Innovation and Business Transformation need Metadata to Happen
In a recent CMSWiRe article by Boris Kraft, several examples of content management outcomes are proffered. What’s extraordinary about the examples is that none of them have anything to do with marketing, accounts payable or insurance (go-to uses cases in blogs and articles for some reason). It’s also cool that the examples have to do with people accessing content via mobile devices, away from the office. Read the article; it’s good and the use cases are pretty interesting.
Mobile devices, apps, platforms, and content-as-a-service are keys to innovation and business transformation. However, for them to work properly you need metadata and well-designed / understood repositories. This post is about the importance of metadata in making the magic described in the article happen. I’ll use a project I am working on to provide some context.
The client I am working with builds electricity transmission infrastructure and one of the projects on the go is to digitize their field reference guides. Their current process is to find the manuals/guides you need, print them out, put them in a binder, and hope you’ve got the right ones. If you don’t have the right information with you, it can be a really, really long drive to go and get it. Proceeding without it is not an option as the consequences could, literally, be fatal. Even if no incidents occur the organization could be penalized for all sorts of regulatory violations.
There are four broad categories of manuals/guides: 1 – Health & Safety; 2 – Environmental; 3- Maintain, Repair, & Replace; 4 – Engineering Standards. The documents are required reading by staff, contractors, and business partners at all of my client’s locations. The specific docs that one must read / use are determined by:
- Your role;
- Whether you’re an employee or not;
- Where you are / will be working;
- What specific task(s) you will be performing;
- What equipment you will be using;
- The weather and season;
- Environmental considerations.
Currently, the information that’s needed is stored in SAP, several SharePoint sites, a geomatics database, a health and safety tool, an engineering project management tool, and a couple of purpose built in-house applications. Getting the information requires searching the repositories you have access to, and asking others to search the repositories you don’t have access to. Oh, enterprise search is a foreign concept. There must be a better way …
Well, there is and that’s what I’m working on. We’re at the phase one part of the plan, which is a portal. I don’t like the portal approach because it’s cumbersome, it sits on SharePoint, it doesn’t provide access to all the required information, it’s not built for mobile field access, and it still requires too much effort of the user. But hey, that’s what was scoped and budgeted for in the first phase so that’s what they got.
Where this client, and any other organization with similar requirements, needs to be is at a place where the solution does the work for the user. If I’m about to jump into a helicopter to go and wash resistors (or whatever those white ceramic things are) on a 500kw line 150’ in the air, I should be able to pull the work order (using my mobile device) and have my phone or tablet updated with all the safety and procedure manuals I need. I should not have to access up to seven different repositories to print out documents that I hope are current and correct.
The truth is that the technology to automatically provide health & safety information to field workers exists. The problem is that organizations don’t understand the scope of the challenge, nor do they understand the potential long-term benefits. I’m not implying that there is some sort of magic button or potion that’ll make things happen; there isn’t. The key to making it happen is metadata. Without metadata nobody would find anything they need in a timely manner, leading to all sorts of negative consequences including increased costs, compliance violations, outages, and potential injury or death. With a properly defined and implemented metadata model the opposite is true. In addition to helping people find the information they’re looking for, metadata helps systems communicate with each other to pass information back and forth, execute workflows, and secure information.
Defining an organization’s metadata is not a trivial task, but it is certainly doable. It requires a team made up of IT, subject matter experts, end users, and information management specialists. Metadata should be defined with specific business outcomes in mind, but framed with good information governance practices. A good metadata model contains attributes that control the content (security, workflow, retention) as well as properties that describe the content.
In addition to defining and implementing a metadata model, organizations also need to figure out their content requirements. It’s all about understanding what information you have, where it’s located, how it’s described, and how you’re going to get it to where it’s needed. It’s also about understanding what information you’re missing and how you’re going to get it. For more of a detailed explanation take a look at the Principles of Holistic Information Governance (PHIGs).
The PHIGs aren’t about metadata; they’re about managing information for business outcomes. However, metadata is a big part of that. The key to metadata is to get detailed enough without getting bogged into analysis-paralysis. A government I worked with spent more than six years trying to develop an organization wide model. Big, big mistake. They should have focused on something more specific like a process, department, or content type.
With the trend of going mobile first or mobile only, metadata takes on an even greater importance. I’m convinced that the way forward is apps built on top of content-as-a-service platforms. In order for that path to lead to anything resembling success, the underlying content platforms need to have rock solid metadata to support them. If metadata and geolocation services can be used to tell you what to listen to, what to wear, what to eat, and what the weather’s going to be, there’s no reason they can’t be used to help you do your job and protect yourself. There’s no good reason why someone should have to search for manuals, guides, or procedures. There should be no more effort required than to submit a work order number (or other identifier) and show up at the work site. In fact, do it right and the order of the two actions doesn’t matter.
Wake Up! ARMA Canada
I just spent the last few days (May 25th – 27th) at the ARMA Canada conference in Calgary. As you’d expect it was great to get together with people that I typically only engage with online. But that’s not the reason I go through the effort and expense of attending. I come to this and other conferences to learn and see what’s new, and maybe make some new connections (that whole networking thing). Unless there’s something really compelling (there wasn’t, for me) I do much of my learning on the trade show floor rather than by attending sessions. I try to figure out what’s new, innovative, and exciting by talking to the vendors and attendees.
- What’s new? Other than RSD’s first appearance (I think) at ARMA Canada, nothing really.
- What’s innovative? Nothing really.
- What’s exciting? Nothing really.
The problem seems to be that the Records Management community is not evolving with the times. Sure, they say “information governance”, but I’m not convinced they know what it means or what the implications are. They talk about social media, but do they use it (there was actually a session during which they were taught to tweet). They talk about cloud but then do nothing about it other than give in to the boogie man prognostications. Shit! Even the younger RM folks are sounding like the older ones who are close to retiring.
Based on what I saw and heard at the conference, I hold no optimism that the state of Records and Information Management will join the 21st century any time soon. RIM professionals are complaining about not being given the dues and respect they deserve (and they DO deserve it) but they have to take it, not wait for it to be handed out. ARMA Canada as an association is not helping. They’ve had pretty much the same content, speakers, and vendors since I went to my first conference in 2008. Yes, the names have changed, but you know what I mean.
I’m not sure how, but ARMA Canada needs to freshen things up a bit. Dump the vendors that do nothing but SharePoint stuff or physical records management; that stuff hasn’t changed since the shelf was invented. Attract vendors that represent the new way of doing business and are influencing and enabling digital transformation of business. Solicit speakers that want to do more than talk about how to build another functional file plan or how to implement an ECM platform. ARMA Canada needs a slate of speakers and vendors that represent a balance of what today’s realities are, and what the very near future will hold for managing information.
I’ll wait until I see what the agenda for next year’s conference is, but if it’s pretty much like this year’s this is likely my last ARMA Canada conference for a while. And if things don’t change fast, the RIM profession will be further marginalized, and I’ll likely contribute to the further marginalization; not because we dislike RIM and RIM professionals, but because the rest of us have to move forward to succeed.
Just to add a little positivity …
Over dinner with a friend of mine I got a good look at Oracle’s Document Cloud (I think that’s the name). It’s Oracle’s offering to the EFSS (I HATE that name) market. It’s really, really slick. The version I saw (not sure if it’s generally available yet) looks as easy to use as Box (which is what I use for my business). I know a couple of things about where Oracle is going with it, but not a ton. One thing that I do really like about it is that it sits on top of Oracle Web Center Content so all the security, metadata, workflow, and retention are taken care of. By the way, for those of you who care; Oracle’s Web Center Content is likely the best kept secret amongst ECM platforms. It’s a secret because Oracle really sucks at marketing it.
A few people asked me about the PHIGs (Principles of Holistic Information Governance) that I put together a couple of years ago; you can download them here.
Image taken from http://www.a-tips-of-life.com/tag/awake/
Case Study: Managing Information – How and Why
This is the second case study type thing I’m trying. It’ll likely be the last for a while as I have nothing left that I can publish without getting sued. Ah, the joys of being an independent consultant. Anyways …
This case study has to do with the project referenced in the two posts linked below. You may want to read them to get a better overall view of the project :
The document I’m sharing is part of a set of four docs that were delivered to the client. The purpose of each document is explained in the case study document.
The client in the case study builds electricity infrastructure; they are heavily regulated. They took the decision a while back to use SharePoint as their ECM pillar (though they don’t really know what ECM is). They also don’t have an Information Management strategy, nor any type of dedicated information governance structure. Though they rely heavily on information, and generate tons of intellectual property, they don’t do much about treating information as an asset. As far as they are concerned, information is IT’s problem and the business is just a client.
I was working as a subcontractor with ARC Business Solutions on this project. One of the key contributors to the project and the document was Chris Riley. You can follow Chris on Twitter at https://twitter.com/HoardingInfo. We knew early on in the project that the client was in ECM trouble and needed help. Though not part of the project mandate we wrote the docs up anyway (No. We didn’t bill the client extra.).
Without further ado … click the link and check it out: Managing Information at client name.
Feedback is appreciated.
The image in this post is my first attempt at visually representing the Principles of Holistic Information Governance. Click on it for the original PHIGs post and a larger version of the image.
Chris Riley, along with Shadrach White, is a co-author of Enterprise Content Management with Microsoft SharePoint.
PHIGs Graphics
I’m working on a graphic to represent the PHIGs. Which do you prefer?
Grahic A
Graphic B
Graphic C
Adopting ECM – A Case Study in Failure
Earlier this year I completed an assessment of Alfresco for a university client. The university licensed Alfresco several years ago and did not have much success. They hired me to find out why, and what to do about it. The options they wanted to look at were to continue on with Alfresco or switch to SharePoint. An option they weren’t willing to consider was a cloud based option. I gave them one anyways, based on Box. Unfortunately I was asked to remove that option from the final report. Oh well.
While the platform in question was Alfresco, I can’t stress enough that the failure had nothing to do with the platform. Under the circumstance nothing would have succeeded. You can read a bit about it in an earlier post here.
I’m trying something a little different; because of my altruistic nature I am making the final report available as a downloadable PDF. I figure there’s stuff in it that many could use, and perhaps critique that would be helpful.
I want to thank Laurence Hart for his contribution to the report and the overall project. Thanks, Laurence. You can follow Laurence on twitter at https://twitter.com/piewords and check out his blog at http://wordofpie.com/.
Anyways, just follow the link and you ought to get to the report (no fees, no signup, no tracking). Feel free to provide feedback.
University ECM Assessment – I’m using Box to share this content. Please let me know if you have any issues.
Image: “Paris Tuileries Garden Facepalm statue” by Alex E. Proimos – http://www.flickr.com/photos/proimos/4199675334/. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
