It is time to move. This blog is moving to a new location: http://www.introspeqt.com/blog.

http://www.contentmechanics.com now points to the new location.

The good news is that there will be more contributors and a lot more action on the new site. My colleagues volunteered (It was not as simple as it sounds. Needed a bit of persuation, pleading, begging, threats etc.) The result is that they “volunteered”! and that is what matters.

Srikant has already written an informative article on FileNet certifications. I hope he will contribute a lot more.

Please visit us at our new home.

Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management are not merely IT projects. Ascending on an ECM/BPM path requires meticulous planning, execution, and measurement. For all stakeholders, it is essential to internalize that such an initiative will definitely alter the way the organization executes its business, positively.

ECM/BPM is about business transformation. It is about aligning people, process, and content with business priorities. So, it is essential for an organization to define how this alignment can be achieved. Any organization that is serious about content and process management must define an ECM/BPM program.

ECM/BPM Program

A program is mandatory for any organization contemplating ECM/BPM. Putting a program in place does not mean that the organization should look at executing the program in a massive way. The organization need not, and in many cases should not, proceed with a big bang approach to ECM/BPM. At the same time, projects should not be executed in isolation thus creating silos within the organization. Defining a program helps the organization in setting the direction of the ECM/BPM journey. Even if the execution approach is small and tactical, a program will let the organization align such steps in the same strategic direction.

An ECM/BPM program involves four steps:
• Articulating the objectives
• Planning
• Executing the plan
• Measuring the program itself

Objectives

It is essential that the organization understand what the objectives of this program be. Such a program will be deemed to fail unless there is buy-in from all key stake holders in the organization. The top management, functional heads, line managers, and all employees of the organization should be prepared well for the change and its benefits.

The commonly achieved benefits of such a program are:
• Improved organizational efficiency and effectiveness
• Better control of the operations
• Increased collaboration between functions
• Better customer satisfaction levels
• Ability to scale up operations better
• Cost reduction

While all or many of these benefits can be achieved in an ECM/BPM program, it is paramount to identify the primary potential benefits. The goal for potential benefits is unique for an organization, so the first step of such a program is to identify them. The most important potential benefits will be the objectives of the program.

Defining the objectives will be an exercise where representatives from all key stakeholders participate. Potential benefits can be defined only if current pain points are enumerated and analyzed. This is a vital exercise since a solution cannot be arrived at before understanding the problem in detail.

The outcome of this step will be clearly articulated organizational objectives for the ECM/BPM program that are endorsed and internalized by the key stakeholders.

Planning

The previous step defined what the program will bring to the organization. The planning step will define how the objectives will be met, who will make it happen, when and where the benefits can be realized.

The first step will be to put together a team who will manage and monitor the planning and execution of the program. The proposed team should have representation from the top management, business units, user community, information technology, compliance group, and other support functions.

This phase will flush out more details about the individual group pain points and areas of improvements. Besides, the step will define tactical and strategic approaches in dealing with the problems in hand. The most significant part of the planning process is to put together a potential organization-wide roadmap for achieving the objectives.

The last priority for the planning phase will be to prioritize the tactical initiatives that are achievable in the shorter timeframe and identify potential execution plans.

Execution

The execution phase will focus on identified and approved tactical plans. It will involve looking at these tactical plans, defining the problems in detail, identifying potential solution, identifying necessary technological improvements, getting internal or external teams to bring execution capabilities, and finally carrying out solution projects.

Execution phase is a long-term process and will involve a multitude of internal teams, technologies, vendors, and administrative functions. The program team will play a significant role in this phase to ensure that each tactical plan execution is fully aligned with the organizational objectives defined for the program.

Measurement

The most important and the most neglected step in an enterprise wide program is measuring. An organization should have a clear understanding of the ROI (Return On Investment) at every step of the program. ROI is nothing but a quantification of the objectives. Objectives are easy to enumerate, but difficult to quantify. In most cases, measurement and monitoring are lost in the execution step.

The program team will need to define measurable matrices for each tactical plan. These parameters are to be reviewed during and after the execution of the tactical plan. The findings are then to be incorporated into future tactical plan execution and approvals. This will ensure that the ROIs are accrued in the right direction throughout the program.

SharePoint is a huge success story for Microsoft. No other product from their stack in recent history had evoked such overwhelming responses from users worldwide. It solves the problem it was created to solve exceptionally well. Move content away from shared folders. Along come the cool collaboration features – shared document libraries, calendars, meeting sites, tasks, announcements, workflows etc. etc. WSS by itself gives an organization enough features to build a highly collaborative Intranet. And that too for free!

Upgrade to MOSS and you get browser based InfoPath forms, advanced search capabilities, IRM (Information Rights Management), Records Management Analytics and far too many more features. To be honest, the list is comparable to any leading ECM/BPM product out there. It is a salesman’s delight. It ticks at least as much features as a FileNet or a Documentum in an ECM/BPM questionnaire. And it costs way lower than what an IBM or EMC would quote for a similar set of requirements. Great stuff!

Unfortunately, the devil is in the details. SharePoint thrives in a very simplistic world. One can build a simple form based workflow in minutes with SharePoint and InfoPath. The catch here is that the workflow has to be simple (I mean very simple) and linear. What one need to do is to build a simple form template in InfoPath and publish to a document/form library in SharePoint and create a workflow using SharePoint Designer (This is also free!)

But real life is not that simple. If one has to build an expense approval workflow that resembles reality, life gets complicated (I mean very complicated). Let us look at a sample scenario like the one below:
- User fills an expense report form
- Attaches supporting documents
- On submit of the form, it is sent to the user’s manager for approval
- The manager updates some of the form information, adds/modifies the attachments, and approves/rejects the form with comments

To make the solution easier, let us assume that MOSS and InfoPath are used. Even then, to create the workflow one needs good amount of SharePoint and InfoPath programming knowledge. As far as I know, you can’t get this done without writing .Net code or using third party components.

One of the issues that the programmer would stumble upon is with attachments. InfoPath forms embed the attachment files inside the form making them inaccessible to SharePoint workflows. So, some amount of InfoPath code has to be written to extract the attachments and save them to SharePoint document libraries. The workflow has to be created with Visual Studio by a programmer and not with SharePoint Designer by an analyst since custom programming is involved. The other major issue is creating workflow tasks for the user’s manager. Finding the user’s manager from Active Directory will need some code effort. And the most important of them all, propagating the form information to the workflow task would require abundant amounts of thoughts, patience, and creativity. Only expert programmers can handle it.

So, it is not easy to implement a very simple real life scenario in SharePoint. But it is not impossible. Using SharePoint for ECM/BPM needs will require skilled implementers. That’s all! Let us hope that Microsoft will make SharePoint 2010 a better ECM/BPM platform.

Service 2.0 is all about the service provider getting oriented towards the customers’ business success.  So, the service basket should consist of items that are easily understood and adapted by most stakeholders at the customer organization. 

The Ingredients

I would broadly organize the ingredients into four categories:

• Building repeatable solutions
• Leverage SaaS
• Ketchup applications
• Consulting services

Repeatable solutions

The talk around repeatable solutions is not new. I know that every service provider talked about it in the past, are talking now, and will talk in the future. There are some good examples of such solutions out there. Ideally, these solution offerings should package technology, domain knowledge, and best practice usage in a healthy mix. Going forward, the vendors will increasingly interact with the business stake holders as against just the IT personnel. The pattern of the discussions will revolve more around the business benefits than just the IT skills. So, it is imperative that the vendors talk and preferably demonstrate solutions that could impress the business stakeholders. For example, selling the concepts of mortgage workflow solutions or accounts payables automation solutions will be more acceptable than the effort to impress upon the capabilities of a FileNet, Documentum or Lombardi. The technology names can be used to drive positioning advantages, but what needs to be sold is a solution for a business problem. 

SaaS

In the recent years SaaS as a delivery model gained tremendous momentum. The smaller to medium organizations embraced SaaS a lot more than their bigger counterparts. As a delivery model SaaS is here to stay, but I am not fully convinced that it will totally replace the conventional IT infrastructure in enterprises. It makes sense for some service providers to invest in a SaaS infrastructure of their own and use it as a delivery channel as well as a pre-sales tool. The benefits of SaaS as a solution delivery channel are widely discussed and accepted. As a pre-sales tool, this model holds tremendous potential as well. A potential customer of an enterprise solution can experience a solution before actually deciding on investing on the infrastructure. And this is not merely being on the other side of the table during a vendor demo, but by signing up for the service on a pilot basis for as much time as s/he wishes. This way, having a SaaS infrastructure actually locks the customer in and obviously the vendor does not have to worry about a prolonged sales cycle.

Ketchup Applications

Ketchups are consumed along with a main course dish and are used to make the consumption process better. In the software world as well, ketchup applications can be used to enhance the functionality and usability of enterprise software products. For example, a web based process analyzer reports viewer for FileNet, a scanning plug-in for Alfresco, or a TIFF viewer with annotation capabilities for SharePoint can add tremendous value to these platforms. Service 2.0 vendors can package reusable solution code into such ketchup applications to speedup implementation timeframe, gain competitive advantages during the sales process, and fill a lot of gaps that the enterprise product vendors left out. Ketchup applications can be licensed to customers along with a service assignment or separately allowing the vendor to bring in revenues independent of the service contract.

Consulting

Service 2.0 companies could focus a lot of building the technology and domain expertise and using it for consulting assignments. Technology consulting is mostly about understanding the customer’s business and coming up with a strategy for information technology applications. Many organizations engage consultants to understand and document their pain points and come up with high level solution strategies. In today’s world it is difficult to zero-in on a particular technology or vendor to solve a set of business problems. Many times customers decide on technologies or vendors based on criteria other than the best suited ones. This could be because they could get biased by vendors or pressure groups. Sometimes the required levels of competence may not exist in the customer organization to take technology decisions. Service 2.0 vendors could provide consulting services to their customers in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of technologies when it comes to solving the business problem in hand. These services will assist its customers in choosing optimal software application solutions for their business needs.

There were many discussions about IT Services 2.0 before and we have seen many definitions of the phrase. All of those are derivations of individual opinions and I don’t think there is any official definition for the concept yet. Here is my take on the next generation of IT services.

So far, the best articulated opinion I have seen is from Chris Barbin of Apprio (http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/editorial.php?id=129). While I agree with Chris on most aspects, there is an apprehension that he is limiting the scope to only SaaS based services in general, and Salesforce.com based services in particular. Here is an attempt to define IT Services 2.0 in a broader sense. It is clear that many of the thoughts presented by Chris are borrowed in this definition as well.

General Objectives

IT Services 2.0 is not too different from the erstwhile (1.0?) services in its theoretical objectives. If we were to look at both from an idealistic viewpoint, the guiding principles would look the same. The difference will primarily be in how the services are rendered and the motivations behind adhering to the objectives. The objectives recommended to be set for a 2.0 solution are:

1. Tangible business benefits to the customer
The most important objective of a Services 2.0 solution is to ensure tangible and measurable benefits to the customer’s business.  This is easier said than done. IT services companies hardly understand their customers and their business today. I don’t think we can blame these services companies because in many cases the IT departments of the customers may not have ample knowledge about the businesses their organizations are into. It is imperative that IT services companies invest in KYC (Know Your Customer) exercises throughout the engagement periods. The services company should be able to understand, articulate, deliver, and reiterate the business benefits derived out of an engagement to the customer.

2. Smaller and measurable project life cycles
In today’s scenario, customers don’t have the stomach for monolithic projects. In my opinion, the biggest positive to the IT industry from the global economic downturn will be the intolerance to very large IT initiatives. Since every investment will now be dissected and analyzed in all possible directions, it is essential to realize an ROI and that too in as little time as possible. So, individual IT projects will be looked at as 3-6 month exercises that will start yielding benefits within a maximum of 7-8 months from the initial decision point. This will enable the customers to realize the ROIs within the same budgeting year.

3. Expectations on value addition
A major requirement for a 2.0 service provider is to be savvy about the customer’s business parameters. Rather than supplying with lines of code or people who can code, these firms will be expected to provide the customers with ideas and suggestions as to how technology can help improve their business. The services firms will be expected to bring expertise and prior experience in solving the exact problem the customer is facing today.

4. “Show me” as compared to “Tell me” approach
The current approach to IT services puts a lot of thrust to tons of presentations, documents, status reports and innumerable meetings. Both the vendor and customer spend too much time and effort in communicating with each other formally with words, numbers and pictures. The thrust of the 2.0 services will be to show how things work right from the first meeting. “Show Me” as an approach will play a significant role in selling the services as well, thus reducing the sales cycle times drastically. SaaS will be a significant delivery model in 2.0 services and with the hosted approach, “Show Me” will be lot easier for the service provider to handle and the customer to comprehend.

5. Assembling instead of building
Building software from scratch is a thing of the past. Now we are surrounded with umpteen enterprise software platforms, technology frameworks, and rapid application development toolkits. Many of the current service providers make use of “reusable components” they have accumulated over a long period of time. I am talking about going to the next level of software solution preparation. This process will be carried out more by solution consultants with minimal effort from programmers. To achieve reduced turn around time for solution delivery, services companies will have to practice the art of quick solution assembly.

6. Paying for value generated and not for resources
What all these will culminate into is a significant shift in service vendors’ mindsets. Service 2.0 companies will not talk about billability of resources, will not send timesheets for customer approval, and will not look for deploying their workforce on customers’ sites on contract. Instead, the focus will be on how quickly they can get out of a customer’s active project. Billing will be based on the achieved business value generated. Most contracts will be subscription based or fixed bids.

What are the key ingredients of a successful 2.0 IT services offering? I have some thoughts on it as well. More on that topic, next time!

In India, there are two distinct markets at least for enterprise software applications. Let me call them the Day Market and the Night Market respectively. The day market is something that I have been talking about for a while. It consists of the traditional businesses who do business with a billion plus residents of this country. The night market is a new phenomenon. This market comprises of organizations whom we fondly call BPOs. The working hours of many BPOs coincide with those of their customers in America or Western Europe which means they operate at night in India. Hence the term night market. I assume that similar markets exist in many other countries which benefit from business process outsourcing.

Why do we need to consider BPOs as a separate market itself and not a vertical segment within the whole market called India? My reasoning here is that the dynamics of this market is entirely different from any other business vertical. Besides, you could see almost all industry verticals within the BPO market. So, it makes sense to look at this as a separate market itself and come up with strategies for selling software solutions in it.

The BPOs fall largely into two categories: Captive BPOs and BPO Businesses.

Captive BPOs are BPO arms of major corporations in the West and are owned and operated by these business houses. These organizations process the business functions of their respective parent and follow their systems and process standards. The applications and IT infrastructure are normally replicated as is, however good or bad they are. If you happen to sell a product or system which is part of their global infrastructure, you might get lucky and be able to sell some licenses to these BPOs.

The BPO businesses are organizations which provides process outsourcing services to third part customers. It is a big business and there are plenty of players in the market. These organizations offer tremendous opportunities for ECM/BPM. It is not often realized because most vendors approach this segment with a traditional license selling mindset.

The most important aspect of the BPO business is that everything is transaction based. For most BPOs, the business model revolves around transactions. Pricing to their customers are based on transactions. So the BPO management always thinks about their expenses and investments based on transactions. What this means is that when making an ECM/BPM decision, they need to calculate the ROI at the transaction level. If it takes them X Rupees to process a health insurance claim now, and with an ECM/BPM solution the cost of the transaction can be reduced to Y Rupees per claim, there is a business case. The entire industry works on cost arbitrage, so it is paramount to maintain transaction level costs down. More over, their contract with a customer for a particular business process could be time bound. So, it makes an investment decision all the more difficult. As long as the vendors can approach the BPOs with a transaction based pricing for their ECM/BPM solutions there will be a good chance of success. The ECM vendors will have to change their rigid license sale mentality and come up with creative ways of working with BPO companies, it will be all the more better for the ECM/BPM industry.

If I were running a BPO organization, the factors I would lose my sleep over will be Cost, Security, and Service Levels. I can’t quite prioritize them in terms of importance, but if I absolutely have to, I will do it in the same order as listed above. Cost is the most important factor since the existence of the industry in a country like India is because of the cost arbitrage. Security of information is critical because if there is a lax on it, not only the business but the entire industry suffers from bad publicity. The West hasn’t accepted the outsourcing phenomenon quite kindly yet and security lapse will be a good stick in the hands of the critics. Service level agreements are important because the customer’s business has to run smoothly even if certain parts of the business process are carried out halfway across the globe.

Given these priorities, ECM/BPM requirements will be predominantly on plain document management, records management, and workflow management. Document management will enhance the organization’s capability to manage the content that is coming from customers, and attach the right access levels to it. Record management capabilities will be critical from a retention and destruction perspective of customer documents. I would guess, it will apply more to the destruction of records and providing reporting of the content received in BPO organizations. Workflow capabilities will enable the BPOs in ensuring SLAs and providing accurate reports to customers on SLAs.

Another aspect of ECM that could play a major role in BPOs is automated capture systems with solid forms processing capabilities. This is one of my favorite topics and I will write about it separately.

To summarize, ECM/BPM solutions could help the BPO industry significantly, but it hasn’t made its presence felt in the marketplace so far. If the vendors could understand the pulse of this market and come up with creative pricing strategies, I am sure that BPO companies will definitely see the difference such solutions can make to their businesses and ultimately the bottom lines.

ROI is the most important criteria for any enterprise project initiatives. It is all the more important for ECM/BPM projects. This is because ECM/BPM will definitely alter the way a company is carrying out their operations. So, it is essential for companies to understand ROI before deciding on an ECM/BPM course. Most organizations actually carry out an ROI calculation exercise to arrive at the feasibility of the initiative. But these calculations are seldom revisited after the implementation of the systems. There can be three potential outcomes of the decision to go ahead with the project: Success, failure, something in-between. If the project is successful, the organization do not see a need to waste time on re-looking at the ROI calculation, unless the vendor wants to come up with a case study. Even in cases where case studies are made, the ROI part of the case study is arrived at more to sustain the feel-good-factor of the vendor and customer. If the project bombs, there are no discussions on the ROI because it is evident that there are no returns at all. If the outcome is something in-between, the debates will be on how the system handles the business requirements sufficiently, how this could have been better, whose fault it is, and what are all the reasons why the system is like this and not better. In my experience, ROI is often a forgotten term post technology and vendor selection.

How do we arrive at the ROI for a potential ECM/BPM implementation? I don’t think there is a straight forward answer to this. I have been searching for years to find out whether there is a spreadsheet out there which will churn out the ROI for a FileNet implementation, and as you might have guessed, couldn’t locate one. ROI calculation is never a straightforward exercise. It depends on a lot of factors.

ROI is nothing but a quantification of the benefits the system provides the organization. The benefits are easy to enumerate, but are hard to quantify. For example, any ECM/BPM implementation will provide many of the following benefits: Cost reduction, improvement in efficiency, increase in control, ability to scale up operations seamlessly, better disaster recovery capabilities, and improved end customer satisfaction. How do we quantify benefits like improved end customer satisfaction or better disaster recovery capabilities? It becomes all the more difficult to this exercise upfront and as part of the decision making process!

One needs to start somewhere. I believe that the first step has to be prioritization of the potential benefits of the proposed system. The priorities could change significantly from one organization to another. Prioritization becomes easier if there were a goal with which the whole thinking process started. Ideally this is an exercise the organization needs to do by itself without involving the vendors. Then convert these benefits to numbers!

As an example, consider an insurance company with about 100 branches across the country considering an ECM/BPM solution. At an average, this organization processes 50,000 new life insurance policy applications per month. They have two employees per branch to process the applications at the branch level and a team of 60 employees to process the application at the central office including the underwriters.

Assume that the goal for an ECM/BPM implementation is set as increasing efficiency of operations The next level benefits are of importance are ease of scaling operations, cost reduction, and increased control of operations.

Here is a sample back-of-the-envelope type calculation.

Similarly, one can come up with calculations for other benefits. Take the same example above and look at it from a cost reduction perspective. Assume each policy application set consists of 20 pages at an average, and the set is photocopied 6 times during processing. Xerox charges are X per page and the total amount spent in one application processing for photocopying alone is 6 x 20 x X = 120X. The monthly average photocopying bill is about 50,000 x 120X = 6 Million X.  Once the organization implements an imaging solution, the savings will be 6 Million X – scanning cost.

Assume that the organization has decided to keep 4 months of current processing applications at the HO before sending them to archive. It amounts to about 200,000 applications which will consist of about 4 Million pages. These records are kept in a records room in the HO which is about 1000 square feet in dimensions. If the per sqft rental is Y per month, the organization will be spending a total of 12000Y in a year to keep the records for reference, before sending them to archive. With an imaging solution, this cost can be eliminated and all the physical records can be sent for archival from day one onwards.

This exercise goes on like this until the organization quantifies all the potential benefits. Once it is done, we have one side of the ROI equation. Next is to figure out the cost of the ECM/BPM solution. That is an involved exercise, and let us look at it next time.

Traditionally, capture systems are all about large mail rooms, tons of paper documents, high speed scanners, and software applications which can handle these types of loads. Companies like Captiva (EMC now) and Kofax built or acquired products which suit such capture needs and became market leaders over the years. While majority of the capture requirements in the US and some western European countries still resemble to what is described above, the new markets offer a totally different challenge.

If you take a closer look at the leading capture applications in the US, you can easily figure out that they cashed in big on the healthcare system in that country. For example, Captiva has a bunch of offerings for healthcare claims processing alone! I guess many concepts on data capture were evolved while trying to solve health claims processing as a business problem. And these concepts might have gotten acceptance across multiple vertical segments as well.

The US and many other western countries do have good physical infrastructure for shipping paper across efficiently. So, centralized capture work in these markets reasonably well. In many emerging countries, the situation is very different. Many of the countries have reasonably good communication infrastructure, but they lack the physical infrastructure and logistics systems. So, data capture systems in these countries will need to be distributed, and document and data shipping will have to be in electronic mode. What this means is that products such as InputAccel or Ascent Capture will not be viable for these markets.

Of course, these products mentioned above do have distributed versions. Many of these products come with a lot more features than what is actually required. More features are always fine, but the price tag is not!! It is a challenge to convince a customer in a country like India to buy a distributed Kofax Document Exchange Server.

The need for these markets is a simple capture application which can scan, index and send the images and index data to a central site. It needs to handle a volume of 1000 pages to 1500 pages a day. Often 10-15 pages are scanned together which constitute a set of documents required for a single transaction. It would be great if there are features like automated document separation using position within the scan set or using barcodes or patch codes. The icing on the cake will be features like cropping of specified zones of the scanned page (Usually for signature or photo), offline/online capabilities, and integration capabilities to FileNet, Documentum, Oracle UCM or Interwoven. The pricing could be anywhere between USD 150-250 per location.

If there is a capture product out there which can meet these criteria, I bet it will be a leader in these markets.

What would be the magic in choosing an ECM platform? What would be the considerations of the CIOs when choosing an ECM product platform? Based on my experience in the Indian market, I would say that the three most important factors many CIOs would look at are:

• Price
• Comfort level with the product vendor
• Brand value of the vendor

in that exact order. Anything else comes way below these criteria.

Price is the most influential selection criteria for any corporate decision. In most tender situations, it is the L1 which normally gets selected. (The least priced bid is referred to as L1) There could be an occasional exception to this rule, but then the other two factors play such an important role in the selection process. Many decisions could be based only on the initial price the company is paying out to the vendor. In many situations, the wrong platform is chosen for all the right reasons!

As a CIO if you are very comfortable in dealing with one of the vendors, first you will be approaching them for any new initiatives. The moment the management decides to bring ECM into the organization, the CIO would ring up his/her most trusted vendor. This vendor from that point onwards will start influencing the decisions of the CIO in all aspects. I must admit that this is a fantastic technique employed by many leading vendors and is a very successful sales strategy for the vendors. Will the customer benefit from this strategy? It is always a 50-50.

I have interacted with some CIOs who swear only by big names. The trust of these CIOs can be won over only if you are an IBM, HP, Infosys, Oracle, or somebody in that league!! I can’t find faults with these CIOs, because they are insuring themselves against some hard questions during and after the decision process. Will this strategy work? Again a 50-50!!

But, choosing an ECM platform is a much bigger decision. The decision should be a well informed one, and as far as possible the decision process should not be outsourced to an ECM vendor. While maintaining the criteria mentioned above are important, there could be a couple of more factors which should play an important role in making that all important decision.

Cost
Since cost is the most important consideration, one should consider the long term cost implications of the decision. Pricing will have four major components: The initial product pricing, the year on year product maintenance costs, initial implementation costs, and long term maintenance and solution improvement costs. The first 3 are easy to understand, and it is often the last one in the list that causes enough headaches to the company. What I have seen recently is that for enterprise ECM rollouts, the initial implementation costs could be between 30 to 40% of the product costs, and the year to year product maintenance costs could be between 15 to 20% of the product pricing. But the year to year maintenance and solution improvements will be anywhere between 50 to 200% of the product purchase cost. If we look at a 5 year cost structure, the solution maintenance expenses will be the most significant of the total spending. 

Solution
If you are looking at an enterprise wide ECM implementation, any one of the leading products will do the job for you. Nobody can find fault with you if you choose one of Documentum, FileNet, OpenText, Oracle UCM, Interwoven, or Microsoft SharePoint. All of these products, except SharePoint, have been around for a while and have many successful implementations. Almost all of these products in some form or the other will give you features from imaging to records management to web content management to email management. But at the same time, choosing one of these products will never assure you that you will have a world class ECM implementation. What you will find out is that it is how you architect and implement the solution that matters. Your key to success therefore is not always the product, but it is the implementation. It means you need to get the right resources to do the right job.

Support
As mentioned earlier, as a customer you will shell out more money in maintaining and upgrading the solution. So it is essential that you have access to a reliable support infrastructure. The product vendors will always talk about support that is limited to product upgrades and defect fixes. ECM implementation involves installation and configuration of the base product along with a lot of customizations and custom application development. Invariably, the product vendor will never take responsibilities for customizations and other custom applications. You need resources at your disposal for supporting and upgrading the solution locally.

What I am trying to say here is that availability of quality resources to implement and support the solution is a very important factor in the success of an ECM solution rollout. While choosing a platform product, one should look at the ecosystem around a product or technology. The big names in ECM like FileNet, Documentum, Oracle etc. have a good set of implementation partners and there are many skilled and certified professionals out there on these technologies. If you choose a smaller player, you might be tied to that company for all support needs and at some time they can hold you to ransom as well.

In India, IBM and EMC2 have built good ecosystems around FileNet and Documentum. They have partners in all parts of the country and there are growing numbers of professionals who are skilled and certified on these technologies. Oracle and Interwoven are definitely trying to get there. You can never go wrong with any of these products as long as you have the right resources to implement the solution.

Business Process Management is a term that is beaten to death far too many times in the recent past. Innumerable vendors, analysts, and experts exist in the market who will tell you all about how to use technology to manage your business processes. I myself have sold BPM solutions to major enterprises. It is a beautiful concept, and if implemented right you will get a lot of your process headaches solved.

There are plenty of challenges when it comes to making BPM implementation and sustenance in an enterprise a success. These challenges broadly fall into categories of people, process, and business priorities.

It is easy to understand the people challenges. Most human beings are change resistant. We hate anything that intends to change the way we do things. Most business processes require human interventions at many or all points. Many of us have seen that users resist new system implementations the most.

Many organizations constantly experiment with their internal processes. Processes change very often thus making any BPM implementation hard to cope with these changes. The real world is very dynamic and so the internal processes have to change in order to keep up with the markets. BPM implementations should be very agile to meet these types of requirements. Many times, rigid BPM systems pose roadblocks on business agility.

Business priorities change dramatically in any organization. The business world is moving towards collaboration and coexistence. Companies are trying to focus on their core competencies and outsource anything that fall in the fringe areas. From a BPM perspective, this trend seriously jeopardizes internal control and tracking. BPM is traditionally an internal issue and it can very well work for an organization if all the transactions are handled internally. The organization can easily map the internal processes and enforce SLAs and escalations at task levels. A major driver for BPM implementation that I have seen recently in many organizations is productivity monitoring. If many of the transaction tasks in a process are outsourced to external vendors, productivity monitoring and task level SLA tracking become irrelevant. Besides there could be far too many disconnects in the process flow which make it extremely difficult to manage and monitor the process.

For example, the loan approval process in a bank consists of many steps such as data entry, customer information verification, credit rating, verification of documents, loan approval, and loan disbursement. Out of these steps, the bank can technically outsource every step excepting loan approval and disbursement. Obviously these steps could be outsourced to different vendors who possess competencies in the respective function. In such an outsourced process scenario, how will the bank implement a BPM solution which can track each transaction step by step? Unless there are systems or platforms which can get the bank integrated with its extended arms, an internal BPM implementation will not yield the expected results.

In my opinion, BPM is a wonderful concept if an organization keeps its entire transaction processing in-house. It could work well if the organization exposes its BPM systems to an outsourced vendor so that the system can track the process flow effectively. With outsourcing becoming a global phenomenon and information and system security concerns swell the thinking process, exposing the systems to an outsourced vendor may be in a different country becomes extremely unviable. I think this trend could seriously impact adoption of BPM systems.