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.

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.