Approaching ECM

approach-picThis is a variation of a post I published years ago. However I feel that approaching enterprise initiatives in a structured manner can reap rich benefits. Having watched and participated in many ECM and BPM initiatives around the world, I feel that it is not impossible to avoid failures. Though the success/failure statistics is heavily lopsided in ECM, with careful planning and execution we can definitely swim against the tides.

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.

Tendering a Disaster

Having participated in hundreds of bids, I am positive that tenders/RFPs (Request for Proposal) are typically the biggest man-made disasters any enterprise application initiative runs into. At least to the east of the Atlantic Ocean, I can say with authority that far too many enterprise implementations got messed up because of the crude procurement practices companies indulge in. Such issues snowball in business facing enterprise application rollouts as compared to fixed scope IT initiatives. So, please guess the effectiveness of the ECM initiatives in this part of the world.

Here is a typical disaster recipe:

  1. The enterprise is at level zero in the ECM maturity ladder. Means they carry on their business using paper and pencil.
  2. Vendors or some key personnel inside the organization moots the idea of a document management system.
  3. A fixed budget is allocated for implementing such a system.
  4. Creates an RFP draft by copying and pasting from similar RFPs floating around in the market
  5. New ideas popup and the organization gets greedy. It wants everything under the sun now.
  6. Tender/RFP is floated. The document typically contains more information about the procurement process, terms and conditions and very little on the exact solution to be procured/built.
  7. The responses from vendors vary greatly. The vendors also have templates for RFP responses and they fit the price first and capabilities later.
  8. The contract is awarded typically to the cheapest vendor.
  9. The vendor is more interested in making sure that she does not lose money on the project than meeting any of the business objectives.
  10. A system gets implemented that the users typically hate, the IT guys find difficult to manage, and the vendor is not willing to support with an open heart.

I have seen innumerable examples of such ECM projects in the region. The most important aspects of business understanding, benefits, and user experience are forgotten in such projects. Unless there is a sea change in the way enterprise solutions are procured, we will see more of such initiatives turning into disasters.

ECM@Work – Insurance

One thing I love about ECM projects is the direct impact they make on our users and their customers. Often we don’t quite get opportunities to be among the end customers and experience the changes our solutions make to their lives. I was fortunate to be involved in a transformation project and spend a considerable amount of time on the floor where actiMotor Claimsons happen.

The scene is at an insurance company in the Middle-East. This organization wanted to automate their motor claims management process as a first step in their automation endeavors. After long discussions on pain points, process improvements, implementation strategies etc., we told the customer of our desire to witness what is happening on the floor. The claim process in this company (and it is very similar in most of the insurance companies in the middle-east) has multiple sub-processes such as claim registration, repair management, settlement etc. What I would like to discuss here is claim registration.

If a vehicle is involved in an accident, the police will issue a report with all relevant details to the drivers involved. The vehicle owner then approaches the insurance company with the police report and registers a claim. Claim registration is often a lengthy process and at an average it takes 30 to 40 minutes to registers a claim. There are a fixed number of claim registration counters at the branch office. Each customer service agent at the counter performs all the tasks required to register a claim. When a policy owner approaches the agent, s/he checks whether it is legitimate policy first. Then s/he verifies the police report, makes copies of the relevant documents, and then walks out with the policy owner to inspect the vehicle and take photographs. Once the photographs are taken they come back to the counter and the agent connects the camera to his/her computer, transfers the images, prints and attaches them to the claim folder, writes his/her observations of the damages, estimates the claim amount, and finally registers the claim in the back-end system. Then s/he prints a claim receipt and hands over to the customer. This was the process the company was following for all these years. Since each customer takes quite a long time to register his/her claim the queues were pretty long and the wait time for other customers were in multiples of hours.

It didn’t take any effort to figure out where the issue was. We suggested that the process be split up and handled by multiple agents, each specializing in one aspect of the process. It was not an easy discussion as the business management felt that with one agent processing all the steps the context will be maintained till the end of the process. It took us quite a long time to convince the business management that a true ECM/BPM implementation can improve the situation and they should not be worried too much about multiple agents working on the same case.

Three months later, our team was ready with an ECM/BPM solution for the customer. I spent half a day at the floor again after a week of switching over to the automated claims processing system. The first visible change was that there were not many people waiting. I could see customers walk-in, going from one counter to another without having too much time to sit in between. A customer comes in and straightaway goes to a desk where an agent verifies the police report and initiates a claims process and provides a token number. The customer then walks to the next counter where an agent scans the documents. The scanned documents are attached to the claim case automatically by the system. Then the customer goes to the desk where an agent is ready to inspect his/her vehicle. The agent walks to the vehicle, inspects it, takes photographs on a tablet, types in his/her observations on the tablet itself. The images and the observations are transferred automatically to the system and attached to the claim case. The customer then goes to the next counter where s/he is apprised of the estimates and collects the claim receipt.

From the time the customer walks in to the time s/he walks out with a claim receipt the wait time is practically eliminated. It could take about 15 to 20 minutes or so to register a claim, but it is perceived much less because the customer doesn’t have to sit and wait. Intelligent use of workflow, document and data capture, and case management techniques allowed the insurance company to reduce the actual customer wait time by half, and increase the perceived claim registration efficiency a lot more.

The half day I spent at the floor experiencing the changes this technology brought to many auto policy owners is etched in my mind as one of the best in my professional life. I could see the technology that I’ve been dabbling with for over a decade helping people to ease their real-world woes. Kudos ECM.

It’s the process stupid

Governance is a theme that caught my attention of late thanks to the recent developments in my country, India. As I type this post, innumerable discussions are going on about maximum governance, reducing red-tape, ensuring transparency, and accelerating decision making. While it is heartening to see that the debates center around good governance, I am a bit surprised that nobody is talking about the elephant in the room – processes. process

In the previous post I wrote that governance involves two acts: legislation and execution. Legislation is a relatively easier task in comparison with execution. Ensuring that the policies are implemented and services are rendered is easier said than done. In my opinion, governments are gigantic service providers. Their purpose is to deliver services to people. Whether it is about providing infrastructure, enforcing law and order, securing the nation, or providing licenses or permits governments are in essence rendering services to the masses. The magnitude and variety of services rendered depends on the jurisdiction of the respective government body. So one thing is clear; rendering government services cannot be done in an ad-hoc manner. There has to be well defined processes behind every government activity. These processes are to be aligned perfectly with the people and information involved.

The key process aspects that can deliver effective governance can be modeled after the DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control) model. However I would like to change the dimensions and split them into four initiatives: Definition, Awareness, Execution, and Monitoring.

Definition

Clearly defined processes are a must for any service rendered by a government body. Whether it is about issuing birth certificates, driving licenses, or building permits, or procuring defense equipment, or building nuclear reactors there has to be a well-defined process on how the government body executes the service. The process objectives are to be clearly identified. The execution path of a service delivery should be documented in detail with the roles of various actors involved. The process inputs and outputs should be listed out clearly and so should be the rules. One of the most important aspects of any process will be the SLAs and the same should be captured on the overall process as well as individual sub processes if any.

Awareness

Creating process awareness is as important as defining the process itself. If one were to approach the city administration for a building permit, she should know how the process works, what information she would need to provide the administration office, and what is the timeline in which she could expect a decision, and what she should do to ensure optimal outcome. Process awareness should be an integral part of the government’s service delivery since both service recipient as well as the service provider would understand how the process works in non-ambiguous terms. It is essential to train the government officials as well as spread the awareness among the public on how the processes work.

Execution

Any process initiative would fall flat if not executed properly. The government body has to ensure diligent execution of the given process whatever the circumstance may. It is imperative that governments look at ways of automating processes as much as possible. Adhering to SLAs is a very important aspect of the execution process. Well defined BPM or case management systems can ensure effective execution of the processes.

Monitoring

How will the head of state know how his government is functioning? How will the mayor know what is going on in her city? The answer is process monitoring. The process needs to be monitored real-time. Monitoring should be possible at various abstraction levels. Process monitoring should be rolled up to the highest level. The head of a government will not be interested in specific transactions, but he will need real-time summations of the various initiatives. At the lower levels SLAs will need to be monitored and escalations should be analyzed. At the higher level dashboards should be provided. In one dashboard the head of the state should get a birds-eye-view of the performance of her government.

Process improvements are not overnight activities. It takes quite long to get going. There has to be a start somewhere though.

Maximum Governance

colors1“Minimum Government, Maximum Governance” is a slogan that caught the attention of a billion people in the recently concluded general elections in my home country. Fairly enough, the slogan did deliver the required results to the leader who coined the phrase. The important aspect of this slogan is the thrust on governance which is basically the act of delivering services to the citizens and reducing the overheads of the government.

Governance involves two major acts: Legislation and Execution. Legislation is about putting the laws, rules, and guidelines in place. Execution is all about ensuring that the laws are implemented and the citizens are provided with the services that they are entitled to. Often it is the execution that falls flat and pulls the governance promises down.

In the present world, technology plays a pivotal role in aiding governance execution processes even though governments are slow adopters. In my opinion the one technology domain that will be of immense help in any government in improving governance is ECM. It is time governments pay attention to the substantial dividends ECM can bring to governance. The top challenges facing optimal execution are:

1.    Governments are the biggest document generators and consumers. Every government activity revolves around documents. Be it citizen services, policy formations or inter-departmental communications documents are produced in abundance.

2.    Like any other organization out there in the world, the majority of governmental data is in unstructured form.

3.    Governments operate at a very high scale. So unless the right information is accessible at the right time, governments cannot be responsive to the continuous demands.

4.    Lack of accountability at various levels within the governments is a major factor for poor governance.

5.    Monitoring and control are not always the best.

6.    Processes within governmental departments are mostly ad-hoc.

7.    The variety of services rendered by a government department is very high and often two citizens will not be requiring the exact same service from the same government entity.

To improve governance governments should focus on improving the execution efficiency and effectiveness. By utilizing the power of ECM, governments will be able to:

1.    Eliminate paper based processing. While paper may not be eliminated fully, governments can do great by reducing paper-based-processing. Documents can be digitized at source and be allowed to flow electronically.

2.    Introduce case management technologies. Since government processes in general are ad-hoc in nature and may require knowledge workers applying discretion in the decision process. It is thus imperative that such users be armed with all required information. Information should be available for knowledge workers when they need it and this can be effectively managed by introducing case management concepts.

3.    Introduce SLAs. Often governments find it difficult to enforce SLAs on services rendered. Case management systems provide ways in which SLAs can be defined and monitored within processes. This will enforce accountability among the government workers.

4.    Monitor progress. The key aspect of good governance is monitoring of the programs and initiatives. Real-time monitoring will be a good tool for the higher level officials to monitor the operations at various aggregation levels.

5.    Reduce corruption. Corruption creeps in when accountability and monitoring reduces. Case management solutions allow for auditing and tracking every of activity happening in the system in real-time.

ECM and Case Management solutions will ensure governance improvements from an execution perspective. These solutions coupled with citizen facing interfaces such as portals and mobile front-ends will effectively pave ways for maximum governance.

ECM – 7 Red Perpendicular Lines

Most of you would have watched the Seven Perpendicular Red Lines video that was well circulated in the social media. It depicts a situation arising out of many enterprise vendor relationships, though exaggerated. Even though the video is primarily about the frustrations of the expert, the behaviors of the customers as well as vendor executives are depicted quite accurately.

I am sure that many of you would have come across situations similar to this one, where the customers don’t have any clues as to what they want, there is immense pressure from your own management to succeed at the customer account, and you are caught squarely in between. This is quite common while discussing enterprise application implementations, especially when it comes to projects of the transformative kind. And well, ECM and BPM projects mostly deal with business and process transformation.

In my experience, a majority of customers are not educated enough of why they need an ECM/BPM implementation. Somebody at some level and on some day would have made a decision to acquire an ECM system without thinking too much of what it can do for the organization. Roughly 70% of the customers that I have seen in the past falls in this category (Category A). Another 20% of the customers have a clearer thought process as to why they need such a system, but they lack the clarity in terms of what exactly can be done and how it can be done (Category B). The last 10% have clear vision of what they want and how it can be done and who they want to get it done with (Category C). Please note that the categorization and the relative percentages are based on my experience alone.

Working with Category C customers is interesting and challenging at the same time. They know their business well and have very clear ideas as to how they can achieve them. They are always in a hurry and pretend to be in control. While working with them, I as a consultant had to toe their line of thoughts and sometimes ignore my own reservations of how certain things are done.

In my opinion, the best set of customers to work for are the ones in Category B. They are clear as to what they want to achieve and are willing to listen. They are not the “I-know-it-all” kind of customers and the process of engagement is more democratic. As a consultant, I get opportunities to work with their business users and leaders in understanding the big picture as well as the nitty-gritty details. They are mostly open to suggestions and are eager to understand the best practices.  Mostly they know their business and are willing to listen to people who understand how the right technology could help them run their businesses better.

The large A Category customers quite compare themselves with the one in the aforementioned video. Their IT and business teams typically lack the cohesiveness required for transformational project execution. I have worked with this set of customers both as a consultant and as a vendor. In majority of the cases, such customers see ECM or BPM as an IT project. I have seen instances of the project stakeholders come up with dismissive answers to genuine queries on the project purpose and requirements. Remember the “Perpendicular to what?” question in the video. The customer is bewildered by that question, tries to find some clues in the set of papers she is holding, and then answers “Perpendicular to everything”. This is exactly how many of the customers behave in my experience.

Then comes the business user who is not at all clued in as to what the project is about. She listens to whatever is going on and is totally disinterested. Her contribution to the discussion is a final “change request”. She wants the lines to be in the form of a kitten! This is perfect and to the T.

The one line that I came across too many times dealing with this category of customers is “You are the expert. You tell me”. In many cases this could be interpreted as “I don’t have any clue as to how to run my business. You as a vendor tell me how I should do my business”. And many vendors are glad to grab that opportunity as well.

Making Content Work

making content workMost ECM projects revolve around managing content and use it in business processes. We are very familiar with the benefits of managing content, preserving it, and using it in business transactions. The majority of ECM investments are in ensuring that content is not lost, it is available to the relevant people at the right time, and is presented to users to complete a task in hand. Documents are searched for once their active use in a business transaction is over as well.

The underlying assumption has always been that the content needs to be presented to a user when she needs it. So we attach necessary and sufficient metadata to our content or even make it content-searchable. 90% of the ECM users stop right there in their utilization of the content they have at their disposal.

The digital world is witnessing an analytics wave now. Trends and insights are the most commonly sought after buzzwords in the industry now. Big and small data are being analyzed left and right to search for the grains of wisdom that could ultimately provide that elusive competitive advantage. One interesting observation from an AIIM research shows that it is far easier to gain insights from publicly available data than from an organization’s internal resources. It is quite a truth that the first place anybody would look for a piece of information is Google and not an internal ECM repository. But there lies a huge difference when it comes to looking for insights. The information that we keep in our internal repositories are far more relevant for our organization than what Google can provide. So there has to be an effort to utilize the content that we store.

This is precisely where Content Analytics comes in. Even though any content analytics tools and technologies available today can no way match the human brains ability to decipher information, they provide a good start. Additionally such tools can process vast amounts of content, extract information, and to an extent apply semantic deciphering. Most of the tools are self-learners where the analytics improve as time goes. Content Analytics works a lot better with semi-structured information such as Twitter feeds, Facebook comments etc. in comparison with unstructured long-form content.

At a high level Content Analytics go through four major steps: bringing in content, extracting information, analysis, and generating output.

To bring-in content to an analytics tool one can employ crawlers or import mechanisms. Crawlers are common among the commercial tools available. Crawlers let the analytics platform to look for new information in specified sources and bring content in as and when it is available. Crawlers can work with internal content stores including ECM repositories or shared drives or even the Internet. Most tools provide options to push content to the platform either manually or automatically as well.

The next step is to extract information from content. The content could come in many forms: from text data to office documents to images to audio or video. Information needs to be extracted in text form to feed into an analytics module and this step employs filters to extract text data from the input content. A wide range of tools and technologies are available that helps in extracting information from varied source formats.

The analysis step is the most crucial part of content analytics. This is where the software reads and analyzes the inputs by performing text analytics algorithms. Text analytics involves sentence detection, tokenization, parts of speech recognition, classification or annotation, entity and relationship identification etc.

Once text analysis is completed, the tools let the analyzed and extracted information to be formatted according to downstream processing needs and then export to the relevant systems.

Content analytics will be more and more prominent as time goes by and the technology will evolve to a much higher acceptance level. Even though there are many commercial software available, much of the research is pioneered in the open source domain. In my opinion, content analytics is one of the technologies that we as ECM professionals can quickly subscribe to and provide considerable value to our customers.

Big Data – Why Should I Care?

Why should I talk about big data in the ECM blog? Well, why shouldn’t I?

Big Data is clearly oversold. It is clearly hyped up to the point where it has set expectations way high that the October 2013 AIIM industry watch report on Big Data and content analytics rated over-hyped senior management expectations as one of the top 5 issues facing big data initiatives! In my opinion the current buzz has ignitbig contented the imaginations of so many organizations and its people about the potential of deriving value out of data that was considered to be unusable or hard to use so far. The current big data tools let organizations manage the data dimensions of volume, velocity, and variety. Though with decreasing levels of effectiveness in the order they are listed above.

The current level of big data initiatives are majorly aimed at handling volumes of structured data.However there is a small but growing set of initiatives that revolves around making sense out of the vast amount of unstructured content out there. The term big content refers to applying big data techniques to unstructured content. Big content initiatives are a lot harder as they pose challenges on the variety dimension of big data.

There has been a tremendous explosion of external and internal long-form content growth over the years in the forms of blogs, tweets, social media updates, presentations, white papers, videos, audio etc. Add the traditional paper-based content and office documents to it, one will get an idea of what we are tackling. The number one big data challenge as analyzed by AIIM in the aforementioned industry watch report is that the content is spread across too many places. Other major concerns included that the data is dirty or not well-organized, not capturing the data needed, and hard to find the data needed. In summary about 65% of the survey respondents felt that their unstructured content is chaotic. The survey finds that more than one-third of the respondents felt that big data analysis will be an essential capability for their businesses. This is a growing trend and it keeps pace with the hype about big data in general.

What this means is that there is a good ECM opportunity under the big data/big content hood out there.Managing content effectively is a prerequisite for deriving value out of it. Effective metadata management and content analytics go very far in gaining insights out of the vast mounds of content out there.

FileNet – Content Management – Part II

This post is excerpts from the upcoming FileNet tutorial series “IBM Case Foundation Solution Developer’s Guide”

In the previous post FileNet Content Management Part I we discussed about a set of features provided by the IBM FileNet Content Management platform. This post is a continuation of the discussion on features. Provided below are an additional set of features exposed by the platform.

Events

Events provide a mechanism for solution implementers to initiate actions in FileNet. For example if an email notification is to be sent to a set of users once a document is added to a folder or if a document is deleted from FileNet, it can be achieved by using events. FileNet triggers events based on activities happening in the repository.  The events include but not limited to creation of a folder or document, check-in or checkout of documents, change in metadata properties or security, deletion of documents etc. FileNet provides an event based architecture for initiating actions. Additionally it provides mechanisms for initiating workflows based on events.

Lifecycleslifecycles

Documents typically go through a sequence of steps during its full life cycle. For example an author creates a draft document which is then circulated for review and then approved and then published and finally it can get closed, archived, or even purged. FileNet allows the creation of lifecycles for documents as a sequence of steps. Document life cycle in FileNet is a sequence of steps through which a document passes forward and in some cases backward too.

Users can promote or demote the document from one step to another in the life cycle. Based on a promotion or demotion certain actions can be carried out on the document such as change to security, version, metadata etc. Additionally the life cycle change can trigger workflows as well.

Content Indexing

The easiest way to find a document is to perform a free text search. FileNet provides full text search facilities with its content search engine. In order to search based on text, the content that is in the repository should be indexed. The content search engine is a lightweight and fast indexing and searching mechanism available in FileNet. Documents and their metadata could be text indexed.

Search

Content management is all about searching. The very purpose of storing and indexing content is to find the right content at the right time. FileNet allows both metadata based searches as well as full-text searches. Users will be able to search for a document based on the custom metadata attributes that are defined as part of the implementation process or based on certain system attributes such as who created the document and when the document was created etc. Alternatively the specific metadata searches can be combined with the full text searches as well. For example a user will be able to find an invoice from ACME Corporation that has a date later than 20th May 2013 and contains the phrase “office stationery” in it. The searches can be defined on the fly or could be defined and stored as a template.

Classification

The first and foremost task in document management is to classify documents. Documents should be identified and classified by their business relevance. Invoices should be separated from employee documents, loan application documents should be separated from savings bank transaction documents, and correspondences should be separated from strategy documents. A process of identifying the various categories of documents should be carried out prior to implementation of the systems. Then the metadata attributes for each of the categories be defined. A definition of a document classification along with its metadata is referred to as a Document Class in FileNet.

Entry Templates

Entry templates provide users an easier mechanism for adding documents into the FileNet repository. They are cookie-cutter document entry forms that simplify the document indexing process. For example if a user has to add material invoices and service invoices to FileNet and assume that there is only one metadata definition (document class) called invoice. In the absence of entry templates the user will have to add every document as an invoice and choose a value for the index field invoice type as material or service. Additionally certain index fields need be filled only for material invoices and certain other fields only for service invoices. The administrator can create two entry templates one for service and the other for material invoice with the invoice type field predefined and only those specific fields enabled for each template. The user then chooses the appropriate template to add the respective invoices to FileNet.

Retention and Holds

Enterprise documents typically have a life span. These are either determined based on compliance requirements of specific regions or countries or some policies set forth by the organization itself. If an organization is supposed to keep a customer document for five years, it must ensure that the said document cannot be deleted by users before its retention period ends. Suppose if there is a legal issue all documents that are relevant in that legal tangle should be retained till the legal issue is resolved; in spite of the retention defined in any policy. In such cases a hold can be applied to the document or sets of documents. Till the hold is lifted such documents will be retained and cannot be destroyed. FileNet content management now supports retention policies and holds.

FileNet – Content Management – Part I

This post is excerpts from the upcoming FileNet tutorial series “IBM Case Foundation Solution Developer’s Guide”

Content Management is the cornerstone of IBM Case Foundation.  It is a complex platform and hence the developer will need to understand the concepts in detail before proceeding with solution implementation. Provided below is a quick look at the high level features offered by the platform.

The IBM FileNet Content Management platform provides a comprehensive list of features to enable the users in managing all the enterprise content, whatever form and type the content may be in. The focus is to ingest the content, organize it, and make it easily findable. Brief overviews of some of the most commonly used features are provided below:

Metadata 

To make the content easily searchable, it is essential that the content be associated with information using which a user can search for it. Such informmetadataation is referred to as metadata. Typically the metadata associated with the content is structured information. For example, if an invoice is being added to the content management system it will be associated with information such as the vendor name, invoice date, type of invoice etc. Assume that the invoice is sent as a physical document to the organization. It will be first scanned and the resulting scanned image will be added to the system with the aforementioned metadata. Any user wishing to find this invoice will be able to search for it using any of the metadata properties.

To associate metadata to content, metadata types are required. In FileNet metadata types are called classes. A class is a collection of properties that can be applied to content or to other constructs such as folders.

A property is a structured data item definition. In the example given above the item Invoice Number is a property of the ACME Invoice May 2013 document. Classes and properties are discussed in detail in the Concepts section later in this chapter.

Storage

ECM systems help organizations to consolidate the enterprise content. What this means is that storage of the content will be managed by the ECM system. While the metadata is stored in databases, FileNet provides a multiple options to manage the content storage. Content can be stored in the file system, database, or a fixed costoragentent storage.

File system storage is the most commonly used method for content storage. Organizations using SAN or NAS normally map the network storage to a mountable file system and configure it as a file system storage in FileNet. The file system drive could be Windows NTFS volume, a UNIX file system, or a General Parallel File System (GPFS).

A database storage area converts document content into binary large objects (BLOBs) for storage in the database that is specified as the object store database.

A fixed content storage system is an external repository that acts like a virtual storage area for the Content Platform Engine system. Content Federation Services provides connectivity and configuration for the repository. Fixed content storage systems potentially provide extremely large storage capacity and typically provide WORM (write once, read many) and retention capabilities. You can use FileNet® Image Services as a fixed content storage system, as well as other storage systems such as Tivoli® Storage Manager.

The administrators will manage the storage configurations and such details are masked totally from the developers or the end users.

Security

Securing documents is a key benefit provided by ECM systems. Each document in the system can be uniquely secured using a wide array of security options provided by FileNet. There are two aspects to FileNet security: Authentication and Authorization.

Authentication provides a user the ability to login to the FileNet system where as Authorization determines what the user can do once authenticated. FileNet uses LDAP systems for authentication and does not keep its own user accounts. So a user can login to FileNet using the enterprise directory credentials.

Once logged in the authorization kicks in. The user will be able to perform activities such as view documents, edit them, or delete them based on the access levels defined for him/her. Security can be set at various levels including repository, folder or documents.

Versioning

Maintaining versions of documents without a document management system is often cumbersome. The user will have to manually make sure that she is keeping various versions of a document. Using ECM systems such as FileNet, version control gets simplified. A user can add the first version of a document to FileNet. For each subsequent edits she could check the document out, make the changes and check it back in. FileNet automatically maintains the versions. At any point, the user could retrieve any of the versions in the series. FileNet by default displays the current version to the user. If the user wishes to retrieve any other version she will have to explicitly request for the exact version to be retrieved.