BbWorld 2009, Learning & Content Management and Mass Communications

Yes, that’s a lot to discuss, but it was enthusiastically during last week’s annual Blackboard World conference hosted on the shores of the Potomac in our nation’s capital. Perhaps even more important was the fact that many of the 1,600+ attendees we’re also seeking ways to better leverage the combination of content management, communications and teaching and learning technologies in ways they may never have considered before. Whether this included third party software partners, open source projects from the academic community or new Blackboard services, everyone seemed to be redefining their expectations about learning platforms.


Before I share more observations from Blackboard World, I should inform readers of changes in my own charter at the company because I expect it will impact the focus of the Just Sharing blog as the year progresses. During the last month, I’ve become engaged with our company’s mass notification business, Backboard Connect, in order to assist with marketing its SaaS solutions and better integrating them with other parts of the overall Blackboard business. While enterprise content management (ECM) and mass notification may not appear to be obviously complimentary, I’m already beginning to see synergies and I’m looking forward to sharing what I learn about that in the coming months.

We’ve discussed the inter-relationships between learning and content management in this blog before. I suspect this topic is going to receive even more attention the rest of the year, if the conversations I heard at Blackboard World 2009 are any indication. Institutions are demanding more flexible solutions for managing course content as it becomes more complex and rich. It would only seem natural for them to look to the ECM marketplace to provide guidance and technology. As an integral component of the Blackboard Learn platform, Xythos has an important role to play delivering enhanced ECM functionality within the teaching and learning process and beyond the classroom as well.

Transitioning from a stand-alone ECM focused role within the company to one intended to leverage knowledge and technology across the businesses has occupied almost all of my time lately, so please accept my apologies for the recent lapse in updates to this blog. I’ll aim to publish at least a couple substantive articles each month going forward. Given the continued transition towards content enabled vertical applications within the ECM market it would seem like a natural evolution for Just Sharing to dig deeper into learning content and content distribution management in the education and government markets overall.


As I said, discussions at Blackboard World this year really seemed to highlight key changes taking place regarding how institutions consider the role of content and the different ways they would like to manage and use it. For example, I heard about more plans to virtualize content storage than ever before. Of course, this was typically followed by complaints that it’s still not easy enough for typical users to get content into to virtual repositories. (Maybe they should try Xythos Drive? We’ll explore more about better enabling content contribution via Java applets and web clients for Blackboard in the next few weeks).

Other attendees discussed their desire to link content repositories within the LMS and ECM environments to help minimize work duplication and redundant data storage. I didn’t hear as much concern about content security and compliance as I would have expected, but perhaps that was just an assumed benefit associated with data centralization? A few attendees even spoke to me about deploying common content repositories shared between distributed campuses. Clearly, the desire to reduce complexity and costs hasn’t dissipated.

It was also evident that technology and business managers were thinking about content and learning management beyond the PC. Excitement about Blackboard’s new Mobile Edu initiative was rampant and questions about integrating course delivery, deploying content and managing mass communications via handheld devices were non-stop. I concluded that if technology vendors want to succeed in the world of mobile applications there may be no better market test than higher education and perhaps parts of K-12 too. Where else can you find such a mobile customer base almost guaranteed to be using all the latest web gadgets?

Once again, BbWorld served to re-set expectations about the role of technology and communications, but this time I think as much outside the classroom as within. I suspect the event also provided a healthy stimulus for continued dialog and experimentation among attendees for the rest of 2009 as well. So, if you’re curious to learn more about Blackboard’s content management plans or how mass communications services can supplement your own content strategies, please stay tuned to Just Sharing. There’s plenty more coming! Jim

Compliance, Collaboration and Web 2.0 Content Management (ECM)

With all the talk about layoffs, budget cuts and spending freezes it’s no surprise that investments in enterprise technology have declined. After all, how can you think about enhancing business performance when you’re not sure who’s going to be around to run the operation? However, as we’ve discussed before, doing nothing with your infrastructure during a downturn may be a recipe for failure itself. Businesses that ignore technology improvements can sometimes find themselves at a competitive disadvantage and possibly even become takeover candidates for more savvy competitors.

I was thinking about this after listening to a respected IT leader explain why she believed fear-based marketing tactics were not particularly effective in down economies. We were discussing what motivated organizations to adopt policies and technologies intended to better protect and track data when she suggested that a “greater of evils” decision theory might overwhelm more rational evaluations during tough times.

The concept suggests that if the economic environment is so unpredictable that managers are uncertain about the prospects for their business, then appeals to protect it from other potential, yet unidentified threats aren’t paid much attention. Thus, while compliance initiatives appear more sensible in calmer times, the desire to protect one’s assets from the unknown declines as economic uncertainty increases.

This sounded a bit like doomsday logic to me, until this same executive suggested that it made more sense for her to consider compliance technology investments based upon their ability to deliver competitive advantage vs. just providing calamity insurance. If you expect that your organization has an equal or better chance to ride out the downturn, she reasoned then adopting technologies that can put you ahead of your competition make sense.

The IT exec’s hypothesis seems logical to me. So, I guess the fundamental question for the glass half-full crowd is what technologies can meet this test? I would guess any solution would still need to present a rock-solid ROI pedigree and impose little hardship upon the current organization or its business processes. Solutions that behave the most simply - like familiar consumer web applications would appear most applicable, it would seem.

In the case of compliance solutions this would mean understanding how potentially at-risk information is being used and determining more efficient ways to facilitate that process. For this exec’s business, finding a better solution meant updating standard collaboration methods and migrating those processes to the web. Content became better protected during transport and in it’s stored state as a result. While compliance was improved, the strategic competitive advantage gained would be what paid for the solution.

Obviously, highly regulated industries can’t avoid compliance requirements. Businesses that compete within them must simply build the cost of compliance into their budgets. For other organizations achieving compliance is more often considered a necessary evil and avoided or pushed to the bottom of priority lists. For these businesses, achieving improved compliance via content management tools can be less like sugar-coating a bitter pill and more like getting a good two for one deal.

End users in many organizations are clamoring for easier ways to share information and keep up with the piles of documents that dominate their workdays. The collaborative benefits of web-enabled content management technologies have already proven their ability to help address these challenges. The fact that they can also help get an organization’s information into a more secure and compliant state shouldn’t be overlooked. It just may not be the first thing you want tell everyone about.

Why not test out this concept for yourself? Software as a service or (SaaS) ECM solutions are ideal candidates to become familiar with ECM technology without the hassle of installing and managing any software. Xythos on Demand is a good example of this. It offers many of the enterprise-class features available in its on-premise cousin and you can get started using it in minutes – literally. As always, please let me know what you think.

Scanning to the Cloud – ECM Helps Clean up Our Physical World

I’ve written about this subject as it relates to my own desktop and possibly yours too, but the response to the web seminar we hosted about the potential organizational benefits of cloud computing and ECM convinced me that there’s more for us to discuss. Over eighty organizations registered for yesterday’s seminar, titled “Can you scan to a cloud? The benefits of scanning documents to electronic storage repositories” and we received a lot good questions from the attendees as well. The whole seminar is recorded for your viewing pleasure at the above link.

I think the interest in the combination of ECM and the cloud is driven by the increased benefits that can be realized by organizations vs. individuals engaged in using these technologies. While it’s great to get documents and files off of my desk and stored more securely, organizations gain the advantage of being able to multiply the value of content stored in the cloud amongst their employees and trading partners. It’s kind of like a network effect scale of improvement resulting from improved content discovery, re-use and an overall enhanced ability to respond to the business environment as a whole.



Organizations will still need help migrating content to the cloud. It’s not as simple as pointing all the MFP’s to some new web-enabled repository. New policies will need to be created. Not all documents may be permitted in the cloud, as legal restrictions often trail technology advancements. Cloud service providers will need to be carefully investigated and able to prove their ability to support various service level agreements. Additional integration work will probably also have to be performed between cloud services and the software and scanners, or MFPs that will become the on-ramp to the cloud.

Fortunately, this process has already begun. A growing number of hardware vendors including Canon and Ricoh are supporting open standards for document transfer over the web, like SSL and WebDAV. ECM connectors from vendors like Captiva or Xythos also help automate the classification of documents during or after scanning helping improve discovery and aiding business process automation. Bar code support and zonal OCR can also help distribute large scanning jobs across an organization or to third parties who can perform the tasks of migrating content to the cloud more cost effectively.


While public data clouds may not be suited for sensitive institutional content, organizations can look to cloud services providers or host their own “internal” clouds to achieve the same network benefits. Most will probably want to take a step-by-step approach beginning with public oriented content first, such as marketing or sales collateral. As they gain experience, they can begin adding native electronic content together with scanned documents, creating complete workspaces of reference and work in process documents in their clouds.

For those of you that would prefer to migrate to the cloud from the comfort of your own office vs. visiting that MFP down the hall there are plenty of options. Check out Fujitsu or Kodak desktop scanners or a new one that’s caught my attention, Neat (neatco.com). There are even client applications like our own Xythos Drive and Xythos Filer that can help make uploading and classifying documents a snap. Once those files are off your desk, you’ll feel better. More importantly, once they are safely stored in the cloud your organization will perform better. Have fun!

Applications in the Cloud Part 2 – The ECM Bridge

A fair amount has been written about ECM and SaaS (Software as a Service) recently, particularly focusing upon whether ECM is well suited to the on demand environment and if businesses can depend upon on-demand ECM providers. I think the second part of this discussion is curious. If customers are confident their client data is safe with a SaaS CRM vendor like Salesforce.com then, all things being equal what makes other types of data, like documents more or less at risk? Obviously the management at Salesforce.com didn’t think there was a much different model when they decided to acquire online document management vendor, Koral last year.

In fairness, Salesforce has succeeded in CRM where customers historically had not been provided with adequate solutions or were so dissatisfied with their existing CRM software they were willing to overlook the switching costs. The Salesforce service’s ease of use and generally superior performance was enough to get many businesses to overcome their fears of SaaS as well. So, is ECM different? Possibly. While this is just a hypothesis, I would guess that the methods organizations use to manage their documents differ more significantly than how they manage their respective sales processes.

While larger organizations may employ common taxonomies to govern how they store documents, this is often in response to industry standard practices or government regulations, such as those designed to help monitor the drug discovery process like the FDA’s CFR 21 Part 11. Small and medium sized organizations not directly engaged with government organizations are less likely to follow standard document storage and archiving methods. Instead, these companies develop their own best practices specifically suited to their environment and often management’s general familiarity and comfort with technology as a whole.

While these document storage practices may not be ideal, many have probably lasted for years, some becoming more automated than others, with each process becoming more different from the next. Unlike the largest organizations which embraced ECM a decade ago or more, smaller companies could not afford the legions of consultants and technicians required to update and migrate their document management processes to a networked model, much less the Web. As a result, their document-centric business processes remain an odd mixture of paper-based and electronic exchanges with the later mostly relying upon email as a notifications and document transport method.

So, what does all this have to do with cloud computing and ECM today? A lot or a little, depending upon how you want to look at it of course. As I stated in my last post, the more warmware built into a business process, the less likely it will easily migrate to another environment, including the web. Obviously, the more unique the process is the less likely a common cloud or SaaS solution will be able to address it. Remember, one of the defining advantages of cloud computing is the aggregation and sharing of resources like computing, delivery and storage across a large and diverse customer population. It’s difficult for cloud applications to be common if they also must address multiple unique requirements while remaining universally accessible and easy to use.

Time and experience will undoubtedly help to overcome these issues. I imagine a future someday where automated widgets (or applets?) will help to transform and migrate even obscure business processes to the cloud with little intervention or planning. Ok, maybe my glasses are a little too rosy. In the meantime, its probably more realistic to expect that the most common elements of cloud computing, such as storage and collaboration can be leveraged to benefit existing business processes back on the ground.

What could this look like? Just imagine all of your business’ client solicitation, upgrade and service notices that you created in your favorite desktop programs are now stored in the cloud. Basic ECM functions ensure that complete version histories are maintained and backed up to keep your IT and legal staff happy. Clients are automatically notified of payment schedules using the cloud’s calendaring service and can instantly review their account status via a secure log-in through the cloud portal.

What’s new about that, you say? Just consider that none of this process required migrating your data from one application environment to another. There is no new software to learn, no consultants to pay, nothing. In fact, you can easily trick existing desktop applications into storing data in the cloud and begin developing scenarios like I just described using technologies that are available today.

If you’re interested to learn how, check back in a few days and I will share the details.

Applications in the Cloud – Is Your Business Ready?

Talk about cloud computing seems to be growing by the minute and I can understand why. If you believe what some industry pundits are suggesting you should soon be able to have your whole desktop PC delivered as a web service to whatever device you choose wherever you are. Work performed in one place will instantly be synched up with the next place, just when you need it. Sounds kind of appealing, doesn’t it?

Well maybe, but the whole concept also has me wondering if I’m missing something. I think there may be more work involved migrating some parts of my digital life to the cloud than others. Storing photos online makes lots of sense to me. They are much easier to share and the services I’ve tried can organize my photos better than I can alone. Backing up my documents online makes a lot of sense too. So, where do I see darkness looming in these web clouds?

I suspect it will be more difficult for businesses to transition to a cloud computing model than for individual consumers like me. Most businesses have been managing their applications and data a lot longer than I’ve been taking digital photos. That probably means they’ve developed a variety of software customizations and methods to help automate business processes with their software as well.

This unique “warmware” found in businesses often represents considerable investment and may become a speed bump, or worse on the way to the cloud. For example, small businesses have counted on Quickbooks to manage their accounting for years and many have developed valuable business procedures around this software. Migrating these individualized accounting solutions to other vendor’s web services could prove challenging and costly.  It might be better to wait until Intuit provides a suitable web service of its own.

What about all of the other software applications whose developers don’t offer a near-term cloud strategy or outright custom applications whose authors are long gone? How can the business processes supported by these technologies migrate to the cloud? I doubt very easily or quickly. Even cloud computing’s poster child, Google Apps doesn’t claim to be a Microsoft Office replacement yet (although it may some day). The thousands of lesser known desktop applications and their warmware will need a migration path of their own if businesses are to fully benefit from the aggregate synergies of cloud computing.

A potential near term solution may still include key cloud components, such as persistent and pervasive data storage and fundamental collaboration tools. These functions represent some of the most compelling elements of cloud computing, but don’t necessarily have to be embedded within process specific applications. SaaS (Software as a Service) and now cloud based service providers are compelled to integrate these functional layers because it can improve the customer experience and create a “sticky” business model. 

However, for business customers seeking a transition to a cloud based model an intermediate option may be worth exploring. Ideally, such a model would allow these organizations to preserve their investments in the customization, training, etc. related to their existing software while helping to move their data to a safer and ultimately more functional location in the cloud…

We’ll look into the specifics of what that model might include in the next few days. I suspect we may be able to get a few pointers from the online data storage and yes, online document management vendors as well. Until then, cheers! Jim

Is Green the New Black?

I don’t know that the green topic needs much extra help to appear fashionable, but we’re certainly beginning to learn about good examples of how ECM is being put to work to reduce paper consumption, travel costs and other factors unfavorable to the environment. We’ve invited Xythos customers and a couple industry analysts to join us on a webcast next month to look into this topic in more detail. Please feel free to join us and share the below invitation link with your friends.

http://www.xythos.com/promotions/greenisnewblack_reg.html

What I like about using ECM to address environmental concerns is that it can produce immediate and direct results. There’s no need for offsets or carbon credits to justify ECM green projects. However, these projects usually require behavioral change in order to succeed. Sometimes that may be difficult for a user community. Other times, the initiative might appear obvious and help employees feel that they’re “doing their part to help” while at work.

One example we’ll be looking into is quite simple, but could yield impressive results – print output reduction. Several Xythos customers have targeted print output as a quick way to reduce paper use and the consumption of energy associated with printing and distributing documents. With target goals of 25% or greater the savings from these initiatives can add up rather quickly, particularly for some of our larger, distributed institutional clients.

Organizations have lots of different reasons these days for participating in green initiatives, and saving money certainly can’t hurt the appeal. Is your organization also finding ways to make green turn to black? Please let me know.

Web 2.0, SaaS and ECM – Is there a connection?

We hosted a web conference about these topics earlier this month and about 100 participants registered for the event. Attendees were asked to respond to a short poll regarding their current use of collaborative technologies and while this may not be a surprise to readers, almost half reported that email remained the primary collaborative tool used to work with others both outside and within their office. This reminded me once again that while terms like Web 2.0 and SaaS appear over-used in our industry there are still many organizations that haven’t yet tried today’s new collaborative tools and may not even be aware of the simpler ways to begin doing this, such as using software as a service. 

While businesses scramble to keep track of email in this age of increased compliance requirements enterprise content management, or ECM solutions can appear daunting given their history of lengthy deployments and costly integrations. The introduction of consumer-friendly Web 2.0 interfaces that facilitate collaboration beyond email and capture vital content in the process might just be the solution that will please employees and the organizations they work for. Software as a service represents a radical new way to deliver ECM to departments or smaller businesses that haven’t had easy access to the technology before. Taken together, Web 2.0 and SaaS could create a tipping point which finally gives ECM its chance to succeed.

We invited business managers from Volm corporation to explore this topic and discuss how they’re using Web 2.0 and SaaS to tackle their email and content management challenges during the seminar. Listen to the podcast to learn more about how Volm is improving how it collaborates and better serves the needs of customers like Dole Food Company, General Mills and others.

http://www.xythos.com/promotions/web20andecmreplay.html