated with lost or misplaced documents by 92%. And one of the keys to these kinds of productivity gains is having the information in electronic format, and having it accessible from right inside the business processes.

On the heels of the Enterprise Application Documents announcement at Oracle OpenWorld ’09, Oracle is offering two webcasts that further explore the process improvements and ROI achieved by integrating Oracle Content Management with enterprise applications. The first webinar, titled “Quick and Easy Access to HR Documents,” shows how organizations can create an enterprise-wide document repository, decrease costs and cycle times of HR processes, ensure regulatory compliance, and improve PeopleSoft implementations by putting document and image access right into the PeopleSoft application window, where people need them.

The second webinar is titled “Transform E-Business Suite Processes with Integrated Document Management.” This webinar shows how by tightly integrating Oracle Content Management and Oracle E-Business Suite organizations can streamline operations, decrease cycle times, and reduce document storage and shipping costs, removing paper from high-volume transaction processes.

These two webinars complete the series that began this summer demonstrating Oracle Content Management integrations with Siebel Call Center and Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing modules. From a single enterprise-wide document repository, organizations can search across content while enabling access to documents right in the business processes where they are needed.

Keeping Content Management Funded

2009-10-26T13:02:00.000-07:00

How do you ensure your content management projects are funded at your organization? How do you ensure that your corporate leadership has visibility into your projects to protect them when times are tight?

I've just uploaded four videos that show the AIIM Keynote Panel. Top executives from four firms discuss how they keep their management aware and keep their projects vital. These four segments have been often quoted since they were recorded, in publications such as Fortune Online, but now you can see them in their entirety.

AIIM Keynote Panel Part 1
AIIM Keynote Panel Part 2
AIIM Keynote Panel Part 3
AIIM Keynote Panel Part 4

These clips are from the AIIM Conference Keynote Panel on the first day of AIIM 2009. In these videos:

Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco discusses how she encouraged her executives to fund a new WCM project when they were not able to find their highest selling product on the web, or how to connect a prospect with a sales person
Mike McKuras of BlueCross/BlueShield of Minnesota talks about how they looked at ECM as one giant project with a $24M price tag, and instead assign an ECM expert to every project to make sure that it is incorporated into the planning
Todd Januzzi of Vornado Realty Trust speaks of how their content management has had a direct impact on their bottom line by making them better able to respond to document requests for real estate sales, and by freeing up office space by converting paper documents to electronic
Lt. Col. JD Whitlock of U.S. Air Force Medical speaks about how they have made their content more accessible, improving the quality of the content and making their people more productive.

Let me know what you think. Leave a comment and tell me if these were useful, or what you would like to see presented next year - we are in the midst of choosing our topic and speakers.

Enterprise Application Documents

2009-10-21T17:18:00.000-07:00

Last week at Oracle OpenWorld ’09 we announced Enterprise Application Documents. Though we have been connecting content management to applications for a while now, the integrations have gotten so much better, and so much more strategic that we felt we needed to wrap them in a name and highlight them.

The user can see assets they can choose from for their campaign. A Siebel sales user can see the sales proposals they have sent to their customer from the customer record.
The integrations are certified with apps unlimited – PeopleSoft, Siebel, E-Business Suite and JD Edwards – Enterprise Application Documents works with all of these products today.
Enterprise Application Documents is also the strategic content management system for Oracle’s Fusion Applications.
Enterprise Application Documents enables migration between application versions and will also enable the migration to Fusion Applications. We’ve already had a number of customers throw out other content management systems, implement Oracle Content Management, and then upgrade their applications and see that, based on how our integration is written, their content moves forward with their new application version.

For end users, Enterprise Application Documents has some important ramifications:

Users can search across application siloes. Like my previous post about Dave Hyzy from Benderson, with Oracle Content Management you can set up virtualized views of content for each audience. If your organization has E-Business Suite for AP processing, and PeopleSoft Campus Center for student on-boarding, you can setup different metadata for each use case. But for people who need to search both systems at the same time, the virtual siloes can be ignored (since is it is really one repository that is being used).
Non-apps users can review and edit documents. If you are using Siebel Sales, and create a proposal for a customer, you probably want to run it past legal before you send it to your customer. If legal does not have a Siebel license, how can they see the document to review it? With Oracle Content Management, anyone in the organization who is authorized can review content, or even edit it.
The documents are subject to content management. More than just a place to store documents, Oracle Content Management provides a truly enterprise-strength content management system. Users can find previous versions of a document, the documents are subject to records management, and can be placed on a hold, content is de-duplicated. All the benefits of content management are included.

As examples of Enterprise Application Documents, we have two webinars we did back in July. The first showed Oracle Content Management integrated with Siebel Call Centers. The second showed Oracle Content Management integrated with Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing.

We’ve got a couple more coming up in November – HR for PeopleSoft and Asset Management for E-Business Suite. I’ll post the links when the invites are up.

So Long OOW 09!

2009-10-15T10:49:00.000-07:00

Last day of OOW 09, I'm in the Middleware Lounge, editing some video I took and uploading it, and answering the many questions about our Middleware in the Cloud story with Amazon. Lots of people are just trying to figure it all out - so I'm going to post a copy of the slides I used for signage in the lounge on SlideShare - many people had requested copies. These slides talk about what the cloud is, what Amazon offers, and how Oracle Fusion Middleware can be used in the cloud.

What we have been showing this week is some of the Amazon Machine Images, or AMIs, that the team has put together. When you sign up for Amazon Web Services (AWS), you get access to these images, which include SOA and WebCenter configuration. No need to install and configure, you just login and you can start developing. Want to share it with others? No problem. Worried about your laptop frying and losing your work? No problem. Do you move between different machines for work and at home? No problem. Because it's all held online, you have many more options for how you work with your projects.

I also uploaded a video of Billy Cripe describing his experience with Amazon Web Services. It was all good until he closed his instance without saving his changes, but he was able to recover a snapshot, so it worked out. There are more presentations at 11:30 and 2:30, and if you come by and drop your business card you get a $35 credit from Amazon - which, at 10 cents an hour gives you 350 hours of development time.

Enable the Eco Enterprise Award Winners

2009-10-13T16:18:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Enable the Eco Enterprise award winners Missouri Division of Professional Registration and their implementation partner Tallgrass Technologies. MDPR reduced paper consumption by 50% through the use of document imaging, scanning, and distributed capture:

Eliminated 22,000,000 pages per year of copy costs
Eliminated 90% of mailing, shipping, and other delivery costs associated with issuing licenses and related certifications
Made an 85% improvement in document retrieval times
Secured online storage at the State Data Center

Now they can provide electronic methods to submit license applications and supporting documents, including fax, web and email capture. They have secured the content and created indexing and metadata conventions to ensure quick and easy access while maintaining 99% uptime.

The results are

894 tons of paper saved
1,789 tons of trees saved
14,706,300 gallons of water saved
1,735,254 pounds of solid waste eliminated
53,640 pounds of emission gases eliminated
License issuance went from average of 3 weeks to 2 days
Reduced average time searching for documents from 2 hours per employee to 26 minutes
Reduced copier cost by 62%
Reduced associated filing cost by 76%
Eliminated or reassigned 7 positions
Reduced costs associated with lost or misplaced documents by 92%

Congratulations!

Customer Awards Event

2009-10-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

We had our customer appreciation event last night, sponsored by Fujitsu. Great food, drinks, and networking. Our customer award winners were:

Open Enterprise - Eaton - Steve Gannett
User Experience - The JM Smucker Company - Becky Gurecky and Kim McMullen
Digital Warehouse Award - Costco Wholesale Corporation - Bob Razminas
Distrbuted ECM Award - Embry Riddle Aeronautical University - Cindy Bixler

Thanks Fujitsu for sponsoring this event.

Smuckers

Andy Larsen, SA Technologies and Robert Esquivel, Fujitsu

Real World Customer ROI of ECM

2009-10-12T15:37:00.000-07:00

Michelle Huff and I have a session today entitled Real World Customer ROI of ECM (4 PM, Marriott Hotel, Salon 9. In it we will refer to a few pages and I wanted to put the links here:
City of Ottawa TEI study
Emerson Process TEI study
Oracle Green Calculator

Virtual Siloes for Applications

2009-10-05T11:06:00.000-07:00

New video posted this morning - Dave Hyzy of Benderson. Some interesting points he makes:

Virtual siloes for integrating with applications – content is specific to those applications and users (metadata, for instance), so Benderson manages those as virtual siloes. But IT admins it as one system, and other users have visibility across enterprise to find documents.

Index validation against JD Edwards – as they index their documents, the values are compared to their JD Edwards application data for validation.

Going electronic gives them simulatneous mulit-user access and processing of documents. Before, when they were paper-based, unless they made photocopies, only one transaction could be processed or reviewed at a time.

Disaster recovery in multiple places - they can archive digital copies in multiple places, which gives them true disaster recovery.

Cloud Computing and Middleware Lounge

2009-09-29T12:49:00.000-07:00

If you are going to Oracle OpenWorld 09, learn about Cloud Computing and middleware development at the Middleware Lounge. Get a hands-on experience of developing Oracle Fusion Middleware in the Amazon Virtual Development Environment, with follow-along demonstrations daily at 11:30 and 2 PM (2:15 on Wednesday, 2:30 on Thursday). The Fusion Middleware Lounge is a great place to recharge your phone or laptop, network, and watch live twitter feeds of conference comments. Lower level of the Marriott, at the end of the Yerba Buena foyer, open Monday through Thursday during show hours.

Oracle at AIIM Roadshow in NYC

2009-09-24T17:30:00.000-07:00

Next week, Tuesday September 29th, we'll be taking part in the AIIM Roadshow in Manhattan. If you are local to NYC come by and see us. Luke McQueen (yeah, that's really his name!) will be presenting a session titled "Get Better Control With Best in Breed Oracle Applications Integration and Web Content Management." You can get more details here.

Oracle The Leader in Gartner MQ

2009-09-16T16:16:00.000-07:00

Oracle Content Management was recently chosen as the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management. What’s interesting is that Gartner takes a broader view of Web Content Management as a comprehensive platform. Besides having best in class web content management, Oracle Content Management is integrated to the products that organizations use as part of their web platform. Companies that use Siebel or RTD for campaigns and offer metrics want to have their assets managed in a system that is integrated to those campaigns and decision engines.

The other thing they are looking at is a comprehensive content management platform that will not only rock your website, but will provide a solid system for your intranet, and on top of that enable you to address file store optimization, governance, and other issues that we think are vital.

To see the press release and the link to the report, click here.

Siebel for Sales/Siebel for Marketing and Loyalty Webinars

2009-07-28T10:23:00.000-07:00

Another web seminar tomorrow - this one focused on Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing users.

Speaking to some of the attendees of the last webinar, we're finding that we are really striking a nerve. Services folks have been looking for ways to attach service agreements and other customer correspondence directly to the customer record in Siebel, ensuring that call center folks have fast access to these documents.

Similarly, Siebel Sales users want to be able to attach customer and prospect correspondence such as sales proposals directly to the customer record. The system also automatically creates a PDF version of the proposal that the sales person can send out. This makes sales people more productive, so they can focus on selling instead of spending their time finding documents, managing them, and converting them for distribution.

And in the case of marketing teams, Oracle Content Management is integrated with Siebel Marketing and Loyalty to enable marketing users to attach assets such as images and web pages directly to campaigns. The assets can be automatically routed for approval, ensuring that only the most up-to-date and approved assets get published with your offers. The end result is you can reuse assets, reduce duplicate efforts, and even automate approval processes for marketing content - getting your message to market faster and improving your marketing agility.

Oracle ECM for Siebel

2009-07-22T09:12:00.001-07:00

Web seminar this morning showing how Siebel Call Center users can associate managed documents such as warranties and service agreements with specific customer records. Nice if you've ever had a problem finding these kinds of documents, or if you want to associate certain documents across a group of accounts.

There will be another webinar next week showing how Oracle Content Management integrates with Siebel Sales and Siebel Marketing and Loyalty.

Billy Cripe - Best Paper Award

2009-07-13T22:16:00.001-07:00

I am BLOWN AWAY that Billy Cripe won Sessions Best Paper Award for the Information Systems Technologies and Applications Session at the 13th World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. Dude, you totally rock!

AIIM Infonomics Issue on Green

2009-07-10T16:39:00.000-07:00

Lots of great content in the new Infonomics issue regarding the green benefits of content management.

I'm really excited to see this taking off.

COLLABORATE 09

2009-06-17T17:45:00.001-07:00

Since my last entry the COLLABORATE conference has come and gone. It was great to see a ton of customers and partners. We had the opportunity to shoot three customer video interviews – Dave Hyzy of Benderson, Margaret Ebner of NV Energy, and Cindy Bixler of Embry Riddle. Those are getting edited now and should be up on the Oracle website soon.

We had an awesome party on Tuesday night hosted by partners Fishbowl, Frontline Logic, Keste, and Elastic Path. Special kudos to Jen Marzolf of Fishbowl for spearheading the effort – it was a great time and a flawless event (until the rain started, but that was just nature’s way of saying it was time to stop partying!).

The Oracle Content Management SIG did a tremendous job setting this event up – from scheduling the sessions to promotions to scanning the visitors. Al Hoof, Dave Chaffee, Mike Barton, and Mark Heinsdelman put in a lot of time and effort and it all paid off as the event was well organized. They did such a great job that the IOUG is using them as an example for the other SIGs on how to organize.

Also, special kudos to Frontline Logic. Brent Seaman’s team earned an amazing perfect score on the Vendor Rating scorecard, which was filled out by exhibits visitors. Well done guys!

COLLABORATE is a meeting of the Oracle User Groups and a great chance to get all the details on Oracle product implementation. Next year it is scheduled to take place in Las Vegas April 18-22nd. Hopefully some of the things that take place in Vegas will make it back to our customers’ offices!

ARMA Tri-Chapter Meeting

2009-04-09T17:37:00.000-07:00

I spoke at the Bay Area ARMA Tri-Chapter meeting today (Silicon Valley, Golden Gate, Mt. Diablo). My slides are on slideshare. One stumper question – how do I decide what a record is when the content is getting constantly updated? Hmmm… If it’s getting constantly updated, is it a record, or is it collaborative content? If there is a published outcome, is that then the record? And is the collaborative content something you would retain to help you remember how you arrived at that outcome, and then discard at some future time? I’d be interested in hearing YOUR thoughts on this.

If I sum up the three major points of my presentation:

The skill set of records managers is needed more broadly across an organization to ensure good retention management of all content (unstructured and structured). While lots of people are focused on the right side of the EDRM model, programs still need to come back to reducing the amount of content being retained.
The owner of various applications are not the owners of the application data
In making your software selection, make sure you understand your organization’s goals for your records management program – are you trying to lower risk, lower costs, provide better visibility to content (and therefore better arming your legal counsel)?

I look forward to getting more involved with the local chapters.

AIIM 2009 Recap

2009-04-03T14:13:00.000-07:00

AIIM served to raise the profile of Oracle as a leader in content management – noting that competitors such as IBM and OpenText were not visible on the show floor nor in the keynote sessions. Attendees also saw Oracle’s presence in airport signs, bus stop signs, cab tops, and on the key cards to their hotels.

Our opening day keynote panel, hosted by Bob Shimp. Bob led four of our customers through a lively discussion of how to maintain visibility for content management projects at your organization. This panel was a touchstone of the show, as it was quoted in a number of other sessions (including two mentions by Dan Woods of Evolved Media) and articles (see links below).

Huge thanks to Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco, Mike McKuras of BCBS MN, Lt. Col. JD Whitlock of USAF MSC, and Todd Januzzi of Vornado Realty Trust. You guys really made a compelling conversation.

See the InfoTrends interview on the show floor with Greg Crider, Sr. Director of Product Marketing.

The Oracle booth had demo stations for Universal Content Management, Imaging and Process Management, Oracle Compliance Solutions (Universal Records Management, Information Rights Management, and Universal Online Archive), WebCenter, Beehive, and Secure Enterprise Search. Six Oracle partners also demonstrated as part of the Oracle Partner Pavilion: Fishbowl, Brainware, Fujitsu, Enterpulse, ScreenScraper, and MuseGlobal.

Joely Urton set up analyst meetings for Oracle executives, and for a number of our partners and customers, which was an added bonus to their trips.

A couple of mentions of the keynote:

Channel Web Magazine quotes Lt. Col. James Whitlock as saying E2O is “a source of exchanging important information across various lines of business and hierarchies.”

FierceContent: The Recession Casts a Long Shadow Over AIIM 2009 relates the story Molly Wenzler told about how she developed executive support at MeadWestvaco: She sat the executives down at a computer, had them search for information on the company's best selling product. When they couldn’t find it, she had raised the urgency of her WCM project and secured funding and support.

AIIM Conference Next Week

2009-03-26T15:15:00.000-07:00

Next week we will be at the AIIM Conference and Expo in Philadelphia. For the opening keynotes (Tuesday March 31 8:45 AM), we will run a panel of four customer executives talking about how to communicate the value of ECM to your organization. Our session is right after the opening keynote and right before John Mancini’s State of the Industry address. I’ve been through the questions with each of the speakers on the phone, and they all have very interesting and unique perspectives, so I expect this to be a fascinating conversation.

We’ll have Oracle logos at the airport, on cab tops, and in bus stops, and we will be in booth 710, with a mini-theater full of informative sessions such as how to manage multi-lingual websites, 5 Ways to Build Your ROI with Oracle Content Management, and How to Integrate Your Content Management and Records Management Strategies. We also have a number of partners in the attached partner pavilion. Out of the partner pavilion, Brainware and Fishbowl will also be presenting in the mini-theater. We also have two presentations in the applications showcase, Supercharge Your Applications With Content Management and Go Green, Save Green with Oracle Content Management.

We also have four customers presenting. Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco, and David Roe of IronWorks, will present on the MeadWestvaco implementation in a session titled “5 Rules to Optimize Your Website for SEO, ROI, and New Site Creation.” (Tuesday 2:30 PM)

Tom Chaffee of BCBS MN will present Encouraging and Sustaining a Common ECM Vision (Thursday 10:10 am)

Jim McKenney will present City of Kent Consolidates Information to Provide Constituents with One Reliable Source of Information (Wednesday at 4:45 pm)

Jen Marzolf of Fishbowl Solutions will present 6 Week WCM Implementation At Ogelthorpe Power (Thursday 10:10 AM)

I’ll try and do some updates from the event – no promises!

AIIM Green ECM Microsite

2009-03-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

AIIM has posted their new Green ECM microsite. It's wonderful to look at, oh, and look at that, it's sponsored by Oracle. Lots of great information including an invitation to the AIIM Web Seminar I'll be doing with Forrester on April 15.

We have a day and a half green event here at Oracle kicking off tomorrow where we will look at all of the Oracle green programs from the product groups.

Green Panel Webinar

2009-03-04T12:49:00.000-08:00

We had our green panel webinar last week – with Cindy Bixler, CIO of Embry Riddle, Nancy Richards, Principal of Business Arts Management, and John Klein, VP of Business Development at Midland Information Resources. John talked about how, in their implementation at Emerson Process Management, they saved over $500,000 in paper consumption. Cindy talked about how Embry Riddle used to ship paper everywhere – back and forth from headquarters to their 170 campus locations. Having information scanned and checked in, making it instantly available from any location, saved them tens of thousands of dollars in courier and shipping costs. Nancy talked about how at Swedish Medical, the two systems she implemented moved them from paper to electronic, saving them tons of money but also improving the patient experience. In the cases of each of the customers profiled – Embry Riddle, Swedish Medical, Emerson Process Management, and Standard Forwarding – they talked about the process improvements each company experienced, and how it saved them money and made them more competitive. But beyond the process improvements, where the bulk of the ROI was realized, the paper-based benefits also brought the green benefits of reducing paper consumption, shipping costs, and other green benefits such as reducing warehouse and office space, reducing employee commutes and the associated environmental impact, and enabling better compliance and disaster recovery planning.

We of course talked about the Oracle Green Calculator, which enables customers to input their paper based ROI, and see the resulting impact on the environment, in terms of number of trees saved, barrels of oil saved, and pounds of carbon emissions avoided.
You can access the calculator here: www.oracle.com/goto/ecmgreen
You can hear the replay of the session here: www.oracle.com/goto/thrive

ASIO – Green Data Centers
ASIO is a green data center working off of energy they generate. Their roof has 120 solar panels, running the servers, lights, and a water-based cooling system. The water for the cooling system is collected on site from rain runoff. The systems only use 2 gallons of water per hour, and 50% of the water is recycled and used again for cooling. ASIO also uses virtualization that nets them at 60/70:1 ratio of virtual servers to physical servers. Most data centers claim they are green by buying energy produced from green sources. ASIO conserves energy and creates their own, moving towards a zero environmental impact. A vision of the future. www.asio.net

MeadWestvaco - Thriving Through Foreign Market Expansion

2009-02-10T17:01:00.001-08:00

As part of our Survive and Thrive series, we had MeadWestvaco, and their consulting partner Ironworks, present today on how they are using Oracle Content Management to manage their main site, and a number of microsites.

Molly Wenzler of MeadWestvaco talked about how the website had been a series of unrelated, unmanaged sites, and how if you would search for their best-selling product it wouldn’t even show up in the search results. David Roe of Ironworks talked about how they spent more time planning the underlying architecture of the site than implementing it. The time spent in the architecture phase really paid off - they stood up the first site in 3-4 months, and now they are able to stand up sites almost instantly. Molly set up a job site in Russian in just a few days, for instance.

Besides the main site, they showed the China site, and the Branding site. The branding site is for employees to find PowerPoint templates, images, logos, etc. They store one copy of the images, but users have the ability to select what rendering parameters they would like the image in (size, resolution, file type) and the Digital Asset Management module of Universal Content Management dynamically renders the image for them.

Now they are able to track site visitors, and their path through the content, to the point where they request a contact or a sample. Molly is really focused on site loyalty – how many pages people view per visit, and returning visitors. And through workflow they are beginning to track those visits all the way through to sales. Molly is using that data to track the ROI of the site. Molly has also put a lot of focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). She points to one $3 million sale that started as a Google search, which led the prospect to their site.

Besides the framework setup, David has pushed really hard on having useful content attributes. The attributes, or metadata values, when combined with the Service Oriented Architecture of Universal Content Management, makes it easy to recast data in many ways. This really shows well in the product site, where products are presented by category, by industry, and by material properties. And by using Dependent Choice Lists, David makes it very easy for people to drill down to specific content types.

David has been blown away by the performance. He said that they have never had the site go over their target response time of 1.5 seconds, and they average sub-second response. To us, this is what we have come to expect from Oracle Content Management, and this type of response indicates that David understands how to properly architect the product. We’re really impressed with his grasp of the system and his ability to execute.

And Molly’s understanding of content management systems, and website goals and measurements, is making for some great uses of our technology.

David’s blog is here: http://contentoncontentmanagement.com/
You can hear the replay here: www.oracle.com/goto/thrive

AIIM SharePoint Webinar

2009-01-28T13:16:00.000-08:00

If you missed the webinar, you can still hear a recording of it.

Great questions from the crowd, and a record setting attendance. The survey was interesting in terms of the qualification of respondents. Carl invited 1000 people to respond. 616 unique organizations responded. Carl then lobbed off companies smaller than 100 people, which brought the number down to 512. Then he dropped anyone who was not in production which he defined as having both business group and IT blessing for the implementation.

Carl mentioned that he gets about a dozen pings a day from organizations looking for SharePoint talent. He attributes this to the high demand for the product, but also the fact that integration is not easy and training is not readily available.

Of the organizations that gave up their implementations, 48% stated their chief concerns were security and integration. And if you can’t secure and integrate your content management system, it’s really not much more than a file share.

SharePoint - Truth and Fiction

2009-01-26T17:25:00.000-08:00

Oracle is sponsoring an AIIM webinar titled "SharePoint – Truth and Fiction." In a recent AIIM study, over 400 organizations shared their opinions and experiences concerning Microsoft SharePoint. So what did we find? Well, as you would expect, SharePoint works well for file sharing. And it works OK for employee facing websites. But it is rarely used for WCM, DAM, Records Management, BPM/Complex workflow, etc. Also, organizations are finding that it costs way more than expected as a platform for development of custom solutions.

I think what is interesting about that is the comparison of Microsoft’s positioning versus reality. They have pushed SharePoint as an ECM solution that can do anything. But the reality is that when you push it to do more than the basics, insanity ensues.

It certainly is an area of interest however – over 2,000 people have signed up for this webcast, which blows away any previous record for an AIIM webcast.

The event takes place Jan. 28 | 2:00 pm EST / 11:00 am PST, and a recording will be available afterward.

To check it out, sign up here: http://www.aiim.org/Events/Webinar-Microsoft-Sharepoint-1-28-09.aspx

Customer Success With Oracle Enterprise Portals

2009-01-14T15:14:00.000-08:00

Oracle has just announced a portal webcast series entitled “Increase Success and Reduce Costs with Oracle Enterprise Portals.” This series, like the Survive or Thrive content management series, will be a great chance to hear customers talk about the challenges they have faced, decisions they have made, and the results they have attained by implementing their portal strategies.

The first in the series is titled “Success Through Communities: How McKesson and Oracle Drive Tighter Customer Relationships through Portal Technology.” McKesson will talk about how they enable rapid 'communities' deployment and 'experience definitions,' helping them respond more rapidly to customer interests. Thursday, January 29th, 11:00 a.m. PST
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=6642147&Act=97&pcode=NAMK08041030MPP049

The next in the series is titled “Success Through Customizations: How South Florida Water Management District and Oracle Keep the Largest Environmental Project on Track with Portal Technology” This agency is the leading agency in restoring America's Everglades – the largest environmental project in the nation's history. Thursday, February 5th, 11:00 a.m. PST
http://www.oracle.com/go/?&Src=6642147&Act=98&pcode=NAMK08041030MPP052

On Feburary 25, the session will be “Success through Consolidation: How Embry-Riddle Simplifies Access to Information and Services with Oracle Portal Technology.” And the last in the series will be “Success Through Migrations: How Alibris Adopted an Innovative Portal Platform Using Oracle WebLogic Portal Framework,” and will take place on Tuesday, March 10, 2009.

Survive or Thrive Web Seminar Series

2008-12-18T00:23:00.000-08:00

Today we had the third webinar in our Survive or Thrive series. The theme of the series asks if, in tough economic times, your organization should merely survive, or if it should thrive. This series features a number of successful customers discussing how Oracle Content Management has helped their organization cut costs and be more competitive. The first webinar was November 19th, with Mark Heindselman of Emerson Process, hosted by Michelle Huff of Oracle.

Frankly, not to flatter ourselves, but mostly due to Mark, this was probably the best web seminar I’ve ever witnessed. Mark took the 200 applications that they have deployed Oracle Content Management for, and focused on six specific use cases, and the ROI that Emerson has realized for each application.

Given the current economic environment we are seeing a lot more reference buying – customers are looking for proven solutions, and this series will give them the proof they need. You can see for yourself here.

Green Calculator

2008-12-03T17:26:00.000-08:00

One thing that content management is uniquely positioned to talk about is the green ramifications at an organization. Companies who move their information online cut their paper costs, their shipping costs, and storage costs. In some cases, because the information is available electronically, employees can work from home, which can save a tremendous amount of gas and pollution.

We’re launching a web page dedicated to the role of content management in green efforts. This page comes with the Oracle Content Management Green Calculator. The calculator enables organizations to see how many trees, barrels of oil, and pounds of carbon they can save by going electronic with their paper documentation processes. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s fun and it is based on reasonable figures from quoted sources.

There’s also a white paper that explains the methodology of the spreadsheet, as well as a podcast talking about these issues. There will also be a web panel with each of the customers in the paper represented, on February 24th. You can go here for more information.

IOUG web seminar series/ COLLABORATE ‘09

2008-11-14T23:34:00.000-08:00

The call for papers for COLLABORATE ’09 closed on November 7th. We’re waiting to see which sessions get selected by the IOUG/Oracle Content Management SIG for inclusion in the conference. We were a little light on IPM submissions – I think the IPM customers tend to be a little shy compared to the UCM customers – but we’re talking to some folks to encourage them to submit some papers, so I’m sure the IPM track will be compelling.

The other concern is the impact the economy will have on in-person events. I’m sure folks will have to work pretty hard to make the case for going to Orlando. In the mean time we have been working with IOUG to set up a number of web seminars to give people a sense of what they will get at COLLABORATE. The first one was this week – Joe Duane, former consulting services rock star (and now product management rock star), presented on best practices for SiteStudio. A great session, lots of very practical and common sense lessons clearly borne out of some personal experience. There were over 80 people logged on, and they asked many engaging questions.

The next webinar on December 18 will highlight some new application integrations of IPM. After that new features of SiteStudio will be discussed on January 8th. For more information on the series and the Oracle Content Management Special Interest Group click here. To register for COLLABORATE, click here.

Fusion Middleware Lounge at Oracle Open World 2008

2008-11-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

One thing I didn't cover in the tremendous rush from OOW to the real world was the Fusion Middleware Lounge. Sponsored by Satyam (thanks!) it was a great place for people to relax, recharge their laptops and phones, meet new people, get information about products, watch keynotes, etc. We also had a video booth, where people could record a video postcard, which we posted on YouTube so their friends and family could see. It took a little while for people to warm up to it, but eventually we started seeing people come to the lounge to record a postcard. It was fun - hope we can do the lounge again next year at OOW.

ARMA 2008 Wrap Up

2008-10-24T11:57:00.001-07:00

Well I'm back from Vegas and ARMA conversations are still spinning in my head. I think the most striking thing I walked away with was that more records managers are recognizing that their organizations need a content management system - that they need a place to put content so they can manage it - with a records retention module so they can manage the restultant records and even retention manage the non-records.

I happened upon an article by Rich Grudman this morning that makes the case better than I could. It is a profile of the County of San Diego and their use of a content management system, including creating an intranet site to see status and check procedures. Great article.

More than anything, records managers should look for a system where
1) users can easily save content. If it enables novice users to simply drag and drop documents or emails to a desktop folder or a folder in the email client, that is a good place to start

2) enables more sophisticated users to check content in and provide more information - document type, keywords, or in the case of records-savvy users, associating the item with an area of the file plan

If users know that they can go back and search the system and predictably find their work, and the relevant work of others, adoption should be pretty easy.

I talked about some of this in a presentation I did two weeks ago to the Tacoma/Pierce County bar association. And the County of San Diego (and most of the people I met at ARMA) are in synch - we need an easy-to-use way to get content managed so that we can apply records management principles, to reduce risks, reduce costs and make our information more transparent so we can make better decisions.

ARMA 2008

2008-10-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

I'm at ARMA this week. Stop by and see me in the Oracle booth, #319. We're having some great conversations, and our partners Frontline Logic, Fujitsu, and SoftLinx are presenting applications they have built on our content management solutions.

I sat in one of Don Skupsky's sessions yesterday. He talked about a case that was arbitrated and he was watching the defendant attempt to respond to discovery, and how they were unable to restore their backups that they created DAILY! Great session.

I also spoke to Michael Sepe, Director of Information Technology for the Las Vegas Valley Water District. It is so refreshing to speak to someone in IT who recognizes the risk of not preparing for litigation by managing document retention. A great conversation.

Information Rights Management in SC Magazine

2008-10-09T21:34:00.000-07:00

I have a new article here in SC Magazine on Information Rights Management. This article talks about after reporting a data breach, losses in company valuation can be as high as four percent. A single data breach reached $6.3 million in 2007 and the cost of lost business averaged $4.1 million.

Content Management ROI discussion at AIIM Golden Gate Chapter meeting

2008-08-28T15:27:00.001-07:00

The most recent meeting of the AIIM Golden Gate chapter was a roundtable discussion on Return on Investment. It was a great group effort, with everyone participating.

I've uploaded the discussion slides here.

Aaron Baldwin spoke about how organizations like PG&E are looking to move their records and document management online to save on real estate. I thought he meant to cut down on storage space of the paper, but he corrected me - with the content online, people can work from home, requiring less office space!

Patricia Oliveira talked about how some organizations are starting to work employee satisfaction ratings into their ROI computations. Fascinating! Hopefully she will blog on this and discuss it further.

There is a tendency to boil the ocean when it comes to ROI. The key is to pick an area where you can prove substantial worth to your organization. Focus on a particular process - e-discovery, digital asset file format conversion, shipping and storing paper-based information, or processing invoices and receivables.

Most importantly, as you begin your implementation, assess what you want to measure and build it into your process. By using ROI as a measure of success, you can secure funding for other projects. ROI is a great way to quantify your impact on your organization - you can put it in personnel reviews, or your resume, for instance. Nothing shows success better to a potential employer than a strong ROI on your projects.

Two Articles in Enterprise Search Sourcebook

2008-06-17T20:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve got two articles in the Enterprise Search Sourcebook. One is a profile of the A.T. Kearney implementation of Oracle Secure Enterprise Search. This implementation was done by Echelon Consulting, who have done a number of SES implementations and have very happy clients. Amin Negandhi, the CEO of Echelon, really knows his stuff. He will be speaking at the Gilbane Conference in SF this week.

The other article is about Delivering on the Promise of Enterprise Search. There was a limited amount of space or I would have gone off much further about what the Oracle Secure Enterprise Search team has done regarding security, comprehensive connectors, and the new user interface that includes faceted navigation. If you haven’t seen that, you’re in for a treat. The dev team showed the sales team and they said “we don’t want to use Google anymore!”

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Article in Information Management Journal

2008-06-11T22:29:00.000-07:00

Raghu and I wrote an article for the Information Management Journal - the ARMA magazine. You can read it here. Most curious that a few of the responses have been more about information security – how can I delete remote documents, how can I track usage. Somewhat tangential but coincidental, since Oracle offers Information Rights Management which does exactly that.

Inside Counsel Webinar

2008-06-09T22:51:00.000-07:00

I did a web seminar a week ago to the audience of Inside Counsel magazine. The focus was Information Rights Management, and how you can share your documents with customers and partners and retract those rights later. Rather than focusing on the IT aspects of this, I focused on the legal issues and use cases.

Accompanying me on the webinar was Rebecca Perry of Jordan Lawrence. Rebecca talked about how organizations can find and identify the most crucial information that they need to secure. The main types of information she identified were customer information (credit card numbers, for instance), employee information, intellectual property, medical information such as drug screening, and personal data such as SSN. Most companies are surprised to find that they have tens to hundreds of violations daily as this type of information leaves on laptops, emails, thumb drives, or through other means.

We did four surveys during the session, the most interesting one to me was what kind of information was most critical to protect. Overwhelmingly our audience said customer information. This is the information that causes the most exposure, and costs the most money when it is leaked or lost. Rebecca had some great figures – the typical data breach costs a company $4.8 million, and companies see stocks fall and average of 1% to 4% the day after a breach is reported.

The Information Rights Management use cases I covered were:

Control who can view, print or copy information out of a document

Effectively delete a remote document by deleting the encryption key on your server. This also has document retention/e-discovery benefits.

Ensure employees, customer and partners are using up-to-date information by forcing updated content when their rights are checked

Audit usage of content, such as when an partner viewed or printed a document

Perform clawback of content that has been conveyed to opposing counsel improperly.

The other interesting survey result was the distribution of responsibility for creating security policies – IT 33% Legal 30% but company executives surprised me at 19%. It’s interesting to see this problem getting visibility across organizations.

You can hear the event here.