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!

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.

I have been convinced for a while that the ECM market in India is huge. In the previous post, I tried to put my thoughts across on that topic. But as a practitioner and vendor of ECM, the struggle has been selling the expertise and solutions in this market. My experiments with selling ECM have been going on for the past three years. Innumerable mistakes were made, many lessons have been learned, plenty of ideas were generated, and a bit of success was tasted during this period.

Selling ECM or any enterprise system in India is not an easy task. There are certain facts about the software market in India that any vendor should internalize:
• Nobody wants to pay for software (They will, if left with no other choice)
• Hardware is everything
• Priority number one for any purchase decision is save-my-back
• Customer expects every feature under the sun in what you sell
• Vendors should only listen to the customer at least till the purchase order is issued (You should continue to listen till you get paid for your own sake. But, once the money is in the bank, customer will have to listen to you)
I am exaggerating a little here, I admit. But you will experience something close to these observations in 8 out of 10 software sales cycles.

Let us get more ECM specific now. The ECM market in India can be roughly divided into 3 as observed by a vendor. The segmentation is of course based on pricing:
• Segment 1: Up to 5 Lakhs (USD 12,500)
• Segment 2: Between 5 and 25 Lakhs (USD 12,500 to 62,500)
• Segment 3: 25 Lakhs and above (USD 62500 and above)

The vendors should very clearly position themselves in these brackets. No matter which segment you are playing in, the customer expects value for the money paid. Whether they get it or not is debatable.

Segment 1 is a complex market. You can sell initially if you know somebody closely at the target prospect, if you can impress just one of the top decision makers very well, or just by harassing the hell out of somebody at the prospect with your sales calls. Once you are done with some initial sales and have a couple of customers on board, your problem starts. Selling consistently in this segment is the most difficult task. You can’t justify direct sales efforts with the kind of pricing that works here. The product has to be very easy to setup and run. You should have specific vertical scenarios well mapped into the product. Scaling up will need setting up of a good channel network. The problem with channels that work on volumes and smaller margins per sale is that they many not have any expertise in managing the customers, their requirements, or problems. Until and unless you have a great product, good support infrastructure, and good documentation, bringing in revenues in this market is almost impossible. In India, I haven’t come across any vendor who has done a great job at cracking this problem. One of my failed attempts was to get into this market with a Microsoft SharePoint Services based ECM product. I have written about that story sometime last week.

Segment 2 is the crowded space. Almost every ECM vendor in the country had at least one go at this market. NewGen has been here for a while, and they captured a good percentage of the market by being here long enough. IBM DB2 Content Manager had its own share of success in this market. FileNet, Documentum, and Interwoven have tried to get into this segment as well. This market segment is sensitive to everything that you can imagine like price, features, integration capabilities, market presence etc. in that order. This market segment includes mid-sized organizations and departments within larger companies. What you sell in this segment will include the product(s) and implementation services. Once you can minimize the implementation efforts by pre-packaging as much possible in packaged solutions, you as a vendor will be able to survive in this market. Mostly the customers don’t care too much whether the solution is open source, Microsoft, Java, proprietary, or standards based. The main factor still will be the price. The problem with the market segment is that the sales cycles can go anywhere up to 8 months or a year until you either win the deal or just get thoroughly fed up.

Segment 3 is a new evolving market segment. Of late, some organizations have realized the importance of looking ECM as an enterprise wide initiative and not at departmental level. The success stories in this segment for the vendors come from global customers who end up rolling out the globally standardized corporate ECM solution in India as well, or certain forward looking companies adopting ECM for their India operations. The main drivers for the ECM solution selection are return on investment calculations, vendor alignments, corporate global standards, and of course save-my-back considerations. Many times technology or product features have nothing to do with a product or solution selection. This is precisely why the bigger players such as IBM, Oracle, EMC2, or HP are bound to control this market segment. I am not convinced that open source or solutions from smaller vendors can make a big impact on this segment. I predict a straight fight between IBM FileNet and EMC2 Documentum in this segment.

Segment 3 provides huge opportunities for service providers as well. As stated above, the product choice has something to do with reasons other than technology. But once the selection is made, technology and expertise come to the fore. There exists a good eco-system around products such as FileNet or Documentum that makes the customers less dependent on the vendors themselves. Every customer will look out for local implementation and support availability. I sincerely hope that people like me may not starve after all!!