AIIM Solutions Seminars
A short tour of ECM case studies
by Tony Byrne
30-Sep-2005
I recently attended one of AIIM's "Content Management Solutions Seminars." Some people criticize these vendor roadshows as glorified marketing pitches. I think they can be quite educational as long as you know what you're getting. The schedule varies from city to city, but the Washington, DC itinerary was packed with meaty sessions. Herewith are summaries of talks hosted by Vignette, Hummingbird, Stellent, EMC, and Percussion, along with my take on their case studies and messages.
"Answers, Solutions, and Experiences with Vignette"
Their Pitch: Vignette adroitly ceded the floor to Jim Schulte, Content Manager of NHTSA.gov, website for the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a Vignette content management customer. Schulte is a journalist by background and came to NHTSA from USAToday.com to try to clean up what had become a very messy website.
Schulte's account of what met him at NHTSA.gov will sound familiar to many government web managers. "Everybody just put their stuff up, but here's the killer: nobody owned it. We have 8 or 9 daughter sites. When there is a problem with a website document, we find and kill 19 versions of it, but the 20th one kills us." NHTSA.gov encouraged visitors to use a site map to find specific content. Printed out, the site map measured 23 feet.
Meanwhile, the Department of Transportation CIO's office had serendipitously procured an enterprise license for Vignette that could become available for NHTSA, but you will start shaking your head when you hear that funds to actually implement the solution were not so easily obtainable. Having to invest scarce implementation resources in slimming down the complex Vignette interface, Schulte was not able to roll out all the features he wanted, including workflow that could enable him to distribute content updating more broadly within the agency.
Nevertheless, an automated CMS can swiftly bring many advantages. Schulte was able to create a mechanism for quickly highlighting high-value content (such as automotive recalls) whenever it came available. Also, he set the home page up to rotate more citizen-friendly content (e.g. used car information) during evening hours.
My Take: This case study highlights the primacy of governance challenges facing national government content managers. NHTSA itself operates multiple websites -- largely a legacy of an internal authority vacuum -- but the agency must also fit within a broader, evolving Department of Transportation architecture, plus work within U.S. government-wide mandates. Enterprise-wide licenses to complex software packages do little for organizations where sustaining adequate funding and institutional support remains an ongoing problem. And yet, Schulte, like other federal web managers, is making progress. His motto? "Semper Gumby." Always flexible.
Hummingbird: "City of San Antonio Story: Integrated Document & Records Management - A Case Study"
Their Pitch: Hummingbird also wisely turned the dais over to a user, Roland Keller, who implemented the company's Document and Records Management product while at the City of San Antonio (Keller is now an independent consultant).
Keller calls every electronic file a "record wannabe," even though local governments typically only see 20% of files winding up as records. "So you need a system to take the other 80% out," he notes. Integrating document and records management becomes especially important in a government setting, where oftentimes working drafts of a document constitute official records.
A single file plan allows employees to look at all documents and e-mail through both Outlook and Explorer. Of course, this puts a premium on having a good records liaison to work with employees to create a suitable folder structure for their official projects. Employees creating new folders need to put them under the right directories, so that they can inherit properties of the parent.
Keller candidly described the training and change management challenges facing the project at various San Antonio agencies. "We had to go through a brainwashing session at first, and then there's a 2-week period to get used to the new screens and new features, while learning the power of the almighty right-click." It helped to make the training fun, including giveaways (scanners, color printers) as enticements for recalcitrant departments. Still, it was a shock to employees that they had to fill out a "profile" form when they first went to save a document. Retrieving a document might mean searching for it in the repository, which sometimes led to a eureka moment ("Wait, you mean other people can see my documents?"), and more discussion about security and the real meaning of ownership.
Not surprisingly, adoption was greatest when Keller's team could solve real business problems. By combining the Hummingbird system with an imaging solution, one city agency was able to re-assign 4 staff members to higher-value work. In the public works department, consolidating multiple spreadsheets into one versionable document allowed employees to more easily reconcile schedules and projects.
Keller cautions that for a system to work, everyone in a department needs to play by the rules -- including the boss. In a collaborative environment if someone won't use the system, then their co-workers have to leave the sandbox as well to work together.
My Take: This session is well worth attending because Keller displays real screenshots from the system, allowing you to preview what a comprehensive DM/RM system looks like in action. You may or may not like what you see.
In any case, Keller's emphasis on change management and business benefits is spot on. Using a document and records management system requires adaptation, and for some, more work. Keller responds, "I'm sorry, but you're going to have a little bit of discipline about where to put stuff." Major systems like this tend to work better in places with a command-and-control culture and highly standardized processes. Keller, a former US Army officer, seems well suited to leading the job. But he concedes that not all San Antonio agencies and not all staff adopted the system, even when instructed to.
As Records Management Report readers know, Hummingbird's document and records management products are tightly integrated, and that was clearly in evidence here. However, Hummingbird's inability to classify folders made the RM process a bit more tedious for employees. In certain situations, some competing systems can dispense with the profile step that annoyed some San Antonio users. Hummingbird says folder classification is coming in the next edition.
Stellent: "Enterprise Content Management is Rapidly Becoming Interdependent Content Management"
Their Pitch: Stellent began by helpfully outlining all the various ways to look at Enterprise Content Management, before segueing into their own architectural vision of the ECM layer cake, with repository services at the bottom, beneath generic content services (like workflow) and specific functional services (like WCM and DAM), topped off with an icing of combined user-interface.
Stellent sees its own "Universal Content Management" suite as the premier example of this architecture, and even went so far as to declare best-of-breed alternatives as "nearly extinct."
More noteworthy are the specific business applications Stellent has cobbled together within this framework, including Multi-Site Manager, and it's Sarbanes-Oxley application. Stellent claims a differentiator in its user interfaces geared to "the masses," as opposed to webmasters, records managers, and other power users.
My Take: It took questioning from an astute participant for Stellent to reveal that it actually sells two ECM suites. For Imaging, BPM, and physical Records Management, Stellent offers the former Optika product, which brings its own separate stack of distinct services.
I agree that an emphasis on specific applications makes good sense, and that interface flexibility can foster broad adoption. Stellent is also being realistic in recognizing that other vendors (probably infrastructure players) are going to come to dominate the repository tier.
However, best-of-breed competitors are far from extinct. In fact Stellent is in no position to throw stones here. The company's balance sheet remains strong, but at slightly over the magic $100m annual revenue rate that seems necessary to sustain coverage by financial analysts, Stellent itself must fight every day to stay relevant.
EMC: "Managing Content for Day-to-Day Business, Governance, and Compliance"
Their Pitch: In this session, EMC focused on the problem of archiving "fixed content" (unchanging data objects with long-term value). The company has some nice answers, most notably its innovative Centera line of storage products, which offer online accessibility via "content addressed storage." EMC can boast implementations across a variety of business applications and content types, from health care (x-rays and voice) to finance (e-mail and documents) to media (video) industries.
My Take: This presentation was really about managing archives. It's interesting that EMC did not pitch its Documentum or Legato products to an AIIM crowd ready to learn more about imaging, document and e-mail management. I suspect EMC simply finds storage an easier sale, and certainly more profitable. Big suppliers innately organize themselves into multiple product groups -- witness all the content management appendages at IBM -- but sometimes vendors underestimate the distance this can create with buyers. After parrying a couple of inquiries about more prosaic forms of document management, the EMC rep finally had to cut off the questions with, "I'm from the storage division." There you have it.
Percussion: "Web Sites vs. Web Content: Bridging the Content Divide"
Their Pitch: Percussion CTO Vernon Imrich led an interesting discussion of how building websites and managing web content constitute 2 different but related paradigms.
IT staff typically lead the construction of websites with a project-management methodology and often some sort of formal software development lifecycle (SDLC) towards the goal of delivering a finished product at the end. Site builders often also lead the selection of a Web CMS tool. They succeed with a completed implementation.
In contrast, web content managers work in a world of continuous content cycling and change driven by audience needs. Where site builders oversee projects, content managers oversee ever-changing processes. They succeed when traffic or revenue increases.
Not surprisingly, the 2 world-views frequently collide, especially when it comes to CMS adoption. For example, the hassle of deploying content from an authoring to a production repository can befuddle contributors and force engineers to revisit an SDLC approach to site builds. Is the website a publication or an application? Just how long does it take to push a spelling correction to the live site?
According to Imrich, successful enterprises must work bridge processes, while allowing both paradigms to co-exist. On IT side he recommends defining an overall site "harness" that will define an information-architecture superstructure. He also urges decoupling site delivery from content management -- something Percussion's Rythmyx product famously does. Content owners focus on information, engineers focus on web applications.
My Take: It is heartening to see vendors take up the call of leading gurus like Bob Boiko and Gerry McGovern who have long argued for a meta-view of content, the primacy of editorial cycles, and an approach to managing content that emphasizes active processes rather than linear projects.
As CMS Report readers know, however, Percussion's approach to decoupling content and site management doesn't work for all use-cases. Sometimes content owners want to control site behavior too, particularly when content is headed to only a single destination. Decoupled architectures also put a stress on content deployment mechanisms, and as I have argued elsewhere, many devils can reside in the details. Nevertheless, Percussion's approach can work well when content is destined for multiple applications and locales, beyond the purview of the initial author.