2002 Technology Plans: What Users Want

by Michael P. Voelker

The job of reporting on new content and collaboration technologies often leads us to vendors, consultants and analysts, but Transform Magazine always strives to put technology in the context of user needs. In putting together this Return on Innovation section, we wanted to view the technology landscape through the eyes of users — those charged with both setting practical direction and solving mission-critical problems.

We talked to businesspeople implementing content and collaboration technologies ranging from Web content management, portals and collaboration tools to workflow, imaging and forms automation. We uncovered a mix of problems and differing approaches to solving them, but we also discovered a common frame of reference.

These users are all looking to make the most of technology they already have in place — making it more user-friendly, for example, and extending it to business partners. They're also dealing with such nontechnological issues as corporate culture, business practices and even paper clutter.

From Content to KM at Barclays Global

Barclays Global Investors (Barclays Global) has content repositories distributed around the globe, content management components installed and undergoing continual review and will soon purchase new collaboration software. You would think the challenges facing the company would be primarily technological. Not so, says Kathy Taylor, managing director of global marketing for Barclays Global.

"You can put in place all the technology solutions in the world, but the real challenge is getting the organization to understand and use them," she says. "You can create the best infrastructure, but if people aren't motivated to incorporate the Web into their business strategy and implementation plans, any initiative is doomed to failure." Therefore, corporate culture — or perhaps more accurately, human nature — is something Taylor would like to see content management vendors address. "[They should consider] both the infrastructure side of knowledge management as well as the organization," she says. "Not enough time is spent on the cultural elements [of business]."

Barclays Global, the San Francisco-based investment management arm of the U.K. banking giant, will trust technology to address at least some of these cultural issues. To begin with, the company is extending the functionality of its intranet, which is now primarily used to share corporate news and internal staff information. The intranet site will be relaunched in January as a "productivity portal" that will offer task-oriented navigation to information.

The company's public Internet site, barclaysglobal.com, already incorporates eight different regional sites offering login-driven personalization. In 2002, Barclays Global will be looking to its content management system — with components from Documentum and ATG — to further personalize users' experiences to include customized homepages. Also on the agenda is Web tracking.

"We'll track the site implicitly by observing and explicitly by asking for feedback," says Taylor.

Real-time conferencing is also on the agenda at Barclays Global. The company has 2,000 employees scattered across the globe, yet recent economic and safety concerns have spurred the company to look for "really good Web conferencing software," says Taylor. Thus far the company has considered Placeware, Mountain View, CA, and Webex, San Jose, CA.

Several crucial content management components are also priorities for Barclays Global in 2002. The company is evaluating portal technology and is "close" to purchasing collaboration and chat software, each from a different vendor. The company will also address the burden of forms, which Taylor characterizes as "the bane of every organization." There is project underway to "Web-ify" as many forms as possible.

Behind every planned system improvement is the realization of Barclays Global Investors' core business. "Our whole raison d'etre is our intellectual capital," Taylor says. "Leveraging that to the fullest extent possible is what we need to do, and that's taking us into the whole knowledge management arena. In some respects [the term] 'knowledge management' is in danger of going the way of 'reengineering' as the watchword of the day, but in our organization, it's vital to our success."

Colonial's Content Demands a Fatter Pipeline

Making it easier for field staff to stay connected is a primary goal for Colonial Pipeline of Atlanta. The company's content management and workflow systems — supplied by FileNet, Costa Mesa, CA, and installed in the Fall of 2000 — have enabled employees to handle invoicing and reporting from anywhere via the Internet, yet some remote staff have been hit head-on with the realities of dial-up Web access.

"I can think of any scenario I want and we can make [the workflow task] hit the right individual," says Kelly Nodzak, transaction manager at Colonial Pipeline. "However, we have field offices with a 56K frame relay. With five people in an office, that dwindles down to 10K."

As Colonial Pipeline has extended more and more workflow to the Web, the bandwidth problem has achieved critical mass, one the company plans to address through negotiation with telecom providers and communications consolidation in 2002.

Compounding the bandwidth problem is Colonial Pipeline's need to install a predictive maintenance and e-procurement system. This system will address regulatory requirements tied to the company's 5,000-plus-mile network of petroleum pipelines. Once this system is selected, it, too, will need to interface with workflows and content management.

"Our desire is to get procurement folks out of transactional purchasing, having them set up the deals and then allowing the user to go directly to the suppliers where those agreements are in place," says Steve Henderson, Colonial Pipeline's procurement leader.

Like many companies hoping to move to e-procurement, Colonial faces the challenge of purchasing low-volume, yet mission-critical parts from smaller suppliers that lack EDI capabilities. Colonial's solution will have to allow for receipt of catalog content from suppliers in any number of formats, ranging from EDI to fax.

"We will have to work on building the supplier interface piece as we build the catalog itself," says Henderson. "There will be some re-keying initially, but fortunately, a lot of what we buy is purchased repetitively."

IT Takes Its Hands Off Content

Mark Andersen, vice president and head of IT at Environmental Systems Design, a Chicago-based engineering and construction consulting firm, has established a single, overarching strategy for content management.

"As much as you can divest the IT group of having to touch content, the better off you are," Andersen explains. "It works better to keep content up to date, and it makes things a lot easier for everyone."

To keep IT away from content, Environmental Systems Design installed an enterprise information portal from Hyperwave, Westford, MA, in the fall of 2000. The system provides a single interface through which staff can create and update new content and access archival documents.

After over a year with the system, Andersen says the company has no buyer's remorse. "I don't worry about [the system] too much," he says. "It's out there, people use it and it doesn't take a lot of effort to keep [content] up to date."

In addition to the portal, Environmental Systems Design uses a Falcon engineering document management system from tsaAdvet, Pittsburgh, PA, for its CAD and ancillary engineering documents. Scanning of hard copy blueprints and drawings is outsourced.

While Andersen is content with these internal systems, he wants to extend access to content to business partners. The company has experimented with project Web sites, but these were unsuccessful due to a lack of support in the construction industry.

"In the construction industry, computers are a necessary evil," says Andersen. "We've abandoned the 'hosting the Web site model.'"

Andersen says the company is now looking for a wireless alternative to full-featured project management systems.

"There are some [project management] products out there that have had some success, but most are glorified FTP products," Andersen explains. "The applications we're running aren't very sophisticated. I could see being able to connect [from a job site] via high-speed wireless or VPN (virtual private network). The big thing that's holding back wireless is speed. We're not going to go back to 10 megabits per second for internal systems, but it might be useful in remote applications."

Content Management Meets Document Delivery

At Sharp Microelectronics of the Americas, Camas, WA, the challenges facing the company in both document management and Web content management involve the same issue: how to make Web-delivered documents easier to find, search and access.

In 2000, the company put in place a Participant Server Web content management system from Eprise to manage its Web content, turning authoring control over to users. Sharp Microelectronics now provides nearly all of its product manuals, spec sheets and other literature in electronic document form (primarily PDF). The push in 2002 is to move beyond the public documents currently available to include restricted-access documents that are now stored on individual PCs and distributed manually.

"Right now we categorize documents and we know attributes such as who created it, when and what revision it's in," explains Don Lavallee, Sharp's director of strategic business operations and information technology. "[In the next phase], when people come in to the site, we'll know whether they have access or not using the security provisions [of Eprise]. When members of the general public go to our library, they won't see any documents that aren't tagged as being available to the public. With a valid login, reps and distributors will connect to our extranet and have access to confidential information."

A larger issue Sharp Microelectronics hopes to address in the coming months is how to improve document search.

"PDFs aren't keyword searchable [from our Web content management system] unless you first download the documents," says Lavallee, who would like to allow users to target appropriate documents before downloading them.

Complicating matters is the fact that many documents in use are scanned or faxed images from the firm's parent company in Japan.

"We'll need to attach keywords to individual documents whether or not those documents are text-searchable," says Shawne Kiln, technical document specialist.

Sharp Microelectronics will be evaluating technologies to do a behind-the-scenes analysis of PDF and other file content. "There are a number of vendors [that] offer that as a point solution, but nothing that will directly bolt in [to our Web content management system] that we've found so far," Lavalle says.

Synchronizing Documents and Web Content

Chuck Kensicki, director of enterprise computing at California State University at Fullerton, sees the school's biggest challenge being not which technologies are needed to manage content, but what role technology should play and how to reengineer business processes to take advantage of it.

The University has made substantial commitments to document management and content management technologies, using Panagon from Filenet for imaging and workflow, SiteFlash from EnFacet, Austin, TX, for Web content publishing and management, and an ERP system from PeopleSoft, Pleasanton, CA.

Kensicki is always on the watch for automation initiatives that make sense for the University. "The low-hanging fruit is always finding ways to get documents off peoples' desktops, scanning and assigning indexes to them."

One continuing project at Cal State at Fullerton has been to move fax receipts from a receive-and-scan model to a direct efax capability. Another project under consideration for 2002 is coordinating the content management capabilities of Panagon and SiteFlash.

"When we have content to share with people, right now it goes either to FileNet's image services and content services [for internal users], or it may go into the Web site itself via SiteFlash. SiteFlash allows us to easily share content [with the public] without relying on a lot of webmasters."

Also on Kensicki's wish list, but with an undetermined timetable, is a portal to allow outside access to certain ERP functions and intranet content.

"There are vendors we buy a lot of products from, and there are a lot of calls handled by procurement that those vendors could look up themselves," Kensicki explains. "For example, when vendors call and ask, 'Where's my invoice?' there's no reason we can't open that up to them."

The University also hopes to use Siteflash to further facilitate Web-based self-service.

"Once a document is retrieved from a customer or student, we can use Siteflash to post that something has been received," he says, adding that a logged-in Web site user would gain access to these records as part of their personalized Web experience.

Through 2002, and likely beyond, Cal State at Fullerton will continue to address the reams of paper documents inherent to most academic institutions.

"We first need to get all the documents captured, then ... look at the security issues," he says. "Before, we couldn't even talk about [managing documents and content] because we had file cabinets. It wasn't even an option."

Also not to be overlooked is the issue of getting users accustomed to electronic workflows. "There has always been a reluctance of people who don't want to give up [having] their hands on a document; they're used to their file cabinets," Kensicki says.

Making electronic forms mimic the look of their paper predecessors is one way Cal State at Fullerton will continue to address this need, as well as continuing to support both paper-based and electronic workflows in many of their business processes.

Summing It Up

What these examples all have in common is a focus in 2002 on the most pressing needs and opportunities — be they limited, tactical challenges or enterprisewide issues that have escalated to critical importance. There's a focus on basics such as lowering cost and improving customer service — gone are discussions of Web spin-offs, IPOs and dramatic, companywide reengineering of content and collaboration technologies. Another common thread is the challenge of integrating multiple, disparate and ever-changing technologies. As soon as one project is completed, another piece of the technology landscape emerges as an impediment or an opportunity to do business in a better, faster and cheaper way.

As Chuck Kensicki of California State University at Fullerton put it, "Business process reengineering is itself an ongoing process from here to eternity."