What has finally moved the Portable Consultant to post after all this time? Frustration!

So-called “matrix teams” come from different work units, by definition. In my current business environment we come together for a project, apply our subject matter experience, and go on to the next project when done. Each member reports to a different organizational unit, with a ‘dotted line’ to the Project Manager.

Unfortunately, the collaboration systems we use are all too often designed by, and for, those separate work units rather than for the projects.

This results in the following (in no particular order):

• Separate repositories for the business analyst, the infrastructure architect, the project manager, etc.

• Where cross-discipline access has been considered it is likely to be hit-and-miss, depending on who asked for access to the repositories of the other groups and when. This results in name-based rather than role-based access.

• Different naming conventions between repositories.

• Different taxonomies (folder structures) for each work group.

• A general lack of consistency in meta-data (where it exists) and searches (which should be based on that meta-data).

The diagnosis of the To Each His Own approach to collaboration is confirmed by the high number of email attachments that are necessary for the matrix team to keep members informed and documentation current.

In my current situation it wouldn’t even be enough if the project manager were to set up a shared repository – there are two PMs: one for ‘the business’ and one for ‘IT’. Even these PMs don’t share the same repository.

The solution for this To Each His Own approach varies from situation to situation. The first step in all instances, however, must be a realization of how fruitless it is to invest in collaboration without some form of inter-group oversight or cooperation to support the matrix team environment.

Have you encountered this where you work? Did anyone try to address the situation? What approach succeeded? …failed?

Yours sincerely on a typical Monday (but posted on a Tuesday),

Cheers,
-pmh

The Portable Consultant is feeling understandably low, therefore, when against this bleak backdrop he is exposed to an ECM project that seems to model much that can go wrong with an ECM initiative.

While the following is not intended as a comprehensive list, these are some of the Do’s and Don’ts that the principal consultants on the project failed to be aware of. In no particular order they were:

• Do have a Project Charter… an SOW is nowhere near good enough for the implementation of a critical enterprise infrastructure such as an ECM.
• Don’t undertake ECM as an IT Department driven technology project… ECM is more dependent on business requirements and business processes than, say, a new firewall. These days the IT guys should be tightly integrated with the business; e.g., the head of IT should be a CIO who ensures C-level priorities, not technology, drives IT.
• Do establish an ECM Steering Committee that is representative of the whole enterprise and leverage them to provide guidance, impetus, and a high-level sign-off for company-wide issues such as the corporate taxonomy, key metadata, and security models as well as critical SLA and Disaster Recovery (DR) requirements. Specifically…
  • Don’t confuse backup/restore requirements with DR. DR is about business continuance after the entire office and/or data centre has ceased to function while backup/restore is about a broken server, corrupted database, or some such.
  • Don’t just sit down some afternoon and enter new metadata fields into the production system on the fly without first gathering, documenting, and having affected parties sign-off on the relevent requirements.
• Do not rely on business units to gather and present their own requirements without extensive guidance from knowledgeable ECM consultants who can speak to the business in their language, the language of business processes not software configuration.
• Do not expect one of the Big 4 consultancies to necessarily know all this and manage the project according to ECM Best Practices… sometimes just one experienced independent consultant can be enough to help even a large global enterprise to navigate the treacherous waters of ECM deployment… without all that excess overhead. <grin>

Sigh. Time to crawl back into my burrow, I suppose. Wake me up in another six weeks.

Cheers,
-pmh

The goal is to offer the 5-day certification workshop, requested by many of the registered participants, in the next session.  A new date for the seminar will be announced when it is available.

Cheers,
-pmh

Toronto Oct 6-8, 2008

Enterprise Content Management, ECM, almost always involves deep changes in an enterprise’s information architecture beyond the specific solution.

A group that I’m associated with has a seminar taking place in October (Oct.6-8) on Enterprise Architecture. The seminar sponsored by the Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence (EACOE) and Arcus Group. The seminar is being held in Canada (Toronto) for the first time, details can be found at this page on the Arcus Group site.

This 3 day event is focused on Architecture Management and Implementation. The first day is geared to senior executives who wish to launch or refresh enterprise architecture departments within their IT organizations. It will provide the necessary basic information about the purpose and benefits of Enterprise Architecture and show best practices in managing the human, process and technology sides of change.

For the second and third day, focus will be on implementation strategies and activities that result in concrete action plans with clear steps on how to implement Enterprise Architecture models and standards based on one of the industry’s leading frameworks called Zachman Framework.

The seminar leaders are Sam Holcman and Merril Mascarenhas. Sam is Managing Director of EACOE and President of Pinnacle Business Group and Zachman Institute for Framework Advancement (ZIFA)and is a recognized expert in research and application of business process engineering and enterprise architecture.  Merril is Managing Partner of Arcus Group and an expert in the human side of Change Management.

Cheers,
-pmh

Cheers,
-pmh

Â

As it turns out, the course description may be referring to the system of email alerts sent out when there are changes to content in the repository to which a user has “subscribed”. Being immersed in Web 2.0 and related technologies, however, I immediately launched into a presentation of RSS subscriptions complete with a demo of FeedReader and descriptions of the benefits of RSS for updating staff and partners via intranet and extranet RSS feeds.

Of course, the ECM vendor does have full support for RSS too. So my explanation wasn’t wasted, but I have been struck by how little people in the general IT world do know about RSS. Our project is sponsored by the company’s Sales & Marketing group and they also know nothing of RSS. For my client the benefits of RSS are simple to explain… a radically simple suggestion, actually.

Since my professional life is in perfect synch with the podcasts I listen to on my daily commutes, I recalled that the February 13th. episode of Todd Cochrane’s Geek News Central Podcast contained a pointer to Why Do You Care About RSSÂ by Sue Polinsky. Check out the comments below the article for more useful links.

Cheers,
-pmh

Although our RFP is for a web content management (WCM) system, the client has been interested in enterprise content management (ECM) vendors from the start because:

1) they have no ECM systems currently in place and…

2) at least some of the business case for the WCM overlapped with ECM functionality.

We reinforced this thinking with a WCM RFP that also touched on document management (DM), records management (RM), and digital asset management (DAM) requirements.

As designed, the RFP scoring scheme brought to the top the WCM vendors for whom WCM was just one component of a full ECM suite. The leaders each have full-blown ECM solutions which include WCM, DM, RM (including physical records), DAM, and imaging. This minimizes integration and simplifies pricing, maintenance, and support.

The WCM project team managed to prepare a tightly scripted demo outline that the vendors were told to follow. We didn’t want them simple display their respective strong points and leave us trying to compare apples with oranges. Our script touched on most of the demonstrable features that we listed in our RFP, anyway. There was no reason to go anywhere else because all the scored points were in the script.

So, although all vendors demonstrated what amounted to full ECM functionality the one that stuck most closely to the script is the one that got the client’s full attention… no one in the audience had to worry about what feature was being demonstrated, they just followed a printed checklist.

All the shortlisted vendors’ products met the requirements, but the vendor who stuck to the script is the one that left the most positive impression.

The moral of the story: if you are using a formal RFP process to select ECM (or other) solutions, consider scripting their demonstration and sync RFP requirements. If you’re a vendor, be sure you stick to the script.

Cheers,
-pmh

Last year I attended LinkUp as a participant. This year finds OpenText, the company, much bigger, having recently acquired Hummingbird (and the RedDot CMS that came with it). So I was understandably interested in what things look like from the conference floor and I rather thought someone would be blogging from the LiveLinkUp conference.

Sadly, my Technorati searches only came up with one LinkUp blog… not a real blog since it was a trade publication and much of the content was (yawn…) text from Open Text’s recent press release on their new release.

-pmh

Now, I’d heard the name and seen some presentations in relation to their financial solutions for corporate governance and regulatory compliance, but I thought I should have another look at their web site before I replied to the email. In doing so I stumbled across an article that began with the following fascinating words:

“In the aboriginal language of Dyirbal, ‘Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things’ is one of four general categories of objects in the world.”

Wow…

The article is entitled Structured Text and Unstructured Data [update: now only available at Internet Archive- here] and it very quickly gets into categorization, textural data mining, ontologies, and similar issues…

“The Dyirbal language uses four basic categorizations for all things:

I. Bayi: (human) males; animals
II. Balan: (human) females; water; fire; fighting
III. Balam: nonflesh food
IV. Bala: everything not in the other classes.

Let’s examine how they categorize and why:…”

Most of the time I’m more concerned with practical matters… such as whether the ECM vendors responding to my RFP really have an open and extensible architecture. But sometimes I like to ponder the wider issues of information architecture and knowledge management. It’s not that I’m expert in those areas, but I wouldn’t mind being a student again. If I were a student, I wouldn’t mind having this article’s author as a teacher. He, or she, knows how to grab your attention and stir your imagination.

The Dyirbal language strikes me as so poetic. It reminds me of a Star Trek story, Episode 2/Season 5 – Darmok, featuring an alien race who could not be understood because they spoke in metaphors. The point being that, to differing extents, so do we all.

When I google^TM “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things” I come up with this book by George Lakoff on Amazon. Wikipedia tells me the sad fact that there are only about five speakers of the Dyirbal language left in Australia.

My “take away” was the article summary which states:

“In the future, more companies will realize the need for extending their Business Performance Management solutions with ECM and textual data mining. Partnerships and interfaces with textual mining companies and ECM vendors will increase.”

I think I understand that… and the Dyirbal classification of Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.
-pmh

The manager with whom I have been working, was asked to present an ECM roadmap to key executives that would place our WCM project in the context of the full pantheon of ECM: document management, imaging, collaboration, digital asset management, records management, and a portal infrastructure.

This is a pretty tall order, even for an ECM consultant, but together with our project’s business analyst the three of us assembled a reasonable roadmap with Best Practices as our compass and some high-level organizational requirements as our guide. We packaged ECM as business processes wrapped around ECM tools, like the web content management system, and presented them in a logical sequence – well, a “reasonably logical” might be a better term given that WCM was, for historical reasons, the first ECM project out of the gate.

The challenge in a presentation such as this is to convey enough detail to get support at the executive level without getting bogged down in details, especially technical details.

As well as the logical (and stunningly beautiful!) Visio diagrams I prepared for the PowerPoint presentation we also gave out full colour copies of the ECM at WORK poster from AIIM, the ECM Association. As soon as I came across it I knew this poster was perfect for our purposes. It reinforced many of the points made in the presentation and highlights areas that might otherwise have been missed by our audience: Compliance, Collaboration, Cost, and Continuity. Three of these are difficult concepts to sell because they are often not seen as having a great deal of quantifiable value. The fourth section on Cost tells it like it is: “While ECM can be a costly initiative, what are the costs of not properly managing your content?” Our presentation could have used those words, but it means more when it comes from an industry association like AIIM.

Registration is required to download the AIIM ECM at Work poster, but registration as an “associate” is free and the site has a lot of very useful material for anyone interested in ECM.

Cheers,
-pmh