ECM: Governance, Implementation and More – Chris Donohue, Alpha Knowledge

The last NSW KM Roundtable event for the year was held this week. The theme for the day was information and governance - a topic I am currently quite interested in. Here's a writeup of one of the presentations on Governance and Enterprise Content Management.

Chris Donohue of Alpha Knowledge has had a long and varied career in both corporate governance and KM, which means he is well qualified to speak on the challenges of implementing a content management system that allows sharing while ensuring that there is a consistent approach to the governance of critical information.

It’s also fair to say that a number of KM Roundtable members pricked up their ears when Chris indicated that most of the ECMs he has implemented are based on – you guessed it – Sharepoint.

Before he launched into his case study, Chris made a couple of pithy observations:

• We spend 90% of the time managing 10% of information that needs to be secure
• Why copy and paste documents, emails and images when you can streamline a process?
• Part of the info management challenge is identifying what “quality information” is.

Case Study: Information Mismanagement

There’s this alarmingly common assumption that the implementation of a shiny new piece of software (in this case Sharepoint) will instantly fix all of the challenges an organisation might have with managing their documents and content. But, as the subject of Chris’s case study found out, just tossing documents into Sharepoint because the CEO has decreed “make it so!” really doesn’t work.

Enter Chris. His mandate was to establish a governance structure that would turn their Sharepoint site from a mess into a well-ordered and efficient platform for managing content and sharing information.

Implementation

Here’s some of the elements that helped them to achieve an effective Sharepoint implementation:

• The information architecture was carefully designed and kept CONSISTENT across the team sites
• A governance and security framework was also clearly defined
• Any content that had not been used in more than a year was not not migrated
• The implementation team got buy in and collective consensus from the company (it helps if the CEO is a fan of the project!)
• Phased process – it doesn’t have to happen all at once
• Communication was critical
• Change managed proactively

Information Architecture

Chris then discussed the Information Architecture of the site. It was broken into 3 types of repositories:

1. Personal Knowledge
   - folders/personal data
   - emails
   - IMs
   
   which feeds into
2. Group Knowledge
   - meetings
   - Network data
   - Intranets
   - hard form docs
   
   which feeds into
3. Business Intelligence
   - data warehousing
   - data mining
   - KPI tracking
   - Reporting

The Governance Framework

Some issues that had to be considered when creating structures for information sharing were:

• Chinese Walls (where departments/business units are in competition and can’t share info)
• Privacy (information that should only be available to HR etc)
• Hierarchy (cascading information accessibility appropriately)
• Compliance (ensuring appropriate and secure management of information required for audit and disclosure)

Most of these issues were dealt with by developing a generic security matrix. Sharepoint allows administrators to establish security groups. In this case they were set up by function:

• Group 1 – exec
• Group 2 – projects
• Group 3 – Operations
• Group 4 – HR

Implementation and Change Management

Training consisted of “Pretraining an post-training”

• pretraining grouped by IT proficiency. Pretraining also provides the opportunity to test the usability of the site and make adjustments before going live.
• post training – refresher courses
• flick the switch! At some point old systems and repositories need to be shut down to avoid duplication of content OR worse, the ongoing problem of content scattered across multiple systems.

Monitoring and Updating – facilitating governance of content

• Assigned owners to content, automated update reminders were set in Sharepoint to prompt review of content by the owners
  -> great for policies and procedures.
• Need to have an overall coordinator monitoring the content owners

An overall view of the process:

Analyse –> redesign architecture –> plan –> implement –> maintenance

The value of the who project was clearly demonstrated when the business went into a merger and were able to create a data warehouse of all the information in just a few days.

Thanks Chris for a solid and interesting presentation.

Electronic Document Managment is all I thought about this week

I'm a little late posting this week, and I'm going to shamelessly play the pity card. I injured my lower back which makes it uncomfortable to sit/stand/lie down/do anything!

That said, I actually had quite a busy week at work, and it was all about Electronic Document Management (EDM). First of all, a large chunk of my time was spent uploading and indexing a collection of resources into a Sharepoint document library. There is something incredibly satisfying in being able to populate 8 different fields with info on the one document, instead of trying to cram everything into a single file name on your share drive.

So I'm creating all this beautiful metadata, but the Sharepoint basic search is pretty much ignoring it when it comes to returning and ranking search results. (Makes me want to tear my hair out!) We are now investigating appropriate search plugins to rectify this situation. Does anybody know of a good Google-style search plugin that works with both document full text and assigned metadata? Much obliged!

I also had a wonderful "lightbulb" moment this week. We have commenced work on the next whitepaper, which is going to be all about accountants and the paperless office. Now this was troubling me for two reasons:
1) I don't know all that much about accountants despite them being the majority of our customers (!)
2) The term Paperless Office sends me straight back to the '90s and seems incredibly passe.

Then the whitepaper team sat in on a presentation regarding CCH Prosystems fx, our document management and workflow software for small to medium accounting firms. And I realised that it doesn't matter what your profession is, being "paperless" in the 2000s means Electronic Document Management. And of course EDM is a big component of Knowledge Management AND modern libraries. Which I know all about (or at least something about). Huzzah! Suddenly this whitepaper is no longer the Great Unknown.

So now we are wondering what consitutes the "paperless" ideal for most enterprises these days? We're inclined to think that just like "full employment" is classed as 95%, perhaps "paperless" actually means, I dunno, 80% of tasks are achieved without paper. Over the next week I'll be looking around for any benchmarking studies on this issue. If you know of any or have some thoughts on the topic, please let me know!

Freehills - how to create a classy intranet with a laughably small amount of time and money

Yesterday I attended the NSW KM Roundtable, which is always good value for ideas and networking. The absolute standout presentation for me was how Freehills put together a fantastic intranet using Sharepoint within 9 months. I nearly fell over when I heard how little it cost them despite having both a usability consultant and professional sharepoint developers.

So how did they pull it off? Here's a few points.

• They engaged a usability consultant (Janders Dean) with expertise in law firm intranets because they couldn't engage their lawyers in user consultation (not billable hours you know!)
• They determined that phase 1 would be a fairly shallow intranet that really focused on core information and they refused to be distracted by Sharepoint's bells and whistles.
• The Sharepoint consultants, usability consultant, Freehills IT folk and the KM folk all co-located for the duration of the project. This cut out the time-consuming process of the consultants taking the spec, going away, building it and then coming back to present it and request changes/clarification. They could spec directly with the writer of the spec for any clarfication they needed and show them the progress of the model before they got too far down the wrong track.
• The final result had to be so easy to use that no user training was required.

So what did the final product look like? Not Sharepoint, that's for sure. With the exception of a small amount of news and navigation on either side of the screen, the front page looks like Google. That's right, lots of white space with a big search box in the middle. The aim is to encourage searching over browsing.

That said, the structure of the content is great, and based around function rather than organisation structure. There is a "How Do I?" section for forms, policies etc. There is also both a "white pages" AND a "yellow pages" directory - so it's easy to work out who to call eg when the aircon breaks down. There is a company page that is kept rigorously up to date with information on board members, financial situation etc (this was in response to a perceived lack of transparency around business processes). The front page also has constantly updated company and external news AND a regularly updated mulimedia presentation. Oh, and most importantly it has a "Did you find what you were looking for?" link to solicit feedback on improvements.

The most important lesson from their consultants was to make sure you had a vision of the future while designing the first phase. Sharepoint is very flexible, but the way you design an element in phase 1 WILL affect your ability to scale/expand its functionality in the future. If you want to continue to grow the intranet over the next 5 or more years, you have to be thinking about how you want to do that from day 1. The value of their usability consultant was to show them the potential of the technology and challenge them to think of ways to improve efficiency that they didn't even think were possible. Amazing stuff.

Metadata out of control - not a pretty sight

One of my projects for the next few months is to develop a collection of business-related resources in Sharepoint. For those of you unfamiliar with Sharepoint, Microsoft itself describes SharePoint as Collaboration, Portal, Search, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) , Business process management (BPM) and Business intelligence (BI) (thankyou AIIM for that definition).

My business development collection is just one part of a larger process of rolling Sharepoint out across the company. And high on my personal agenda is to ensure there are appropriate guidelines to ensure a consistent approach to metadata across all teamsites (ie make sure we have consistent titles and subject terms etc for documents loaded into Sharepoint).

You don't have to look far to see how messy an inconsistent approach to metadata can get - just check out my "tag" list to the left. There's probably about 40 tags, some of which I remember to use consistently and many which I don't (meaning that if there are multiple posts on a topic they may not all appear under the relevant tag). Plus it doesn't look very appealing at all. And this is after only a few months of active blog posting by one person. Can you imagine what a collection with multiple contributors might look like after a year or two?

Now I am actually a pretty big fan of tagging items with as many relevant terms as possible, a la Delicious. But it helps to think about consistency as you go - tag with either "blog" or "blogs", or you'll end up with two separate collections which defeats the purpose. OR you tag with both so people can find them, but then that's extra work (not much, but it all adds up). And the graphic interface of Delicious is a big help in searching through the collection.

Sharepoint out of the box is not as flexible as Delicious and may not compensate quite so effectively for metadata shortfalls. While I haven't had much actual experience with it yet, I'm anticipating its metadata will be presented in a manner closer to my blog tag list - ie in a big list without Delicious' ability to combine and filter tags. So we're back to that big mess again - unless we get in early with some appropriate standards.

My next steps? Clean up my blog tags (sigh) and come up with a few standards for them. Then continue to establish and promote some standards for Sharepoint metadata within our company. I'll also be spending some time reading Mark Schneider's Sharepoint Taxonomy and Governance blog, which looks like it will be a good resource!