However, in many companies ECM-related strategies have not been successful. There are three main reasons: First, business sponsorship of ECM has been insufficient to overcome the challenges of embedding the technologies and disciplines in to the business. Second, content is stranded in silos and largely unreachable for analysis – its discovery and distribution is haphazard and older content swamps newer content, and this overwhelms users. Third, ECM systems themselves are not designed to take account of workflows and user conditions – they fall increasingly short of users’ demands for collaboration, and the proliferation of overlapping ECM applications compounds user confusion and separation of content. Increasingly, users are abandoning legacy ECM systems because of poor user experience. As a result these companies are unable to extract much value from their content.

ECM applications are elective, not mandatory. Their adoption is critically dependent on the people and process elements of ECM implementations to generate and sustain commitment to their use. These elements are the most difficult aspects of building an effective ECM capability. However, the recent huge growth of inexpensive, highly capable ECM solutions creates a real opportunity to raise workflow productivity and meet compliance targets…if only companies could change their approach to ECM…

What is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?

Enterprise Content Management is a combination of workflow processes, policies and technologies that support the business lifecycle (Creation, Storing, Distribution, Discovery, Review and Archiving) of unstructured information. This information (referred to as content) may take the form of text, multimedia files, audio or video files. ECM therefore covers document management, web content management, search, collaboration, records management, digital asset management (DAM), work-flow management, capture and scanning.

What has changed in ECM recently?

Users increasingly capture and share work-in-progress as they collaborate with each other. However they also suffer information overload from email, internal communications, spreadsheets, IM, portals and websites. They increasingly expect to find and act upon content with no concern for the source application.  Technology available to users now includes home PCs, broadband connections, Wi-Fi-enabled laptops, and a variety of ‘consumer’ platforms (e.g., netbooks, tablets, and smart phones), meaning that they increasingly expect to receive and act on important content almost anywhere at any time.

The ECM market has also matured; point ECM solutions are becoming suites and the largest of these have significant add-ons from other vendors, giving more choice and integration. In addition a variety of cloud-based delivery mechanisms such as ‘Software as a Service’ are becoming commonplace across vendors portfolio of offerings. Consequently solutions can vary the level of control, pricing and implementation speed to suit different circumstances.

Organisations must now view ECM differently

Before the prize of inexpensive productivity gains can be realised the organisation will have to increase ECM adoption and its integration into workflows, decrease content duplication (and increase its reuse) and reduce the impact of rapid improvements in ECM solutions and sourcing with the legacy portfolio. This requires some changes to the standard approaches to ECM strategy and execution:

• Shift focus from Content Types to the Content Lifecycle: – Re-set understanding and expectations in users and stakeholders as to how the management of the content lifecycle increases the business value from content use
• Switch solution design from a System view to a User-Centric view: – Give users the ECM skills and services necessary to realise this business value. This means designing ECM solutions in the workflow to deliver the right content to the user, at the right time, in the right format
• Move from Push to Pull deployments: – Provide central leadership and support for ECM initiatives while giving business groups the freedom to implement services locally
• Change from Traditional roll-outs to Rapid implementations: – Provide faster, smarter ways of delivering ECM services using rapid implementation techniques
• Move from ECM Application use to ECM Service provision: – ECM works best in the background which means architecting functionality as services used alongside and within other applications and delivery channels such as portals
• Don’t manage as Point solutions but as Enterprise Systems: – The ‘E’ in ECM is critical to a good ROI; The same disciplines of standardisation and simplification long accepted in the ERP lifecycle applies to ECM

Once these perspectives have been accepted the organisation can formulate a more effective long-term ECM strategy, and also deploy differently in the short term to get a better ROI.

The characteristics of good ECM implementations

Like other elective systems, human factors drive ECM outcomes rather than just focusing on the technology implementation. Successful ECM implementations provide user experience, improved search capabilities and collaboration capabilities. High level, sustained sponsorship is also critical; someone who regards content as an asset that needs exploitation and careful management.

An ECM ‘Centre of Excellence’ is often created offering the business expert advice, guidance and leadership on ECM implementation along with an ECM Best Practice knowledgebase. Rapid implementation approaches are increasingly used to deliver ECM services quickly and with minimum disruption to business as usual. A roadmap for transforming information governance from departmental or business-unit efforts to an enterprise-level discipline will also address issues like federated search, metadata strategies, and interoperability between content and records management systems.

ECM technology is increasingly delivered by loosely-coupled applications using well-defined standards that are integrated across the entire organisation, often with hybrid content architectures.  As small a number as possible of solution providers should provide repository services, with industry-specific applications used to support any unique business processes. The ECM applications portfolio should be consolidated as soon as possible, as content silos are a significant barrier to implementing the content lifecycle. A catalogue of content management services, operating across the lifecycle, is increasingly available through many delivery channels such as PCs and mobile devices. Alternative delivery models (e.g. cloud-based) are also being piloted.

How do you start?

Simple. Stop spending money on ECM technology projects until sufficient, sustainable sponsorship is in place. Reset the ECM strategy quickly to put users and the Content Lifecycle at its heart. Apply best ECM practice as far as possible to in-flight programmes, particularly the human factors elements.

Want to find out more? Call Andy Montgomery on 01483 551200.

Differentis has been involved in leading edge efforts in Consumerisation for the last decade, and it is evident that these changes have massive consequences for the way IT should be managed. These changes encompass the technologies themselves, the way those technologies are used, the manner in which they are supported, the applications that the new technologies allow, the ways in which the enterprise can change and the services that are bought. They also change the IT governance and increasingly importantly, the degrees of freedom granted to the users.

We see four critical aspects of consumerisation in corporates:

• The End Point (the device focus)
• The Usage and Experience of the technology (the applications focus)
• The Delivery of the technology (Infrastructure and technology support focus)
• The external Provision of Technology (Services focus)

The End Point (Device)

Understanding the nature of the demand for consumer devices will require potential users to be segmented by device, usage, the applications it would need to run, the data it would need to access and/or store, and what it would need to connect to. Senior managers are often seen as candidates for tablets, but if they are to be supported properly IT managers need to understand the conditions for their effective use. Many organisations are actually introducing self–support mechanisms as part of the deal to allow use of tablets.

There are some advantages of allowing people to choose their own machines, or even making them use their personal machines, particularly for companies who employ large numbers of contractors. However, many of the benefits will accrue from the decoupling of the device from the infrastructure that supports it, not from the nature of the device itself.

The Usage and Experience

The first applications to be considered within a corporate environment are typically a browser and MS Office. Many senior managers use little else; providing they can be delivered to a decoupled desktop there may be little else to do.

Consumer applications are almost always elective rather than mandated, and often collaborative in nature. This means that the strategy, provisioning, management, support, measurement and marketing of consumer applications will be different from the mandated corporate heavy metal.

The Delivery of the Technology behind the Consumer Experience:

Lockdown

Many advantages of being able to use consumer devices arise from the benefits of having the kind of infrastructure and applications architectures that enable them. The device lock–down was seen by many CIOs as the only way of retaining control over the core environment, although what really needed to be locked down was just that environment – the services – not the device as a whole. Gaining this control actually only requires locking down the elements of the software build that interact with the corporate applications (say SAP or Siebel). A virtualised desktop is built on a remote central server where the programs, applications, processes, and data are accessed through a browser. This does four things from the CIO’s point of view:

• It enables control of what really needs controlling – the core operating systems and the interfaces to core corporate applications;
• It provides freedom for the users to use applications that do not integrate with that core;
• It enables any device capable of running a browser to access core applications including email and MS Office or equivalents;
• It places much of the operational support at the central server, enabling better service and theoretically a lower cost.;

Downloads

The corporate adoption of the technology used to deliver consumer services could be of enormous value, the consumer experience of using technologies like the App Store is much better than that typically provided in the corporate arena. Such technologies underlie the consumer experience, and their advantages are independent of those of the device.

Security

Virtualisation requires that security services themselves be virtualised – we need a flexible, logical security layer inside a virtualised data centre. Traditional static security measures are often insufficient, as it is hard to manage static security devices next to a pool of dynamic virtual servers, and the security often gets in the way of the benefits of virtualisation.

Encapsulation and portability of virtual machines allows virtual servers to move between physical servers. If the security can’t follow the servers, we all have a problem. Virtual security technologies allow companies to secure virtual environments without compromising on resource-pooling and live migration. What security has to achieve need not change, but how it is delivered will.

The External Provision of Consumer Services:

Cloud Computing

As the relative cost of elements that underlie the delivery of technology services change – whether those are storage, applications, power or real end–to–end business services – their optimum configuration can change.

The various Cloud offerings – Software, Platforms, Infrastructure are currently battling it out, and there are many trade–offs to be made.

Service Based Pricing

The mechanisms that underlie and enable service pricing are exactly those which underlie Cloud computing. Services are delivered over a shared infrastructure, which enables fluctuations in individual customer demand to be more easily managed because variations cancel out. Capacity can be provided and removed more quickly without lags and premium payments and economies of scale can be made at levels greater than those afforded to a single customer.

The economics come down to economies of scale and the ability to achieve higher levels of utilisation, at a cost that is understood. There are evidently advantages for a firm to implement many of the technologies used by Cloud providers, providing they have reached a sufficient size. If they are small they would do better to go to an external provider.

Summary

The growth of consumerisation within IT is not an add–on that can be simply absorbed into the way IT is managed throughout its life cycle. The changes we are seeing are far more pervasive, and the consumer technologies, the part that consumers actually see, is a small part of that story.

Want to find out more? Call Mark on +44 1483 551200.

It’s true that mobility continues to grow, that we are enthused by new consumer technology, and that work and play are not sharply distinguished. At work we are increasingly demanding the ability to access our applications and our data anytime, anywhere, quickly and easily, and from the device of our choice.

There are some fundamental differences between services which work well delivered by Cloud providers (Multi–tenant Software as a Service), and those which are provided and supported internally (often from your own data centres). Most of the differences have to do with the management of the trade–offs, however, not the underlying technology. For example, a heavily customised Siebel platform tailored to work exactly to your requirements is a different proposition from a Salesforce.com solution that delivers standard functionality covering approximately 80% of what you would idealy like, but which forces you to change to fit the remaining 20%

Solutions running from the cloud are typically simpler, and provide many advantages when it comes to automatic upgrades and changes. Increasing capacity due to volume growth is simplicity itself, and typically cloud product providers look to release new features two to three times a year, but other kinds of changes may have to wait until some other customers also decide they need them. Providers may also be on the lookout for changes that are being driven by new technologies that have passed individual customers by. For example who was designing applications two years ago that needed to cope with Twitter?

There is also an operational perspective on Cloud–based services. Whereas internal solutions can have variable levels of resilience, Cloud Service Providers must design their solutions from day one with very high levels of resilience, as it is their entire business! One system going down is a drama, 1000 businesses going down is a crisis. However, moving operations to someone else’s Cloud involves some more trade–offs; administration accessibility, transfer of technical and operational risk, but much reduced set–up costs and significantly faster implementations.

Smart businesses should consider where they would get the biggest benefit; Which initiatives and projects would benefit from Cloud–based services? Which operational services are best delivered from the Cloud? Which application services are best delivered by a SaaS provider? On the face of it generic application services should be procured from a cloud provider (e.g., email, CRM, accounting, HR) rather than very company specific services, especially if that very bespoke solution is believed to give some competitive edge. Whether to use external hosting (and any ancillary services) for those bespoke services is another question.

In part these decisions will depend on the segmentation you need to make – of those people who really need to access all their applications and data anywhere any time using any device. Device independence isn’t a slam dunk.

Having to access applications and data run by a third party and over the internet brings a number of specific security questions to address. Some regulated businesses can’t use Cloud–based services without specific restrictions, and many operational service providers won’t be able to say exactly where the data is at any one time (However, Salesforce.com has just announced options to address this issue). So it might not be an option for you. In general however, this model turns the traditional security approach on its head. Traditionally, security focussed on a thing: it might have been the network periphery, or the server, or the end point, but the lock down focussed on some object that was owned or controlled by IT. Once services are virtualised and device independence is granted, security can no longer focus on any object, but instead must secure the service.

Device independence often goes with browser independence (or at least much greater independence than many internal IT departments would wish to grant) and this may be extremely hard to achieve for many highly configured applications. Again, it is crucial to understand the segmentation, and the trade–offs that might need to be made here, especially in the light of some of the possible costs to enable the migration.

Outsourcers have argued for years that they can turn fixed (capital) costs into variable (operating) costs, and no doubt this has its appeal (depending on the trade–off between self–financing and using the outsourcer as a bank); certainly buying services from a provider who has massively more economies of scale than you do, and who can smooth the peaks and troughs of demand is at first blush attractive, and being able to walk away (or downsize without stranded costs) is pretty much always an advantage. Cloud–based services take this concept one stage further, with their straight line cost per–user–per–month models, typically with notice periods of between one and twelve months only.

However, we can’t assume that the economics of Cloud computing will win the day, as there is always a trade–off between paying for something you might not use (your own data centre, or investing in servers and a high number of seat licences for an application before implementation starts) and paying for only that which you do use (the Cloud’s capacity) plus the profits of the provider and the relative costs of capital. This in turn will depend on your estimates of your need for growth (or reduction) over the planning cycle.

It is likely there are many and varied opportunities to be had by exploiting new models of technology and technology service provisions (often unhelpfully just called “Cloud Computing”). But they need identifying, and working through, if you are not to be the victim of just the next bit of marketing hype.

Want to find out more? Call Ron on +44 1483 551200.

XP has been a faithful servant of the corporate world. Most corporations have built a locked down image of XP to run on their desktops, and this is still widely regarded as the best way to manage a large estate without explosive support and testing costs. This has come at the price of speed and flexibility for the business and of varying suitability and usability for users, but this is a trade-off that the CIO (and his colleagues) have been prepared to make.

Now that XP is two generations old, MS can stop selling “downgrades” to XP, and there is a hard stop in 2014 when support will cease. No matter how well Windows7 may compare to XP, upgrading is a huge commitment of time and money with payback largely reliant on the development of new applications that it enables. So, many Corporates are caught in a trap, facing a forced global desktop upgrade to Windows7, which could require substantial investment in new more powerful hardware, but does little to reduce the support costs or show any upside to the business. But there is a better way…

The Real Price of Lock-down

Desktop strategy has been focused on achieving lock-down for years. We all know and understand the reasons why – control; security; manageability; simplified testing and reduced support costs.

The current Locked-Down Desktop paradigm aims for consistency across all desktops. To maintain it in the face of the forced move to Win7 the options are not attractive:

• Do nothing and risk running unsupported XP
• Pay Microsoft to support XP as a “special”
• Re-implement the estate to Windows7 with a 50% hardware refresh and no significant addressing of the users’ current requirements

The first wave of escapees

Since 2003 some companies have segmented their users and allowed those that require little or no access to transactional systems to self-manage their own machines, and to use the public networks. The benefits of this can be substantial, both from cheaper support to operations costs, and in terms of flexibility. However a parallel – although much cheaper – infrastructure has had to be built.

This hard segmentation, with a locked-down corporate infrastructure running next to one based on self-configured consumer technologies utilising public infrastructures, is an interesting step in the right direction. It demonstrated that there was a real value proposition but also the difficulty of defining the hard segmentation for individuals needing to occasionally dip into the corporate systems. The challenge remained of how to mix and match the benefits of cheaper public infrastructures and the benefits of self support and configuration while maintaining the controls of the lock-down.

The current Smart Moves

Technologies have continued to improve and communication speeds and coverage have expanded to the point where a new paradigm can be glimpsed. For example, a combination of virtualisation of the desktop, remote management and selective upgrades and desktop optimisation to avoid wholesale replacement could enable:

• Device independence, so an organisation is not tied to specific platforms;
• Smart ways of delivering services to new or upgraded end-devices; indeed, this may obviate the need to buy more powerful machines, or to upgrade altogether;
• Remote monitoring and management of the delivery of the service and of the devices despite their proliferation;
• Managed access to third party devices, providing flexibility in supporting contractors and temps without giving them a corporate PC.

The benefits for the IT organisation will be from being able to manage a single, centralised virtualised desktop (which is what the device lock-down was supposed to achieve). The benefits for users would be computing capability matched to role, potential freedom to select / configure devices and to self-support if preferred.

The way out of the XP trap

The real question is how to get there from here without getting stuck with the costs of each model and without unacceptable spend on the way.

A sensible plan of how to get there should cover these steps:

• First segment the users (casual, mobile workers, temps, contractors, core data entry etc) s0 that those who will benefit the most can be addressed first;
• Understand the needs of each segment and how the technologies can support them, recognising that this is not just a question of choosing the “next PC”, but potentially of reconfiguring work so as to take advantage of more innovative and attractive solutions;
• Review the infrastructure components and capacity – servers for virtualisation; networks to support virtual desktops and data volumes for Citrix; old-fashioned but important, as nothing will sink the plan more quickly than poor performance if a component is miss-sized;
• Understand what needs to be put in place to support each segment and plan on the upgrades;
• Have a user migration plan that dovetails with hardware end-of-life and prioritises the high value hits (e.g. contractors).

If you are still running XP the clock is ticking; if you want to avoid spending money over many months to leave you no better off than when you began, the time to start exploring the technologies and planning the moves is now.

In this part we are going to look at some of the management disciples needed to deal with the consumerisation of IT.

Management disciplines:

Now we move on to look at how the consumerisation of IT needs to be incorporated into the IT strategy. We start by reviewing the business rules that were developed in the old model (e.g., control and command, everything inside the moat, the IT department as policemen, not enablers).

As IT is consumerised there are likely to be implications for the incentive model (budgets and charge-out approaches) as users and cost centre managers have choices, rather than being the passive recipients of centrally determined and designed systems. This will also impact third party contracts, IT portfolio investment management (new development, retirement, and enhancement), the innovation process as well as approaches to regionalisation. The security model is also likely to need to be updated to build a new trust, authentication and connectivity framework, treating the device, not the enterprise periphery, as the locus of security.

The choices that users make in the use and deployment of consumerised IT must be reflected in the economic costs to the organisation. Traditionally IT costs were incurred centrally and some sort of charge back or allocation mechanism told different parts of the organisation the cost of the services they were offered but gave few signals to help them optimise their economic use of IT. This didn’t matter when choice was limited but once IT is consumerised it becomes important to develop provisioning and charge-out policies to enable users (and their managers) to make rational economic decisions concerning their use of technology, and to provide the means for them to save or spend as needed. In this way the same market signals that ensure that the cost and value of consumer offerings match the desires of the consumer will be available to the organisation.

The consumerisation of IT also affects services and not just technology

Once consumers concentrate on the service as delivered at the point of use, it becomes easier to consider deploying those emerging “good enough” solutions in the consumer space. This enables user communities to challenge the costs of some incumbent solutions, such as e-mail and in many cases allows IT to re-think the physical network model by taking advantage of the public infrastructure.

A different support model for consumerisation may be needed

Not all user segments will have the same requirements (or even wants) as regards technology; they will certainly have different support requirements. Some support may be directed at communities (segments) rather than individual users, and in some cases it may be appropriate to move to a low cost self support model for some applications (e.g. Google search to complement the help desk). The incentive model will have to be aligned here too.

The IT Ecosystem

Consumerisation will significantly impact the IT ‘ecosystem’, whether you like it or not. While it is easy to get started, don’t forget the IT ecosystem is likely to evolve into a combination of mandated and elective elements that provides users with greater flexibility whilst maintaining corporate standards and appropriate security. Managing this evolving ecosystem will be assisted by incumbent vendors embracing open standards, and will drive the supplier strategies too.

Infrastructure integration

Consumer technology investment is often a lightweight overlay to existing infrastructure. While they may appear ‘disruptive’ and offer a challenge to an organisation, and perhaps its dominant culture, they are not necessarily technically complex to implement. They often build a relatively lightweight overlay to the existing infrastructure and may not require complex integration. Starting down this road doesn’t mean having to radically reshape existing systems.

And finally

Living on the Web

Sounds like an empty phrase but actually encapsulates a potentially valuable approach to creating a flexible workforce. To “Live on the Web” means not just web-enabling the existing applications, but taking a role-based view of the users needs to ensure that everything they require is available over the web. This does not just allow mobile staff and home workers to be more effective but frees the organisation from the physical constraints of fixed offices. This flexibility allows more freedom to redeploy staff, shift premises and reconfigure organisations as required. Clearly this will not apply to everyone – but the segmentation should identify the appropriate groups.

Click here for more points of view on Consumerisation.