Ending the Tyranny of False Network Connectivity Assumptions

You can’t always connect to a network. Some have done better with that reality than others.

Microsoft desktop software assumes the user is connected to the network. I’ve been on a 100% travel schedule for years at a time, so the assumption of full-time network connection seems outlandishly wishful. I’ve found Outlook particularly offensive in this regard. After years of trying to get used to it, I still want to return to Lotus Notes Mail, which was designed with a traveler like me in mind.

Verizon’s VZAccess Manager and AT&T’s Communication Manager have provided good data network connections for the significant amounts of time between hotel rooms and offices. Airlines such as AirTran now offer connections while in flight. The only problem is that the assumptions about connectivity require more bandwidth than these services generally deliver.

I don’t hold it against developers who build assumptions into their software based on a future expectation of infrastructure. I understand that as much as I do travel, many others do most of their work from an office with a lot of reliable bandwidth. At the same time, there is a large and growing community of mobile people like me who have been forced to improvise and scramble to use software designed with us as an afterthought.

There is new hope that the tyranny of false network connectivity assumptions may come to an end. It comes from “desktop” and social networking applications accessed via mobile devices such as Blackberry and iPhone.

I wanted to see Matt Coblentz’s presentation of CenterStage Mobile Client at EMC World last week, but schedule conflicts prevented it. I saw Matt in the corridor later and he showed me something more convincing. He demonstrated on the spot that he is already using CenterStage Mobile Client with his Blackberry Bold. I am not a bleeding edge technology adapter. Relative to others in the industry, I am a laggard, but not this time. I’ve seen CenterStage Mobile Client in action. It’s a real productivity enhancer. It will work with my existing Blackberry, and I want it.

That answers one of the questions posed in last week’s post, and here are the others:

Q: Does CenterStage provide the end user functionality that users and businesses will readily adopt?
A: This is highly addictive functionality. Once users get their hands on it, they won’t want to let it go.

Q: Does CenterStage fully deliver the back end capabilities of Documentum Content Server?
A: In theory yes, CenterStage delivers the backend functionality. It’s a good bet that this theory will be proven in fact, because all CenterStage content is being stored in CenterStage.

Q: Does CenterStage have the flexibility to allow enterprises to centralize or decentralize administrative responsibilities? To the extent administrative responsibilities are decentralized, does CenterStage allow safeguards to keep departmental administrators within bounds of enterprise policies?
A: CenterStage is looking good in this regard. Initial deployments will prove it out, but this seems like another low risk bet.

Q: Does CenterStage have an advantage in accelerating mobile computing applications?
A: This is the real surprise behind CenterStage. I didn’t think this question was going to have the most exciting answer, but it does. If you’re a mobile professional you can see an end to the tyranny of false assumptions about connectivity.

The Dawn of New Age of Collaboration?

Ever since there have been departmental systems, Collaboration has been departmentally focused. eRoom, Lotus Notes, and SharePoint owe their success to end user functionality on the one hand, but also to departmental deployment and control models that support viral adoption across the enterprise on the other hand. Given the trends of enterprise consolidation and cloud computing, the time may have come for the pendulum to swing back to a centralized model for collaboration software. (Remember collaboration before Lotus Notes?)

The pendulum should not swing to complete centralization of responsibility and costs. Rather there should be a shift that lets responsibility and cost lie where it is most effective. In such a shift, enterprise policies would be controlled centrally. Work structures would be defined and implemented in decentralized fashion, for greatest responsiveness to the demands of work on the front lines. Each business would fine tune the balance of what is centralized and what is decentralized according to its own needs.

Consolidation within enterprises and cloud computing are driving the infrastructure for centralized computing, but what about application software for centrally deployed collaboration? EMC Documentum CenterStage targets this space. More will be revealed about CenterStage this week at EMC World 2009 and we’ll all be better able to gauge the alignment of the trends toward centralized infrastructure with the centralized control model of CenterStage.

Here are a few things to look for:

• Does CenterStage provide the end user functionality that users and businesses will readily adopt?
  
• Does CenterStage fully deliver the back end capabilities of Documentum Content Server?
  
• Does CenterStage have the flexibility to allow enterprises to centralize or decentralize administrative responsibilities?
  
• To the extent administrative responsibilities are decentralized, does CenterStage allow safeguards to keep departmental administrators within bounds of enterprise policies?
  
• Does CenterStage have an advantage in accelerating mobile computing applications?
  

A good portion of the 2009 EMC World content management agenda is allocated to CenterStage. The next few days will shed some light on whether CenterStage is a sign of the dawn of a new age of collaboration.

They are both Right about Web 2.0. Now Get a Backbone in Place.

“Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform”, says Tim O’Reilly. “I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means.”, says Tim Berners-Lee, “It’s dookie.” They are both right, but it doesn’t matter.

Whether you agree with O’Reilly or Berners-Lee, information technology organizations must deal with the adoption of social-networking, video-sharing, wikis, blogs, and user tagging. Because people use them and businesses demand them, the infrastructure has to control and support Web 2.0 applications.

Public Web 2.0 facilities can achieve inter-company benefits, but those public facilities don’t meet the large organization’s need for control or support in the areas of retention, access, security, availability, and cost. In those large organizations, rogue Web 2.0 islands have likely sprung up internally and increasing adoption has caused unplanned cost and risk. Public facilities and rogue islands were fine when Web 2.0 applications were an experiment, but for many companies, enterprise-caliber infrastructure is now required.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technology is a promising backbone for Web 2.0 applications. The appeal of ECM is first in the fit and maturity of the technology. ECM is designed to manage unstructured information such as addressed by Web 2.0 applications and has been proven at enterprise scale for over a decade. The appeal of ECM is also in the potential to leverage existing investments. Most large companies have existing ECM platform investments that can provide needed support and control to Web 2.0 applications.

EMC Documentum Content Server (Documentum) is playing the role of backbone for Web 2.0 applications via two different approaches. First, Documentum has traditionally played a repository role for custom-built or niche front-end applications. Documentum plays a similar back end role when used in conjunction with Web 2.0 solutions built using Crown SiteBuilder and Crown Web Gear products. In the second approach, EMC has built on it’s eRoom heritage of providing application front-ends, and EMC is now extending eRoom solidly into the Web 2.0 era with its CenterStage product.

If you have enterprise-scale Web 2.0 needs, Crown can help you evaluate your options and put the appropriate infrastructure in place. Ask us about our SiteBuilder and Web Gear products and about our experience with EMC CenterStage.

Heterogeneous ETL Platform Capability as a Content Consolidation Enabler

Extract Transform and Load (ETL) operations can be homogeneous or heterogeneous. Homogeneous operations involve extract from a repository and load into a repository of the same technology. As an example, one can synchronize the content in a North American Documentum repository with the content in a European Documentum repository via a homogeneous extract and load (i.e., from Documentum and to Documentum). Two or more technologies are involved in a heterogeneous operation. As an example, one can migrate from FileNet to Documentum, by extracting from FileNet and loading into Documentum.

The challenge with content consolidation is that there are several, if not numerous, repository technologies to be addressed. For example, if content in SharePoint, FileNet, Lotus Notes, and ApplicationXtender are content sources to be consolidated into a Documentum target infrastructure, then extract must be performed on four different technologies and load into one technology. Each of the technologies involved implies a need for knowledge of the technology, technical infrastructure (e.g., test environment), and existing functionality to connect to each repository technology. A heterogeneous ETL platform capability addresses each of these needs:

• Knowledge of each technology is required to inform consolidation strategy from an enterprise taxonomy point of view. Knowing each source technology is required to understand how the content in each source will map to a taxonomy for the enterprise. Knowledge of each source technology is also important for consolidation efficiency. Consolidation efficiency can be improved by best leveraging technical capabilities in the source, such as indexes and application programming interfaces.
  
• Technical infrastructure (for the several or numerous technologies involved) to test and execute consolidations can be costly and time consuming to establish, but is required for an effective consolidation program. In most consolidation programs, the technical infrastructure is required for a finite period of time, and obtaining required infrastructure via outsourcing is an economically attractive idea. Aside from traditional outsourcing or hosting, large consolidation programs can also leverage infrastructure of solution providers or software vendors.
  
• Constructing extract connections to each source repository technology is the most technically risky portion of a consolidation effort. Using pre-existing extract connections for the source repositories or proven models for constructing them greatly reduces the risk.
  

If you are like 69% of companies in a recent Gartner survey (see my April 19, 2009 post), you have more than 6 content repository technologies in use. Crown’s Professional Services and Crown’s Buldoser Center Product represent a heterogeneous ELT platform that reduces the risk and cost of consolidations. Cost and risk are the two main obstacles to consolidation, and with those obstacles addressed, what’s stopping you from consolidating?

The Silo-Investment and De-silo Cycle

When people refer to silos, or stovepipes, they mean it in a critical way. Silos refer to something inefficient because it is insulated, disconnected, uncoordinated. There are organizational silos. There are information silos. There are communication silos.

In some cases, silos successfully fulfill a business case. Successful silos provide promised cost or revenue, but all businesses evolve over time and to evolve with the business, silos that succeeded need to shed their insulated, disconnected, uncoordinated characteristics -- the organization, information, and communications need to be de-siloed.

In other cases silos never achieve their planned business case. In case of failure, the need for integration and coordination may never have been understood or articulated. Like the successful silos adapting to a changing business, the failed silos also need to be de-siloed.
Silos are created and dismantled in cycles driven by business and technology trends. Silos crop up the “Silo-investment” portion of the cycle. They are folded back into the enterprise during the de-silo portion of the cycle.

Portals were envisioned as a way to foster cross organizational communication and many portal initiatives delivered on this promise successfully. The late 1990s and the early years of the 21st century saw much investment in portals. Technologies from Plumtree, Epicentric, and Vignette flourished in the silo-investment phase. The business continues to change and continues to embrace the portal concept, so those portal technologies have begun to be folded back into the enterprise during the de-siloing phase. Portals continue, but they continue in a way that is connected with the rest of the enterprise.

Consider that we are now in the silo-investment phase of web 2.0 social networking technology. There is investment in technologies such as Jive’s Clearspace and Atlassian’s Confluence to realize the value in web 2.0 functionality. This is the silo-investment phase of web 2.0. As before, there will also come a time for de-siloing.

Content Consolidation to Become Increasingly Common

In a 2008 Gartner survey of nearly 400 respondents, 69% of enterprises indicated they had more than six repository technologies in production use. These enterprises can benefit from a consolidation program (http://blog.crownpartners.com/?Tag=consolidation) using content Extract Transform and Load (ETL) (http://blog.crownpartners.com/bid/17240/Enabling-Consolidation-with-Universal-ETL), and will increasingly initiate strategic action to realize those benefits.

Two factors are especially important in driving the acceleration of consolidation initiatives. First, cost of consolidation is borne once, but the cost-saving, service-level, and “content de-siloing” benefits are perpetual. In times of revenue uncertainty, the guaranteed return of these perpetual benefits becomes increasingly attractive. Second, consider that increasingly sophisticated automation of content ETL reduces the cost of consolidation efforts. Prior to the development of content ETL, custom programming and manual effort made consolidation error-prone and costly.

Consolidation programs are typically made up of a “hub” and “spokes”. The hub portion of the program ensures the readiness of the strategic content management platform and coordinates one or more spokes. Each of the spokes addresses one of the non-strategic content management technologies, by folding it into the strategic content management platform. Whether the spokes are pursued serially or in parallel, the start-to-finish time required for the consolidation should be minimized to accelerate the returns.

Consolidation at user firms will continue to drive shake-out among content management technology providers. Vignette, Plumbtree, and Fatwire are among likely losers in the continuing shakeout. Weakening among providers such as these will accelerate consolidation efforts as user organizations move to the better-funded, more-rapidly-evolving, better-maintained products from the apparent-survivor providers.

Crown’s Buldoser technology and related professional services capabilities can enable and accelerate your consolidation. Ask us about a consolidation assessment to help you understand and realize the benefits of consolidation.

Crown’s Value Proposition: The Software First “Hybrid” Advantage

Unlike its competitors, Crown is not a typical firm. Rather, Crown’s value is demonstrated through its software offerings. Crown frequently uses engagements in order to leverage and grow their technology solutions.

Traditional IT consulting firms follow a prescriptive approach to client engagements. The process involves a detailed assessment of a particular client need and the creation of a customized solution to meet that need. The consulting firm will follow a series of steps in its process: conduct a strategy analysis, identify an appropriate technology solution, and implement that solution to meet the client’s need. This process is repeated over and over for each new client with little modification to the overall process or project timeline. The value of a traditional consulting firm is based on their understanding and application of “best practices”, or lessons learned from previous engagements, to solve a current client need; not necessarily in the process utilized.

By following this process, a traditional consulting firm is able to expand its knowledge base of best practices and create unique solutions for its clients. The consulting firm leaves the project with additional knowledge on how to solve a problem, but often leaves behind the customized technology solution that made the project a success. Because a traditional consulting firm is compensated on a time and materials basis, the firm is incented to create longer project timelines with customized solutions for each client.

For traditional firms, this model meets their financial goals:
· Keep billable hours as high as possible
· Avoid software that will eliminate the need for human capital
· Grow bigger, but not more efficient

Crown’s model rejects the traditional prescriptive methodology. Rather than only provide the next client the benefits of learned strategies, Crown also provides the customer with enhanced software solutions from each previous, and future, engagement. In this way, Crown can deliver the same technology solution adopted at one client site to another client without having to repeat the entire project timeline.

For Crown, this model meets their goals:
· Create a highly utilized, knowledgeable staff that can streamline the project
· Provide customized software solutions built on best practices
· Capture more market share and grow
· Establish reputation as the low-cost provider due to lower price and higher efficiency

Further, the client is able to own and maintain those best practices, and software, after the project has ended. Crown will continue to update its software solutions through future client engagements, providing updates to previous clients who own earlier versions of the same or similar software. Crown, in that respect, is able to continually service clients long after the engagement is over.

Crown’s Software First model provides several benefits to its customers:
· Rapid, skilled implementation of customized solutions
· An in-house software solution with ownership rights
· Benefit of previous product enhancements based on best practices
· Benefit of future product enhancements based on best practices
· Half the cost of the competition and twice the value

In addition to benefiting its customer base, Crown’s software model differentiates it from its competitors in the following ways:
· Continuously growing intellectual property
· Research & development is funded by the clients since it is developed on a case-by-case basis on the client site
· Software updates have created a new channel of recurring maintenance revenue year over year
· Crown’s software replaces manual processes
· Ability to take on more engagements and grow to include more software offerings
· Brand development and increasing ability to serve repeat customers
· Overall lower cost of ownership

By the efficient nature of this model, Crown continues to thrive despite the current economic downturn. When IT professionals are encouraged to seek low cost alternatives, they rely on an organization able to consolidate software solutions and provide the highest ROI possible.

Note: Thanks to Crown Managing Partner, Richard Hearn, for the text in this post.

Content Management Platform: A Critical Element in a Knowledge Intensive World

Business is increasingly knowledge intensive. The most successful businesses have the knowledge to do the right things and do things right. That knowledge, whether nascent or explicit, whether instructive or persuasive, produces value when it’s in the mind of an employee, a supplier, a distributor, or a customer. Getting knowledge into those minds drives business results.

Content refers to the documents, web pages, images, videos, and audio segments that enable business results by delivering knowledge to people. Managing content is essential for achieving compliance, efficiency, quality, and other business objectives. Fortunately, software to manage content is reaching new levels of maturity and Crown provides solutions for content management using industry leading products from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Assembling and delivering knowledge in the form of content is most efficient when supported by a “content management platform”. A content management platform consists of standards, hardware, and software, supported by specific operations and personnel. A platform typically accommodates multiple business needs and serves multiple departments, cost centers, divisions and business units. A platform provides cost advantages that result from sharing expense across a large number of users or applications and the related economies of scale. It also increases service levels, because service-enabling investments that could not be afforded for a single application can be afforded for a collection of applications.

A content management platform provides greatest knowledge advantages when it is used to add and preserve value in each step of the enterprise value chain. Conveying content and knowledge via a single enterprise platform is more consistent and economical than stringing together islands of content management. Below are a few examples of the content produced and used at each section of the value chain. Just as value snowballs through the value chain, content critical for later sections of the value chain should reference and incorporate content in the earlier sections of the value chain.

1. Supply steps in the value chain: raw materials, component, and capital equipment specifications; contractor services descriptions; job skill requirements; capital or financing plans.

2. Central steps in the value chain: procedures that define the integration of inputs with additional sources of value within the firm; management reports; go to market plans; work-in-progress and finished output specifications.

3. Distribution steps in the value chain: sales and marketing material, product documentation, warrantees and guarantees, service descriptions.

With more than 500 content management “go-lives” using industry leading software from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft, Crown understands the importance of knowledge and how to deliver it throughout an enterprise using content. We look forward to exploring the ways that experience can help your organization get the most out of its knowledge.

Answers on EMC CenterStage and eRoom-to-CenterStage Conversion

EMC’s CenterStage is the next chapter in the evolution of EMC’s collaboration products. CenterStage has origins dating back to the 1980s. At that time, VAX Notes was a commercial product that provided threaded discussion for Digital Equipment Corporation’s peak 130,000 employees, including me, and their customers’ employees. VAX Notes had been influenced by earlier work at University of Illinois’ Computer-based Education Research Laboratory (CERL). VAX Notes provided the inspiration for the blockbuster Lotus Notes product, released in 1989, which enabled solutions for many of my clients. Later, key Lotus Notes employees left to start Instinctive Technologies which shipped the eRoom product in 1997. Based on the success of the product, they changed the name of the company to eRoom. eRoom is the collaboration product offered by EMC today via EMC’s acquisition of Documentum in 2003 and Documentum’s prior acquisition of eRoom in 2002. With EMC’s new CenterStage, now there is a product that combines the best of eRoom, Web 2.0 functionality, and the enterprise content management capabilities of EMC’s Content Server

We at Crown have been anticipating CenterStage since our first conversations with EMC regarding the next stage in collaboration in August 2006. As a result of these conversations, Crown has been selected by EMC to be the sole provider of eRoom to CenterStage conversion software. Crown has incorporated its proven Buldoser technology into the RedCarpet and Buldoser Center products, which convert eRooms directly to CenterStage.

Since EMC’s CenterStage product has become available in beta version in September 2008, Crown has presented at many webinars and user groups about CenterStage. Some of the questions and answers from those sessions follow in this post.

Crown’s Buldoser technology, which has been continuously accredited since 2004, and extensive Extract Transform and Load experience make Crown the ideal party to help eRoom customers convert to CenterStage. If you have a question not answered below, please contact Crown at info@crownpartners.com.

Q1: Does CenterStage have the same concepts of access control, both by membership (groups/roles) and by item or folder-level access control (restricted access, hidden items)?
A1: Yes, all the eRoom features in this area come through
Q2: Can you use the Document Storage product component of CenterStage without the other new Web 2.0 components?
A2: The CenterStage Essentials version is a "limited" release of CenterStage. It does include storing documents in folder and attachment boxes like in eRoom, plus a few other features. There is no charge for this version.
Q3: I saw the term "data tables" in CenterStage features. Is that the same as the database function in eRoom?
A3: Yes. The feature is renamed in CS as "Data Tables" (much to the delight of database purists J ).

Q4: Is there a move from EMC to focus more heavily on new technologies (such as web 2.0) and move away from the more recognized features that eRoom has now?
A4: No. CenterStage has been built to leverage all the great features that eRoomers love in it today. Virtually all eRoom items (like Polls, Databases, etc.) will be made available in CenterStage within the current product roadmap. It also strives to "marry" the current eRoom features with newer Web 2.0 technologies that are now flourishing (Blogs, RSS, Wikis, etc.).

Q5: Can eRoom be converted (upgraded) to CenterStage Essentials (CSE)?
A5: Yes, if you are using eRoom today and want to replace it with CSE, you can convert your data accordingly. But not all eRoom features are available in CSE, so you would lose them. If you are using eRoom primarily for document storage, then you may be fine.

Q6: Is it possible to use eRoom and CenterStage Essentials (CSE) at the same time?
A6: Yes. An organization could have both applications running in their environment, but there would be no direct connection between them (like eRoom enterprise with Content Server).

Q7: Will the updates to the RedCarpet utility for migration go hand in hand with CenterStage changes?
A7: Yes. RedCarpet and Buldoser Center are "in synch" with CenterStage. Just note that with each new release of CenterStage, there could be delay of several weeks of the RedCarpet and Buldoser Center releases to ensure that it has been fully tested with the very latest release of CS.

Q8: In an eroom to content server migration using Buldoser Center, how are eRoom databases dealt with (things like field names, drop-down lists etc)?
A8: It is the intention with every feature in eRoom to have it move into CenterStage with the same data. So an eRoom database will convert to a "data table" in CenterStage, including all fields, records, access control, discussion areas, change logs, attachments, etc. If there is anything that cannot be converted it will be clearly documented.

Q9: How will it be addressed if certain objects throw an error when converting? Will there be developer support available to support such incidents?
A9: A report is generated after every data conversion pass from eRoom to CenterStage. It shows what has been copied successfully and what has not. There is then an opportunity to address the specific objects which failed the conversion. Then, with RedCarpet, you re-run the entire data conversion batch. With Buldoser Center, you only need to select the "exceptions" or "failed objects" and re-run those. Yes, blocks of Developer Support hours may be purchased and used to troubleshoot errors.

Q10: How will eRoom indexes be migrated? Do we have to re-index all content post migration?
A10: You will need to re-run those indexes in CenterStage.

Q11: Does RedCarpet or Buldoser Center also work with Documentum Content Server (not just CenterStage)?
A11: Yes, Buldoser Center was built in large part for migrations to Documentum Content Server.

Q12: In the case of eRoom approval databases, will RedCarpet be able to handle the different stages of approval--in other words, will it bring over all approval steps, even those that are "in progress"?
A12: Yes, RedCarpet is planned to process the different types of eRoom databases, including Issues(approval process) data bases. As long as CenterStage has a corresponding, consistent location or feature where the data can be moved, even details such as approval steps will convert as needed.

Q13: Do you support the migration of a Community Member List? Does CenterStage have an equivalent "community"?
A13: Yes, there is the concept of "local members" in CenterStage (in addition to the LDAP directory), and members from eRoom will be imported accordingly. Group and community member lists will be transferred. “External” eRoom users will be transferred into Documentum as “inline” Documentum users.

A Call For Urgent Investment in Consolidation, Productivity, and Customer Relationships

Making good investments is as important as it ever has been. Times of economic contraction demand investments that reduce costs, improve productivity, and enhance relationships with customers. In addition to the drag of slow or negative growth in the market as a whole, businesses that abstain or are unable to make these investments will also suffer loss of market share.

Reducing costs by consolidating redundant systems is a good investment. Redundant systems spring up in times of rapid growth, when increasing capacity to satisfy an expanding market dominates other considerations. Now is the time to reel-in those redundant deployments and reduce indirect cost per unit of output. Consolidate before market growth returns, because once market growth returns, the focus will again be on expanding capacity and there won’t be time to consolidate.

Improving productivity is a good investment. As experience accumulates and technologies evolve, opportunities arise to do things more efficiently. Now is the time to harvest the benefits of experience and technology developed while markets were growing. Increase productivity now, before market growth returns, because once market growth returns, the accelerating pace of business will make it more difficult to adopt productivity enhancing practices.

Improving relationships with customers is a good investment. If customers are spending less, it’s all the more reason to retain existing customers and attract new ones. If the competition is in disarray resulting from changing financial circumstance, now is the time to strengthen customer relationships. Traditional “pounding the pavement” approaches to customer acquisition have been outpaced by web and e-marketing approaches. Don’t wait for the competition to regain its footing. Work quickly to strengthen the loyalty of existing customers and reach out to new customers via web and e-marketing.

For each of the good investments, one question that remains is how to get most benefit per dollar of investment. For more information on the use of information technology to get the best return, visit the resources below.

• The use of extract, transform, and load technology for consolidation is in “The Critical Role of Extract Transform and Load Solutions for Enterprise Content Management”

• Further perspective on business process management and the related productivity gains is in Mark Travers’ KM World article, "Business Process Management: A Strategic Imperative for a Down Economy"

• A web and e-Marketing approach to strengthening customer relationships is outlines in my previous blog post, "The Foundation for WAM Solutions: Speed and More..."

Consolidation, productivity, and customer relationships are all good investments and should be pursued urgently during this phase of the economic cycle. Any one of these good investments gets even better to the extent that multiple objectives are addressed with one initiative. There are many ways that these investments can be made to address cost reduction, productivity enhancement, and customer relationships all at once. My colleagues and I at Crown are eager to identify and realize exactly those investments with you. That's making a good investment great.

Going from Good to Great on the Fifth Anniversary of Buldoser Accreditation

Crown’s Buldoser product is celebrating its fifth anniversary of accreditation awarded by Documentum and EMC. Having been in commercial use as a Crown project utility since 2001 and licensed as a supported software product since 2003, Buldoser was first accredited as Designed for Documentum in 2004. It has been continuously accredited during the five intervening years.

Much has changed during Buldoser’s life, and much has stayed the same. Crown’s Buldoser initially became popular as an alternative to “Dump and Load” and home-grown approaches for moving content. In the early days, Buldoser moved content among Documentum repositories, file systems, and ODBC-compliant information stores. The changes in Buldoser’s life have occurred via four major releases and supporting minor releases. Now Buldoser has broadened into a family of extract, transform, and load (ETL) products. The family includes Buldoser, Buldoser Center, and RedCarpet. These products each have a distinct and complementary purpose. As a family, they address a wide range of use cases such as migration, archiving, synchronization, and others. Beyond the traditional Buldoser source environments, additional source environments have been added, including FileNet, Lotus Notes, SharePoint, ApplicationXtender, and eRoom. (For a more detailed review of the current evolved state of the products, reference “The Critical Role of Extract Transform and Load Solutions for Enterprise Content Management” in the Crown resource library at http://www.crownpartners.com/home/login.jsp)

Crown’s consistent investment in ETL products is based on the flywheel concept presented in Jim Collins’ “Good to Great”. Using the concept, Crown’s ETL products have gained maturity and momentum through steady, sustained investment over a period of years. Crown has made the investments in much the way one would apply consistent force to accelerate the spin of a heavy flywheel. Like the optimal force applied to a flywheel Crown’s investments have been a steady vector, always aligned toward a single direction, always continuing to accelerate the fly wheel.

Most important in the life of Crown’s ETL products have been the experience and loyalty of Crown customers. The passion they share for Crown products and their collaborative engagement with Crown has brought the ETL products to the milestone of the five year anniversary of Buldoser’s accreditation. The partnership around the ETL products continues, and as more a more customers join in that partnership, the flywheel of these products accelerates from good to great and beyond.

CMIS is Showing Promise

Standards development is slow and standards implementation is slower. Proposed standards are reviewed and revised to make a first generation standard. Even the participants in the standards process make implementation investment cautiously, if at all. Competing standards vie for prominence and succeeding generations of the standard emerge, but implementation investments remain scarce. In rare cases a version of a particular standard wins confidence across a community of stakeholders, the implementation investments begin to flow, and the investment in the standard begins to pay off. While JSR 170 and JSR 238 have failed to gain momentum, the next generation standard, CMIS shows promise of paying off.

The JSR 170 and JSR 283 standards have been in development since 2002 and 2005 respectively. They are designed to make application functionality portable across content repositories from different vendors, protect investment in content management applications, to foster an increase in commercially available content management applications, and encourage increasingly lower prices for content management repositories. JSR 170 and JSR 283 were unduly influenced by smaller players and did not protect significant investments of major stakeholders. The required support did not emerge for these standards, the investment never materialized, and there’s been no impact on the marketplace.

The experiences from JSR 170 and JSR 283 are reflected in a next generation standard, Content Management Interoperability Services Specification (CMIS). CMIS shows promise because:
- CMIS reflects the interests of the EMC, IBM, and Microsoft customer bases, and shows promise of winning support from across the community of stakeholders.
- CMIS is planned to protect existing vendor and user organization investments. CMIS will not require major product changes or significant data model changes.
- Aggressive standard approval timelines have been set with an objective of initial standard approval by OASIS in 2009.
- Even though the standard is not yet approved, expectations for product implementations are already being set. For example, IBM has identified CMIS as its plan for integrating its Lotus and enterprise content management products.

Archiving and electronic legal discovery are applications of increasing importance to Crown customers who are making investments in these areas to reduce operating costs, increase efficiency, and reduce risk. The CMIS standard is particularly suited for enabling further automation of archiving and legal discovery when the standard is leveraged using an Extract Transform and Load (ETL) utility such as Crown’s Buldoser Center. Crown is already adapting the design of Buldoser Center to take advantage of CMIS when EMC, IBM, and Microsoft implementations become available. (Some early CMIS functionality is already available and Crown is using it.) CMIS, in conjunction with Buldoser Center will make it easier to expand the sources that can be addressed with Buldoser Center and expand the advantage that Crown provides to its customers. CMIS is showing promise, and Crown is ready to leverage it.

Enabling Product and Installed Base Consolidation

Organizations consolidate diverging and rogue infrastructures to reduce cost and improve efficiency. Infrastructure consolidation is increasingly popular among users of software, and Crown enables those consolidations (see “Enabling Consolidation with Universal ETL”). Software vendors also need to undertake consolidations. They need to consolidate products and the installed bases of customers for those products.

An example of vendor consolidation from the automotive industry is Ford’s acquisition of Jaguar. When Ford acquired Jaguar, it maintained the Jaguar brand and distribution channel, but supplied Jaguar manufacturing with many of the same components that were used across other Ford models, especially Taurus. The idea was to keep serving the same customers, but reduce costs by consolidating the manufacturing.

Like the Ford-Jaguar example, software vendors also need to consolidate products. When Oracle acquired Stellent, it planned to consolidate the Stellent product with its own Oracle Content Data Base. When Open Text acquired Ixos and Humingbird, it planned to consolidate those products into its own Livelink product. FatWire acquired OpenMarket product from Divine with the plan to consolidate with its own products.

In the case of software product consolidations, one product of the two consolidated products is typically considered the strategic product. Customers using the non-strategic product will be required to undergo a conversion to adapt their information to fit the design of the strategic product. To keep customer loyalty and sustain maintenance revenues, vendors need to make that conversion as easy as possible.

Crown’s Buldoser technology is commonly used to enable conversions, and can be adapted to perform conversions on a mass scale to convert an installed base of customers. Most recently, Crown has adapted its Buldoser technology to converting the world-wide installed base of EMC’s eRoom customers to EMC’s strategic product, CenterStage. Crown’s technology is the only technology endorsed by EMC for the eRoom to CenterStage conversion. To make the conversion from eRoom to CenterStage as easy as possible, Crown has not only adapted the Buldoser technology, but has also created specialized branding, marketing, product support, professional services and distribution capabilities.

Crown’s hybrid software and professional services capabilities are well suited for migration, archiving, and upgrade of individual businesses. The same hybrid software and professional services capabilities wrapped into an integrated program, are well suited to conversion of a large installed base of customers. While Crown possesses unique capabilities for migration, archiving, upgrade, and installed base conversion, Crown is not resting on its laurels. Crown continues to make investments in software technology, professional services, marketing, and support capabilities to allow fluid consolidations on individual-business or installed-base scales. On behalf of the Crown leadership team, we are eager to assist with your conversion needs, large or small.

Where To Place Trust When Making a Big Bet?

Businesses take risks in order to make returns. A business retains employees with a plan that the employees will produce marketable value. A business purchases equipment or licenses intellectual property to create products or services. A business makes commitments to suppliers and business partners to combine their goods or services into something of greater value. In slang terms, a business “places a bet” in taking a risk in order to make a return.

Sometimes a business makes a “big bet”, through an unusual risk or investment. When a business makes a big bet, the potential gains are greater, but so are the potential losses. Leaders direct special attention to identify and manage component risks in order to realize the greater gains and avoid the losses of big bets. They call on the best available expertise. They enlist the most trusted partners.

A friend of mine reports that her firm has been called by the United States Treasury Department to manage portions of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). TARP is a high-visibility big bet. The invitation from the Treasury Department is based on reputation of her firm. It is a reputation built on a track-record of success with large-scale and complex financial operations.

Crown enables the success of big bets that require careful, timely content management solutions and services. When Crown is called to enable big bets, it is a reflection of the trust that clients place in Crown. That trust is based on proven expertise and commitment to success. It is trust built on innovation and in demonstrated capacity. It is also a challenge to once again prove that Crown’s world-class reputation is warranted. It is a challenge to further strengthen and extend that reputation.

When ST Microelectronics teamed with Ericsson to create the world’s strongest product offering in semiconductors and platforms for mobile applications, Crown provided the web content management solution that brought the news to the world. Crown is the company they could trust to present and enable ongoing updates to complex information delivered via high-visibility web sites.

When a major North American pharmaceutical company and its Japanese partner decided to transfer intellectual property related to their joint venture with more than US$3 billion in annual sales, they called on Crown to enable the transfer. Crown is the company that they could trust to handle the transfer efficiently and in compliance with pharmaceutical industry regulations.

When the Unites States Army needed to achieve dramatically higher recruiting goals, they called on Crown to provide the solution that would improve the efficiency and targeting of their recruiting. Crown is the company the Army could trust to leverage recruiting assets repeatedly for campaigns across the country. Crown is the company the Army could trust to focus recruiting on narrower audiences with information designed specifically for those audiences.

The rest of the Crown leadership team and I value the trust that clients place in us to enable their big bets. It’s an honor and it’s a challenge when the world’s largest corporations turn to us to provide strategic content management solutions and services. Crown accepts the role of big-bet-enabler and repeatedly proves that its world-class reputation is warranted. Enabling these big bets is the keystone objective for the hybrid organization of our firm. This is the work for which we were born and bred.

Shaping the Content Management Frontier

The choice to live on the frontier brings with it the possibility of unknown challenges and risks. It also brings the potential for great discoveries. A geographical frontier is the boundary between settled and unsettled lands. There is also a business and technology frontier that marks the boundary between commodity products and services, and products and services that can change market structure and industry rankings.

From the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries in North America, people who lived on the frontier faced the possibility of starvation and conflict in a harsh environment. Some people died on the frontier. Some people retreated to predictable life in settled areas. Some survived on the frontier. Some thrived.

Those who thrived acquired skills and character forged by the demands of the frontier. They developed frontier work ethic, self-reliance, ingenuity, resourcefulness, and opportunism. At first they were shaped by the frontier, but later the frontier was shaped by them.

Frontiersmen learned to survive on their own, but also became adept at banding together. They developed and shared practices, communication techniques, and protocols relating to trapping, hunting, clearing, building, and farming. The more they organized and worked together, the more effective they became at shaping the frontier to reduce risks and seize opportunities.

The geographic frontier of North America is largely gone, but the spirit of the frontier lives on among entrepreneurs. The frontiersmen are people and businesses that face unknown challenges and risks for the possibility of great discoveries. They work together to shape the frontier. Much as frontiersmen from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries became respected leaders, these entrepreneurs gain the respect across that business community.

In the information technology industry, there is a frontier in the content management market. Platform technology providers and their products represent the settled areas. EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft provide platform technologies that instill confidence for common content management needs. But content management solutions that change market structure and industry rankings represent the frontier. By living on this frontier of content management, the toughness required to thrive has become instinctive. Frontiersmen have the skills and character to provide the content management solutions that favorably disrupt industries to the benefit of their clients.

Crown is committed to thriving on the content management frontier. Crown has made a practice of blazing its own trail since founding in 2001. It’s a trail blazed with investment in products, expertise, and high standards. Crown is also banding together with others who share the commitment to the content management frontier. Together they are working to shape the frontier to bring favorably disruptive solutions to their clients. To learn more about life on the content management frontier, visit www.crownpartners.com, and to learn about the companies banding together to shape the frontier, visit http://www.crownpartners.com/corporate/corporate_ourpartners.jsp.

Content Management Solutions Hit Three Investment Justifications

Most investment justifications fall into one or more of three categories. Justifications for investing in managing unstructured information, also known as “content”, are no exception. The categories for justifications are:

• Productivity Enhancers – Investments that will allow more work to be done with the same personnel, financial, or other resources.
  
• Risk Reducers – Investments that reduce the likelihood of undesirable scenarios, especially undesirable scenarios involving legal or regulatory costs.
  
• Market Reachers – Investments that increase engagement with existing customers or investments that initiate engagement with new customers

Traditional data is structured information, such as name, address, phone number, price, quantity, stock keeping unit, etc. Content is unstructured information such as descriptions, instructions, contracts, correspondence, images, web pages, audio, etc. Investments in content management have objectives such as increasing the speed or capacity of content creation, improving the quality of content, expanding or controlling access to content, or making content more usable.

Crown has combined its software and professional services capabilities to provide content management solutions that fulfill each of the three justifications. Crown solutions for speeding the delivery of new information to web sites, reducing cycle time in reviewing a loan application, and streamlining insurance claims processing are examples of productivity enhancers. Crown solutions for ensuring the accuracy and consistency of content and enabling the efficient archiving of e-mails are examples of risk reducers. Crown’s delivery of interactive web sites and integration of customized e-mails into the customer experience are examples of market reachers.

Knowing the technology for providing content management solutions is important. Knowing how to use the technology to fulfill justifications for investment in content management is more important. Knowing both is a fundamental part of Crown’s way of delivering exceptional value of a hybrid software and professional services company.

The Hybrid Advantage

Today’s hybrid vehicles use both an electric motor and an internal combustion engine. Use of two power sources achieves best results versus energy consumption, environmental, and performance objectives. An emerging type of information systems company, called a Hybrid Solutions Company, also takes a hybrid approach. A Hybrid Solutions Company has two power sources. It combines elements of professional services and software firms. As with vehicles, a Hybrid Solutions Company has advantages in achieving results.

Hybrid Solutions Companies use practices of professional services firms to understand customer needs, advise customers, and deliver unique solutions. Developing and articulating strategy, managing solution requirements, and overseeing delivery of a unique solution are professional services competencies that are incorporated into a Hybrid Solutions Company.

Hybrid Solutions Companies use practices of software firms to increase the speed of solution delivery, increase quality, and reduce the cost of solutions. Anticipating feature requirements, formalized software engineering, and managing lifecycle maintenance are competencies of a software firm that are incorporated into a Hybrid Solutions Company.

The advantage of a hybrid vehicle is not just having two power sources, it’s having two that work together for one purpose. Careful design is required to achieve the benefits of a hybrid model while addressing its challenges. At a minimum, the power sources in a hybrid vehicle must be coordinated so that each contributes only when it is most efficient and contributes in a way that does not interfere with the other. For example, the internal combustion engine turns off while a hybrid vehicle idles, but both power sources work together when acceleration is required. Beyond coordination, the two power sources and other systems in the vehicle can reinforce each other or share components. For example, the internal combustion engine and breaking systems drive a common generator to charge batteries for the electric motor.

Like the hybrid vehicle, the advantage of the Hybrid Solutions Company is not just having two power sources. The Hybrid Solution Company unifies the professional services and software competencies for one purpose. Coordination of the two requires an understanding of when the professional services or software competencies should be used, and when they can effectively act together. For example, solution features that will be employed at many customers are addressed via software competency while unique elements are addressed via professional services competency. Beyond coordination, common requirements management and post-sale support functions can strengthen both competencies and reinforce the firm’s overall ability to fulfill one purpose.

Crown has offered professional services since 2001 and licensed software products since 2003. Since 2003, Crown has invested in the Hybrid Solution Company model. Just as improvements continue to be made in hybrid vehicles, Crown is committed to increasing the value provided to customers by operating as a Hybrid Solution Company.

The Foundation for WAM Solutions: Speed and More…

Economic indicators may be down, but business is not slowing down. Global 2000 customers still have aggressive deadlines. They still value speed. They even want previously unachievable, next-generation solutions, and they want them faster than ever.

The need for speed, and more, is especially strong for Web and Marketing (WAM) solutions. WAM solutions are essential for bringing new products to market and strengthening relationships with customers. There’s a need for speed associated with WAM solutions, because time to market is as important as it ever was. Speed alone is not enough, because products need a marketing program that is sharper and stickier than the competition on the first day to market and every day.

“Web speed” means delivering solutions so fast that old standards for schedule are meaningless. Web speed is exciting, but if the result is a static solution that requires ongoing technical investment to keep it up-to-date, then the excitement is short-lived. What if you could have speed and more? What if you could have a solution deployed with web speed AND you could refresh and expand your e-marketing programs on a continuous basis without ongoing technical investment? You want both. You need both.

From the Crown point of view, speed-and-more is based on a “need it yesterday” mentality, “instant” translation of experience into re-usable intellectual property, and harnessing progressive software technology and economics. Speed and more is about making strategic e-marketing gains routine. For large-scale product-launch or customer-relationship initiatives where the stakes are high, why settle for anything else?

(Note: In Crown’s early days, “Expect More…” was a company tag line that inspired customers and employees. The inspiring open-ended nature of that tag lives on in “Speed and More…”)

What Did They Say at the Crown Forum?

The summary report on the Crown Forum in November 2008 in Prague, Czech Republic is complete. At the forum, 30 business and technology leaders provided input on their priorities for content management and especially for Extract Transform and Load (ETL). As a sequel to last week’s post, the report reinforces the trend toward consolidation of content and the need for universal ETL.

From the input gathered at the Forum, 23 perspectives have been distilled and are included in the summary report. Those 23 perspectives support these five strategic trends:

• Information technology organizations are moving toward a centralized, scalable content management backbone as a foundation for content management across the enterprise.
  
• There is a strong and growing need to move and transform content via a standard process and technology to increase flexibility and reduce cost.
  
• Large scale adoption of collaborative content management products, such as eRoom, Lotus Notes, and SharePoint, has given rise to greater need for administration and control capabilities.
  
• Regardless of the content management and collaboration technology employed, the trend is toward globalized business process and workflow and away from departmental business process and workflow.
  
• Businesses have growing needs, both strategic and tactical, to move and adapt content fluidly according to changing business and technology contexts.

Crown uses results from its Forums to guide its investments in products and solutions. Results from the November 2008 forum have reinforced and guided us in bringing Buldoser Center to market sooner, in December 2008, rather than sliding the release date into 2009. The November 2008 Forum has guided us in considering features for future releases -- we will prioritize support for a wider range of departmental content sources such as eRoom, Lotus Notes Data Base, SharePoint, and Application Xtender. At the same time, these results have steered us to narrow the field of targets to enterprise-capable repositories.

Crown plans additional Forums for 2009. If you’re interested in future Crown Forums or reports from past Crown Forums, please e-mail info@crownpartners.com or call +1-937-723-2300.

Enabling Consolidation with Universal ETL

How to do more with less? That’s a popular question, and “consolidation” is a popular answer. In recent years, consolidation initiatives have often been deferred. They’ve been passed-over in favor of business expansion initiatives. This year, there are fewer promising expansion initiatives, and the cost-saving possibilities of consolidation look more attractive.

Crown’s Budoser, Buldoser Center, and RedCarpet products support consolidation efforts by moving unstructured information. If you have unstructured information in distributed or far-flung repositories, these products can help you move the information into centralized repositories. Buldoser has been moving content since 2003. Buldoser Center and RedCarpet are more recent additions to Crown’s Extract-Transform-and-Load (ETL) family of products.

Crown’s ETL family of products is part of Crown’s continuing investment to enable Universal ETL for unstructured information. Universal ETL is a vision for free flow of unstructured information from one repository to another. Doing more with less by consolidating requires a flow of information from a larger number of repositories to a smaller number of repositories. Crown’s ETL products and the vision for Universal ETL are in direct response to this requirement.

Consolidation is an immediate need. Crown’s ETL products provide immediate value, and pave the way toward the vision for Universal ETL. Let me or my colleagues at Crown know if you’ve been thinking about consolidating unstructured information or if you want to know more about our vision for Universal ETL.

Keep Bucking Bearish Economics in 2009

We at Crown Partners have been fortunate in 2008. Our customers’ confidence and ability to invest in our offerings not only allowed us to continue operating profitably as we have done since inception in 2001, but also drove growth in our software business.

In 2009, our commitment to providing value through market-focused initiatives will continue to overcome bearish economics. Customers have responded favorably to our investments, and we will continue to broaden and deepen market-focused initiatives in:
· Web-and-Marketing
· Extract-Transform-and-Load
· Enterprise Performance Management
· Standalone Software Products
· Strategic Account Operations

Crown leverages scale economics of enterprise software from EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft to produce measurable gains for our customers. Crown unlocks value from enterprise software by focusing professional services and developing complementary software products through the market-focused initiatives. We are already at work doing more of the same in 2009 so that we can help our customers thrive in the New Year.

Visit this space for news and opinion about Crown’s investments, market and technology trends, and in-the-trenches experience creating value through Crown products and services.