ECM Briefs

This week I was in Grapevine, Texas where the annual International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference was held. ILTA has been going strong for several years now, but I have to say this year was one of the best conferences I've been to yet with regards to the session content, the great people I spoke with all week and of course the great venue.

The week was especially successful for us at the show because we saw a lot of traction at the booth and also to our peer group sessions, as a result of some of the announcements we made this week.

Our email management session was the most popular (it was a full house!). A few of our clients put together some key points about their approach to email management, which been a hot topic for quite awhile and is one of the main reasons we announced our new email lifecycle management solution this week.

As we mentioned in the announcement, the offering addresses the largest business problem facing firms these days, which is managing enormous volumes of client- and matter-related emails. To solve this problem, we took our email archiving capabilities for Microsoft Exchange, tied it together with our LegalKEY records management system, and added a series of efficient filing components to really give firms the power to manage the entire lifecycle of emails from creation to disposition.

The offering also addresses key concerns at most firms, such as scalability, user adoption and compliance when it comes to implementing the right system, but really these are the key things we focus on with every solution we come out with.

This week we also got to announce a couple of new customers who have taken some significant steps towards making their law firms more efficient. Chambliss, Bahner & Stophel for example will be using document management to control its document-based knowledge assets in a secure, integrated, and intuitive environment; while global law firm, Hunton & Williams is in the process of replacing its existing conflicts checking system with our LegalKEY Conflicts Management and New Business Intake systems.

Well, I've pretty much given my last bit of energy this week writing this post. I have to catch my flight back to New York soon and you can bet I'm going to take this long weekend to try to relax and enjoy the sunshine before things get even busier this fall.

Any sanguine observer of web trends and technology generally could not be blamed for rolling their eyes at yet another Web 2.0 corporate initiative. But give us a second to explain. For regarding Web 2.0 - all hype aside -- there really is something worth talking about here. First, it doesn't really matter if you call Web 2.0, Internet 2.0, or the "next next" thing. What the meaning behind the term, whatever term, suggests is that we have reached a common milestone in the development of Internet related technologies generally, and digital media technologies specifically (of particular interest to Artesia, Open Text's Digital Media Group) that taken together enable a fundamentally different approach to putting together large complex systems. Scott Bowen, President of Artesia, talks more about this in our latest podcast launched this week.

It wasn't of course a particular day or time, a specific invention or product, but rather taken writ large we have entered a period of modularity where interoperability and flexibility are as important, if not more so, than sheer functionality (can we do it at all) or performance (yeah we can do it but it takes a week). Where once streaming audio over the Internet was a feat, today video delivered over IP is common place whether online or as part of a service providers infrastructure.

Here at Open Text we're excited about the opportunities these trends present. First our flagship Digital Asset Management product is being used in more and different use cases. Where once perhaps just a very nice and very important virtual filing cabinet, today it is rare where a customer doesn't integrate its enterprise DAM with other systems ranging from online ecommerce systems to backend financial and billing infrastructures. Robust public APIs of course are the secret sauce - the LegosTM of the digital world. Our latest version, Artesia DAM 6.8, for example, shipped with a full complement of web services that have been used to extend the system's core functionality in many directions from large file delivery to web content management integration. We'll be expanding this set of web services even further with future releases and, in fact, are the very method we are using to integrate other products from the Open Text suite including the Business Process server which will make heretowith one-off process changes easy to recreate, re-use, and modify as the situation fits.

Secondly, Web 2.0 means we can build, test, configure, and support our product differently and we expect even more robustly than ever before. Where once DAM was something of an art with custom implementations the norm, over the years our team and the associated technologies have matured such that today we have a standard client services methodology and a range of delivery options from fully integrated behind-the-firewall enterprise DAM to a completely hosted "Artesia On Demand" for which no local IT-infrastructure is required.

So Web 2.0, surely it's been hyped, but don't let the hype distract you from the significant technical trends it represents.

Last week, we announced that Citrix Systems has selected Open Text for a solution that helps manage content from Accounts Payable (AP). The idea is to optimize AP workflow to improve overall speed, control and visibility of its operations as well as extract additional value from its investment in SAP® solutions.

Citrix offers a good example of what we're seeing in the larger market: More companies looking to optimize accounts payable to reduce costs and improve efficiency. With the right approach, companies can cut average invoice processing time by improving the handling of problem invoices, avoiding duplicate payments, and taking better advantage of early payment discounts. About 85 percent of invoices coming into the typical company are still in paper form, so automating the handling of invoices once they're received is critical.

There are several strategies companies can follow to successfully automate the handling of AP processes and documentation. The key is to take a holistic view of the process, rather than view each invoice independently, transaction by transaction. Understanding each invoice in the broader business context and being able to connect invoices to other related content, such as supporting documents, change orders, email-trails and other information, is essential for success. Today, this content is disconnected from invoices and AP systems. Here are some of the strategies companies should consider when assessing how they can improve automation of AP processes and the handling of AP content:

• Move aggressively from paper to universal electronic invoice processing. This involves scanning paper-based invoices and then applying optical character recognition software to extract as much information as possible. Vendor self-service portals, vendor networks, electronic transfers and other Web-based solutions are gaining momentum as techniques for reducing paper volume.
• Don't just automate broken processes. Recognize the difference between process automation and process optimization. Organizations that focus on automation run the risk of having a fast bad process. Take a close look at process flows to ensure that they are well-designed and fully optimized. From there, automation can begin to deliver significant gains.
• Address the problem of information silos. For many organizations, an important part of the solution has proven to be a set of enterprise content services tightly integrated with transactional systems such as SAP or Oracle. These services can pull together content from across the enterprise stored in multiple repositories and present it to users in the context of a particular vendor, project or invoice. In some cases, related content from different systems can be presented in a familiar client application, such as Microsoft Office Outlook or Excel, saving the need to launch a separate application window and reducing training costs. Content services also provide comprehensive search capabilities to help users quickly locate content across multiple systems.
• Consider the company's broader records management needs. Many companies now need to incorporate invoices into a broader records management system that maintains all business-critical documents according to pre-defined rules. Records management needs are driven by compliance and regulatory requirements.

You can find out about Open Text's ECM solutions for AP here. There's also a recently-published study on Open Text's AP solutions by research firm PayStream Advisors which you can find here.

Interesting developments south of the border...

On July 30, 2008, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) voted "unanimously" to start looking at web sites - specifically emerging interactive technology - as new ways to open up channels of communication and disclosure between corporations and the investor and shareholder community. According to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox in the July 30 statement, "Ongoing developments in technology have increased both the markets' and investors' demand for more timely company disclosure on the Web, and in turn, raised new securities law issues for public companies to consider".

While on the surface this new guidance might not have direct applicability to Canadian public sector, this statement represents a critical turning point in the journey to Government 2.0. Increasingly regulatory and legislative bodies are being compelled by emerging technology and changing information worker habits to look at new content forms and channels. This SEC development recognizes that corporate disclosures can now legitimately be made through new communication channels - including blogs and investor communities or forums. Companies who want to pursue cost effective and interactive shareholder communication can now explore these Web 2.0 inspired tools that have proved so valuable in other areas of customer engagement.

Open Text will be watching this interesting collision between 2.0 culture and content and the legal compliance obligations we see in both private and public sector. As new forms of content and online communication become more widely accepted in the eyes of courts, regulatory bodies and public sector agencies, those of us who are concerned about records retention, preservation, corporate memory retention and appropriate disposal policies need to think hard about how new 2.0 content types are handled. Ensuring that information governance strategies and retention best practices extend to the next generation of electronic content is what we do best.

Click here if you've thought about these issues. We want to know: Are You Ready?

Originally posted on blog.gtec.com

Last week we announced that EWE AG, one of Germany's largest energy providers, has rolled out a contract management solution based on enterprise content management software. The company's solution, called Central Contract Management, has helped to reduce risk, speed up operations and increase transparency.

Managing contracts, with all their dense language and many pages of details, is a difficult job for any organizations. This is because contracts often span many different individuals, departments and software applications. Pulling out the relevant details and making sure that those details are accurately represented and acted upon across the company is a big task. EWE, however, has taken the bull by the horns and is reaping the rewards.

For companies that are looking to make gains on the contract management front, I thought it would be worth revisiting the five cornerstones of a contract management strategy. You can download a comprehensive white paper on the topic here.

Automated Contract Creation
In order to provide a truly flexible system that eradicates cost at every stage of the contract lifecycle, the contract management system must provide the ability for trusted end users to make use of technology to create contracts and legal documentation within pre-planned and pre-approved parameters. This will enable resource constrained groups such as legal and procurement to focus on the creation of approved contract templates and best practices.

Secure Contract Negotiation
Contract negotiations between external parties often take place via e-mail. This can create many problems for contract negotiators. Sending an e-mail to five recipients will generate five separate copies of the contract. If the five recipients wish to make any comments or amendments to the contract, then there may be multiple versions of the document in circulation. This creates significant work for the contract manager when attempting to bring these versions together into a final contract, and can lead to a loss of control over what may be sensitive commercial information. A comprehensive contract management strategy should use a secure collaboration environment for contract negotiations with external parties.

Electronic Contract Repository
A comprehensive contract management strategy should include the implementation of a central electronic repository to store contracts and agreements. Paper filing cabinets or shared folders on a company network are not efficient mechanisms for storing sensitive information like contracts. The contract repository helps companies meet corporate governance rules, and gives authorized staff instant access to the latest version of any contract. Companies can also avoid the extra costs of retrieving archived contracts when needed from off-site paper stores, a common practice for many organizations.

Automatic Upload to Back-End Systems
Most organizations manually key contract data into back-end systems, an inefficient, time consuming, and sometimes error-prone process. A contract management strategy should insist on the use of data transfer technologies that can automatically extract key contract data and upload it to relevant back-end systems as required without any manual intervention.

Proactive Report & Alert Management
While documented processes around the creation, review and archiving of contracts are required to meet compliance requirements, the true commercial power of a contract management system is in its reporting ability. Reports are used to alert and provide actionable management information to staff members who require that information to carry out their business function. The terms of a contract can affect many parts of the business. Specialists like sales managers or the procurement team, will want to keep track of the finer detail relating to their principal transactions. Other business functions like finance, legal, operations, customer services, etc., may only need to view subsets of the contract data to either ensure that suppliers are complying with pre-negotiated terms or that customer commitments are being met so that the business is maximizing revenue while minimizing risk.

Take a minute to think about all the content that flows through your company's legal department: new documents created by legal staff, documents for review from outside counsel, vital business contracts, business unit requests for documents from various archive sources, or content that is part of a discovery order - and they all demand the legal professional's time. The reality is that content is growing at a rapid rate within legal departments, and the task of controlling and tracking it all is difficult without the right technology in place.

As organizations grow, the job of managing thousands, or even millions of paper and electronic documents is time consuming and costly. Much of this information can easily be lost or buried within email systems or across shared drives. Without an effective means of capturing and organizing documents, the flow of information either breaks down or becomes stagnant -- outdated documents cause confusion and can become difficult to eradicate. Consolidating all of your information assets in a secure repository can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend managing documents. When integrated with a matter or case management system, a comprehensive methodology for organizing all of the work that a legal department performs is made possible.

If you feel like you're drowning in your legal documents you might want to consider checking out this webinar taking place this week on managing content in the corporate legal department. Attendees will get a short lesson on the usefulness of a central and controlled repository for storage and management of many types of intellectual assets, with particular attention paid to how those assets are related to legal matters. The demonstration section of the presentation will focus on integration with the Microsoft Office suite of applications, security, and searching.

The webinar takes place on Thursday, July 24th at 2pm Eastern Time. Click here to register.

Better late than never: my blog entry from last week on government 2.0 on blog.gtec.ca

History has taught us that in an enterprise setting there are many diverse needs and expectations related to search for different types of content at different phases of the information lifecycle and for different user contexts.

The volume of data in organizations continues to increase at unprecedented rates. And while enterprise information systems control access to some of this large quantity of data, there is so much information that it results in overwhelmed end users. The information noise that attacks users on an hourly basis is causing new forms of inefficiency throughout the enterprise. Governments and corporations are investing heavily in creating and archiving information and that data is underutilized and yet that data must still be both discoverable and made available to users who need it. Unfortunately, most information quickly becomes buried in information silos.

The problem with enterprise search was recently exposed in an AIIM Market IQ on Findability, which asked users about their experiences finding information within their enterprise. The study found that fully 50 percent of respondents believe that "Findability" in their organization is "worse" to "much worse" than their own organization's consumer-facing Web sites. Of course, finding publicly available information is much easier on the Web because information is in browser-ready, standards based formats. In contrast, company data lives in a morass of database formats and file structures, and faces the complexity of user permissions and sign-ons.

Given this complexity, applying consumer-style search to enterprises is unlikely to provide a satisfying experience for users. Or for companies, for that matter: does a company really want its users to spend time combing through millions of results per query? A better approach is to build intelligent enterprise search into users' daily context. This involves making full use of the user's context and behaviors to deliver task-related intelligence that enhances the user experience, with the ultimate goal being what we call "find before search. Current examples of this in Open Text applications today include:

• Records being automatically categorized and filed according to their content when added to the system
• Aggregating related information into documents being viewed, such as automatically providing links to subsequent procurement documents when a contract is viewed within the repository.

These are capabilities that are here today and utilize search and information access technology "behind the scenes" to provide users with important information and context around the document or process that they're working with. We have customers who have seen big gains in productivity and customer service because workers have the information they need gathered and accessible just by opening an email from a customer, for example.

Future advances in search "intelligence" will also become embedded in a modular fashion into enterprise applications, such as business intelligence and litigation support. The concept will be expanded to include many other user-centric applications that can provide even more details about the user's task at hand.

When talking to vendors about these solutions, be sure they are taking a modular approach to providing all the technologies necessary to deliver full spectrum information access and discovery. This is achieved through the application of search as an integrated set of technologies that can adapt to the diverse and constantly changing landscape of content repositories and native indices from many different vendors. By continuing to align information access with enterprise content management capabilities, companies can move to the point where they have a joined-up content and access strategy across the enterprise. The key isn't just search, it's search with context.

This week I'm at the Drug Information Association Annual Meeting in Boston where I've been talking to people about all aspects of enterprise content management in the life sciences space including records management, quality management and Web 2.0.

Pretty much everyone I've talked to at the show is looking to do more with ECM. They're looking to go beyond traditional regulated documents, and want to have more focus on contract management and records management, and basically bring all of their content together under one roof so to speak.

I've also been hearing a lot more Web 2.0 talk this year. Conferences like this one give pharmaceutical professionals an opportunity to connect with peers and prospective drug development partners. As we take advantage of these opportunities here this week, we're reminded that the next generation of social networking will enable those relationships to build throughout the year.

New sites and services are being launched that will help connect those in the life sciences community. I met someone yesterday who was launching a social networking tool for drug development companies and professionals.

I've asked myself many times when Web 2.0 will significantly impact pharmaceutical and biotech companies... As I am approached by someone who has been following Open Text on Twitter, I realize that it may be sooner than I thought.

Walk into any life sciences organization and you might see more than a few people scratching their heads and looking bewildered when asked about eDiscovery and how exactly a record is defined in the industry. Some might tell you that regulated content is the only content that has to have record classifications applied to it, which isn't the case. And because of the litigation aspects associated with these records, legal counsel and the senior executives will tell you their own perspectives.

Pharmaceutical, Biotechnology and Medical Device Manufacturers face an enormous number of regulations - including the FDA Rule: 21 CFR Part 11 for Electronic Records and Electronic Signatures -- which guide their records management practices. Records Management is nothing new to this industry, but the increasing use of technology in the industry, and the increasing use of electronic information management, is forcing organizations to rethink the way they manage their records.

In a podcast posted this week, I discussed these issues with Christine Ardern, Director, Records Management for Entium Technology and Liz Kofsky, Records Management Program Manager for Open Text.

We all stressed the fact that organizations need to recognize that a solid enterprise-wide records management practice is essential to a successful compliance program. Many organizations have implemented departmental strategies to address one or more records management requirements typically under the regulatory or quality management umbrella, but recent changes in eDiscovery legislation as well as general good corporate governance practices require a holistic approach to records management.

The main thing to remember is that keeping everything is not a viable option - the podcast will help you take the first step in determining the best records management options for your organization.