Enterprise Content Management - answers.

Below are the answers to questions stated in cms blog questions.doc.


2 The Chaos of Content
List 3 sources of tension between IT and the user community, in terms of enterprise content management.

Below are direct quotations that describe sources of tension between IT and the user community.

1. “We see it as a hybridization,” Theresa continues. “We have an even
split when it comes to the instigator. There are plenty of business
owners who have a content-related need, and come to us for an answer.
We have an equal number of IT folks who are tired of the business
managers coming to them saying, ‘we have a problem and you need to
fix it for us.’ IT gets that a lot,” she notes.

2. IT has imprinted into their DNA the primordial urge to “centralize,”
“simplify” and “manage” information. Business owners are equally
prone to “leverage,” “access” and “empower” themselves with any and
all content they can get their mitts on. When these two forces are
allowed to continue unabated, there is no other word for it than “chaos.”

3. She continues, “When you see the business side get more savvy
about IT, it’s because the IT group isn’t meeting the
businessperson’s needs, and not moving quickly enough. The
business side recognizes that IT has a huge challenge, so they
(the business owners) decide to go out and get it done on their own.
They then bring in their own things, and that just creates more chaos.

4 Unlock the Value of Content to Maximize Online Business Performance
Getting the right content, to the right person, is a popular KM phrase.
How can better content enable enterprises to optimize the customer experience?

Quotation:

Content management solutions help companies optimize the
customer experience by delivering the most accurate, current,
persuasive and appropriate content. Getting the right content
to the right person, at the right time—across all channels
including the Web, call centers, print, storefront and
wireless—means enterprises can:

- strenghten customer loyalty

By providing higher-quality and contextually
relevant information to customers through
a personalized interaction, positive customer
experiences keep customers satisfied, decrease
defections, increase sales growth
and increase lifetime customer value.

- achieve unified brands, messages and corporate image
- accelerate worldwide product launches and promotions
- optimize customer process efficiencies
- provide regulatory compliance and security

Content management solutions help companies employ
persuasive content to optimize the customer
experience—delivering the most accurate, up-to-date
and appropriate content.

6 Content Management vs. Knowledge Management
The article mentions some differences between CM and KM. Which of these terms describe CM, and which describe KM?
o Capture - describes Content Management
o Create - describes Knowledge Management
o Route - describes Knowledge Management
o Manage - describes Content Management
o Convert- describes Knowledge Management
o Publish - describes Content Management

Is CM or KM bigger in scope, i.e. does one belong under the other’s umbrella?

CM is more 'general' and is bigger in scope that KM which pays attention to
details. CM belongs under KM's umbrella.

8 Managing Email Overload: The Smart, Secure and Legal Way
Name 3 drivers that dictate what an email management solution must do.

- Email as a source of corporate records needed for regulatory
compliance and legal discovery
- Email growth as an IT headache
- Email as a source of business-critical information

Name 5 requirements of any email management solution.

- Retain messages in compliance with regulations and
corporate policies;
- Provide a highly scalable repository able to keep
pace with email volume growth and long retention
periods to aggregate billions of email messages;
- Facilitate searching as required for legal
discovery;
- Improve system performance and reliability;
- Integrate email with other corporate records
and content.


What are some consequences of not having an email management system?

Without one, you will: spend more on administration;
overloaded servers will degrade the performance
of your email system; and users will be
burdened with mailbox limits. Further, you will
be subject to the risks of non-compliance and/or
spend millions of dollars and countless hours
combing through voluminous files to produce
messages required for legal discovery and regulatory
requests. Finally, important information
that could be shared and leveraged to the benefit
of the organization may be lost.

10 Today's Search: All The Power. No Pain.
What are some criteria for evaluating an enterprise search solution?

- ease of installation
- time needed to learn how to build interfaces and put the server up
- ability to easily manipulate the user interface

11 The Emerging Role of SharePoint in ECM
Do you think SharePoint is a good choice for students to search a discussion forum on COLWeb? Why or why not?

In my opinion, Share Point is a good choice to combine different types of software
which adds functionality that users could take advantage of. Very often people don't
realise that there exists certain software that could be useful in some cases and
therefore do a lot of 'extra work' wasting time. What is more, I've found out that
when it comes to simply searching and accessing the documents, SharePoint is the
ideal solution.

12 Top Five Reasons to Outsource Document Capture
Name the “top five reasons to outsource your document capture project”.

1. Focus on your organization’s core
business processes;
2. Improve service levels to clients and reduce
transaction costs at the same time;
3. Faster and more secure implementation
of compliance and discovery initiatives;
4. Providing near-term cost savings
while avoiding technological obsolescence;
and
5. Cost-effective disaster recovery.

13 Will Your Next CMS Scale to Meet Your Demands?
Is content management something you buy, or something you do? Explain.

Content management is more of a pursuit
than a product. It’s something that you
do rather than something that you build or
buy.You know your organization, its needs
and its appetite, and propensity for change.
Finding a flexible, scalable solution that
best aligns with a well-defined strategy is a
logical goal.

According to the quotation above, I have to agree that
content management is something that we do. It's about
connecting some correct, appropriate strategy with
solutions what in my opinion creates something that
is custom made, prepared right for particular company.

14 The Value of SharePoint-Based ECM Solutions
What are the key chunks of functionality that an enterprise content management system should have?

transactional content
functionality such as document scanning
and imaging, report management and enterprise-
class business process management
(BPM) <--- not yet provided within SharePoint today.

Enterprise-class functionalities:

advanced content
lifecycles, unified policy administration, central
audit logging and reporting and intelligent content
organization

15 How to Correct Your Organization’s Content Myopia
What is the best approach to transforming these business areas with Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?

Below there is some information on how to implement particular
solutions mentioned in the question.

o Accounts payable
To build a content-
enabled solution for AP, start by scanning,
classifying and indexing paper documents as
well as capturing electronic invoices. Save
time and improve accuracy using tools such as
queue-based workflows and automatic notification.
Integrate accounts payable information
with enterprise resource planning and other
line-of-business systems to ensure it gains the
widest possible currency.

o Contract management
To implement a
solution, begin by leveraging collaborative
workspaces to share documents, track deliverables
and hold threaded discussions. Enable
users to access associated content—office documents,
scanned images, email and more—
from a common content repository. Develop
electronic forms to streamline contract
requests and notify others about contract milestones
and obligations.

o Client engagement
Content-enabled
solutions for client engagement provide
secure, central,Web-based workspaces that
enable collaboration across projects and
around the globe. You’ll be able to track
milestones and resolve issues, give clients
visibility into processes from project
launch to completion, and track key metrics
across various projects.

o Compliance
Start by automating
the entire content lifecycle to protect content
from inappropriate use or disclosure
while ensuring its accessibility. Mitigate
risk of non-compliance by automatically
auditing content during any stage and
enforcing policies for retention and, as
appropriate, disposal.

o New product development
Create flexible
workspace templates to enforce best practices
and track progress across multiple
projects through enterprise database
rollups, dashboards and reporting tools.

o Enterprise marketing
Coordinate campaigns, product launches
and ongoing branding and marketing
communications. Keep projects on track,
reduce overall costs and exert greater control
over brand assets using media repositories,
creative workflows and virtual workspaces.

16 Widgets, Wizzbangs and Whoozits
New functionality on your web site should be in alignment with ______ .
Give an example of when a discussion forum might not be a good idea on a website.

New functionality on your web site should be in alignment with business model.

[If it does not
fit business model, implementing it is
likely to do more harm than good.]

Car producer's website could be an example. Cars are still quite expensive goods (especially luxury cars) and if potential customers face some 'bad content', it is
more likely for them to resign.

17 Is On-Demand Content Management Right for You?
In a few paragraphs, explain when SaaS would be an appropriate alternative for content management?

While thinking about implementing SaaS, it would be good to revise
some of it's key features that determine whether it is good or not to use
it.

First thing is functionality. If your application needs some components that
simply cannot be found in other commercial products, for example OCR or ability
to view proprietary file formats, SaaS should be the choice. It delivers broader
and more cost-effective functionality than other products and does it by integrating
multiple technologies and distributing the cost among all users.

What is more, SaaS is more configured rather than programmed, which means that
customization is much shorter than in case of other products (it takes days or weeks, not months). SaaS solutions which are designed to require minimal end-user training increase time-to-productivity.

Moreover, SaaS eliminates the majority of needless costs making itself available for those who don't want to spend 15% of the five year
cost of owning and maintaining that application while paying
for a typical installed software package.

Risk is the next factor that can be reduced by use of SaaS as most implementations are licensed annually,
and sometimes product simply does not live up to its
promise, or needs change, it increases the risk of failure.

SaaS upgrades are applied at the data center and available immediately to all users what is in contrast to other solutions in case of which you have to answer the following question: upgrade the application
at high cost and experience implementation
delay, or continue to use the older version of
the software package and forego the benefits
of the upgrade?

Although many companies will find SaaS appropriate, there are some exceptions and that is why all pros and cons should be carefully revised.