Survive or Thrive Web Seminar Series

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.