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.

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!

IT and business groups within big organizations haven’t had the best cohesion ever.  This is a much debated topic in various books, blogs, discussion forums, seminars, and workshops. The existence of such a divide is well acknowledged and accepted. Why do I want to talk about it again? I believe that many of the discussions around this topic were too theoretical. But it is time we look at the issue through a much simpler pair of lenses. It is important for this blog because, any discussion about enterprise BPM or content management will not be complete without understanding this particular issue.

Why don’t IT and business groups talk to each other in the same language? I would say, in many organizations:

• They don’t take the trouble to understand each other
• They have their own respective priorities and budgets
• There may not be anybody whose job is to ensure that these groups talk to each other
• The thinking is so compartmental that people fail to see beyond their immediate problems and tasks
• Bridging this gap is pretty lower in the priority lists of the executive management

There could be another hundred such reasons that can be enumerated. The simpler fact is, we are talking about people! They like to be in their comfort zones, as long as there are no major incentives to break through them.

Historically, companies created innumerable inefficiencies within their four walls. The hierarchies, process controls, policies and the bureaucracies associated with them hamper the smooth sailing of organizations. They could afford to ignore such issues till recently. But, times are changing. The current economic scenario puts a lot of pressure on organizations to cleanup their acts. With the workforce shrinking and pressure to perform in difficult market conditions increasing, businesses have to look at better and smarter ways of doing things. So, it is paramount that companies try to bridge this divide.

Is there some magic to solve this issue? If there were, somebody would have succeeded by now. I have more questions than answers:

IT is a support group within companies. So, why do they need separate budgets? Should they derive their revenues from their internal customers? Why would a company year on year set aside x amount of money only as a cost budget? If there is a customer-vendor relationship between IT and business groups, will there be improved interactions between them? How many companies out there tried and tested such a model?

Do companies follow a process of discussing about newer IT initiatives to all business groups within the company? Are there initiatives to share learnings from one group’s experience with the rest?

Did anybody try to create a bridge group with leaders from IT and business, thus forming a small team with the sole responsibility of formulating IT solutions for business problems?

Has any organization tried to utilize the skill levels of IT services vendors in bridging this gap?

It’s been a while since I got the patience to write something down. Last six months were eventful. My new venture started off well and I had been working closely with customers in multiple geographies. What this meant to me is that I once again got back into looking at the finer details of content and process management implementations. This period provided me with a re-exposure to the American market.

During the 3 odd months I spent in the US, it was clear to me that the times are tough. I was consulting for a large banking corporation in the mid-west. The banking industry is badly hit, and it made the remaining players very cautious with anything and everything they do. The 2009 budgeting processes are complete and priorities are simple:

• Keep the lights on
• Invest only on projects that give clear returns within the year

Big infrastructure investment thoughts are clearly out of the window. No one wants to see monolithic projects being executed or even mentioned. So for vendors, selling more licenses of ECM or BPM is an uphill task. I am sure that it is going to hit the ECM BPM software industry in a big way.

The focus of enterprises is to reduce operational costs. What they would want to do in 2009 will be to do as much as possible to improve operational efficiency (Means more FTE reductions). ECM/BPM is definitely a technology that will help organizations to achieve the two aforementioned priorities. If there are innovative ways of utilizing the existing investments in technology infrastructure, and the benefits of such smaller initiatives are to be realized within a short period of time, many of the enterprises will look at such options with glee. Most of the organizations I have known have enough and more software licenses of some ECM/BPM system or the other and adequate hardware infrastructure that run those software. But they are seldom used effectively. Enterprises hardly have bridged the gap between IT and business priorities. I haven’t seen many customers who reap the benefits of a content enabled business process management system to its fullest potential.

The need of the hour (rather the year) is to implement quick and effective solutions to improve business agility. ECM and BPM can very much be at the centre stage for providing businesses with the agility they need to steer through the tougher times. The IT departments and services vendors will need to internalize this reality and come up with cost effective business solutions to help the enterprises. The shift from billability to customer value-add could be hard to realign to for many IT services providers. There could definitely be some smarter vendors who could reinvent themselves to become the next generation IT service companies. It is imperative that a 2.0 revolution happens in the IT services sector as well.

The current economic scenario could very well pave the way for greater coherence between business and IT within enterprises. That would indeed be a welcome change in the right direction.

India is home to a billion plus people with a GDP of about USD 1.5 trillion. Its GDP is the fourth largest in the world and is growing at close to 10% year to year in recent years. This is not hot information. Analysts to politicians, industrialists to farmers, and professors to housewives across the world talked about this again and again. Why am I bringing it up here? These numbers are significant when we look at the ECM market. The various surveys by Gartner, Meta, and Forrester estimate the ECM global market anywhere between 7 Billion to 9Billion USD in 2008. The rough break-up is 40% product sales and the rest services. The year to year growth is in the vicinity of 20%.

The Indian ECM market is estimated at USD 45 million in 2008. This will be about 25 million in product sales and the rest in services. Conservatively the year to year growth could be between 25 and 30%. India’s ECM market positioning in reference to the rest of the world doesn’t quite make sense, given the fact that its GDP fares very well against that of the world. The truth is that these numbers are closer to reality, and the good news is that the numbers will have to balance soon.

The requirements for ECM solutions can be directly proportional to the economic situation of the market. We have seen in matured markets that the major players contributing to the economic growth have always adopted ECM/BPM as a driver for productivity improvements, service enhancements, and increased revenue generation. Over the recent years a similar trend has started in India as well.

The bad news is that India has to catch up with the developed economies in terms of ECM solution adoption. What the western world has been doing for more than 20 years now has to be implemented in as much as a quarter of that time period. That itself is the good news as well. The country can always try to do things the smarter way. This is very similar to the telecommunication scenario we experienced recently. Between the late nineties to today, the country witnessed unprecedented telecom boom, and it has more than caught up with the rest of the world in telecom infrastructure. In fact, the country today is at a much more advanced stage in terms of its telecom infrastructure in comparison with certain developed countries. A similar trend cannot be ruled out for ECM as well in the next 5-8 years.

I believe that there exist huge opportunities for ECM product and service vendors in the country right now. The banks, insurance companies, manufacturing sector, government, public sector enterprises, and infrastructure players even today grapple with the monster problem of handling unstructured information. Very few organizations possess ECM solutions as of now. For these sectors mentioned above, ECM could add value in document management, process management, and compliance management, in that order.

The entry point for the market is plain document management. Where a vendor can start focusing is in providing imaging and image management solutions to contain the paper monster. Once these organizations are used to seeing and feeling paper in electronic image formats, workflows and records management could be added to the mix to leverage full ECM capabilities. I would say for the next 2-3 years, ECM vendors should focus on selling plain scan-store-retrieve solutions to the Indian market. It is easy for the customer to understand and vendor to sell.

Is it an easy proposition? Not necessarily. ECM product vendors may not like their products to be tagged as a scan-store system. They may always want to impress the customers with catchwords like SOA, BPM, Compliance Framework etc. Besides, scanning is easily said than done. Implementing a business scanning solution suitable for Indian enterprises could be the most challenging task in this entire mix. I am sure there could be a couple of smart vendors who are working on these kinds of solutions for the Indian market out there.