One more ECM product, in case anyone is interested!

Earlier this week, I was working on one of the most dreadful documents in a project cycle, the bill of material (BOM) where reality hits that the vendor’s claims of $100/user that mushrooms to a few million dollars of software and a truckload of hardware. This does not even include the costs for the system integrator and the consultants. 

In the middle of this, my RSS reader showed a post from CMSWire.com (Sorry, I am an old fashion, I do not Twitt) about another ECM product called M-Files from a Finnish company called Motive Systems. 

 M-Files. like all other products, is attempting to promise the world with the following:

 

Affordable price,
Ease of use,
SharePoint integration, and
Enterprise level quality.

How many times we heard this?  I thought the industry has matured and forgot the cheap and ease of use claims.  Even the free SharePoint is not cheap nor  easy.

Even after these thoughts, my curiosity still took me to the website to check them out, just to find the main topic.  “there are 10 reasons to choose M-Files”, none of them seems to me as  really special or new. I also found that they have a free download and they are running V6.0 beta.  I started the downloading and looked at the V6 enhancements and to my surprise, the major encasements are:

 SQL server support
Scanned documents capture through eCopy
Ability to run scripts as event handlers
Integration with Ms Office and outlook

 At that point I clicked cancel on the download box because these V6 enhancements should be V1 specification.  

I am leaving the honor and the fun of testing M-Files to anyone interested in one more ECM product.

ECM project estimation is it ART or Science ……!

One of the main responsibilities for an ECM project manager or a solution architect is to develop the estimates for a proposal or a project budget.  It is a responsibility that comes with the territories while many do not look for it.

 Interestingly, the linguistic meaning of estimates is “rough” calculation, “tentative” evaluation or “preliminary” judgment.  These definitions are far from the truth of what we are asked to provide. Actually, PM and SA are required to provide a “firm” “commitment”.  In the project management world, the word estimation really means a “commitment” to a budget and a schedule.

In the early stages for the process of developing a project plan and costing, it is essential to separate the estimation from external factors like available budget and schedule targets. Estimates should be neutral and analytical on without external influences.   Later, the project plans and pricing are the proper place to include the project constrains in form of a relation between the required deliverable in the space of time and money. The early inclusion of the project constrains to estimates, is the most fatal common mistake that results of poor estimates.  

Traditionally, In the software development industry, lines of code is the main factor for developing an estimate, on the other hand, ECM industry is unique in the fact that estimators need to account for a large number of different factors like components (widgets), tasks and as well as lines of code, further complicate that the average cost of each component vary wildly among products.

 “Count”, “Compute” and “Judge” method:

 From my experience, one of the simple techniques to produce a fast and amazingly reasonable  estimates is the “Count”, “Compute” and “Judge” method.  These terms should be used on that specific order. Judging or guessing should be the last resources.

 These terms make estimates sounds like math and science. This is true, the software estimation endeavors are as old the software industry itself, but the art side comes to this above methodology on what to “Count”, how to “Compute” and when to “Judge”

On a typical ECM project,

the “Count” is what we call the project widgets. These are items like the number of users, groups, or objects. Processes, tasks, documents, folders, cabinets, web pages, wire frames, portlets, use  reports, repositories, libraries , renditions, versions, formats, etc ……

 The “Compute” is the average time, effort and cost of delivering each of the above widgets.  In other words, the compute stage should result of the unaltered totals for delivering these widgets.

 The “judge” comes as the last step to fill information on any missing pieces from the previous steps and to introduce the factor of previous experience, environments, culture, schedule limitation, other risk factors and even internal politics factor.  This step should take the “compute” totals and translate them to schedule, durations, budget and staff.

Project Estimates has always been treated as a final document engraved in stones and future changes are introduced to the project plan. It is important to treat estimates as a living document and periodically conduct estimate reviews similar to the budget and schedule reviews but maybe less often.

 In my experience, estimates reviews were always more accurate indicators in predicting project problems as they are leading indicators while budget and schedule are lagging indicators.

 In conclusion, estimates is a since but it requires the brush and colors of the experienced architect to accomplish a successful “Estimation”.

To all the products I loved before…. Documentum is the one……..!

Pie , Lee and Johnney opened the Pandora box of memories and asked how we started in ECM world.  For me, when I started, the term ECM was not even invented; it was just imaging and workflow.

 Certainly you feel the old age when you talk about industry pioneers who no longer exist and even worse, when Everyone around don’t know their name or contributions.

 My first project came with a small system integrator in California to deploy a correspondence tracking system for the Saudi oil giant ARAMCO.

 In San Francisco I met Berkeley chick named ViewStar.  A pioneer in the engineering drawings management systems had their own proprietary graphical UI.  The Saudis however requested that the system must run under MS-Windows and be bi-lingual in Arabic. This task was not an easy one.  At that time globalization was not a fashion yet.  

 After a few Adventures in the Saudi Arabian desert and many long trips from San Francisco to the middle east traveling on PanAm and TWA (more forgotten names),  I left the company to Join WANG Systems.

 

 

 With WANG (Massachusetts aristocrat), I came to know the UNIX world; my task was to deploy WANG/Open Image and Open/Workflow at the US State Department as a replacement to the legendry WANG VS imaging system. WANG systems pioneered too many things to count in this post.

 

Fast forward few years, while walking the corridors of EDS government group in Virginia, I met a young Californian beauty named  Documentum  and the rest is history, we lived happily ever after except for few  fights and screams with every new release, version, service pack or adopted product.

 These days, I sit in my office watching a young flattery European named Alfresco.        The question ,  Is it really a new love or just “mid-life crisis”……….?

Boy …… Now I really feel VERY OLD …. Thanks to you Laurence

Health Care Reform and Government Inefficiency

Many of us CM and BPM consultants live and work heartbeat away from the federal government in DC metro area, find ourselves in very peculiar position.  In one hand, as independent consultants, we are major victims of the current health care system.  On the other hand, we are first hand witnesses in the federal government inefficiency in running anything.  In fact many of us made a good career out of the attempt to fix our government.

On a personal level, I traveled to most of the developed world and many of the under developed countries.  Our health care system is a national disgrace, with 18% of all adult Americans under the age of 65 uninsured, more significant when we are the most powerful country on earth that promote Democracy and freedom around the world and spending over 1 billion dollars a week in supporting these ideas.

Few months back, I participated in a large government agency contract that helps the agency to issue a system RFP.  The number of consultants responsible for the acquisition compliance with federal regulation was 3 times the consultants responsible for the system requirements and selection. On the other hand a year earlier I was working with a medical insurance giant, where we had an army of claims specialists overloading the system with rules of how to tighten the claim process to minimize payments to the medical providers as well as patients.  Every time I remember the two clients, I feel really sick about how inefficient and embarrassing our systems are becoming.

Why should we trust the government?  Why not? They run the social security system for 10s of years before we had problems. On the other hand the private sector screamed asking to privatize the social security, just to run to the biggest financial fiasco in history.  Thanks GOD we did not listen to the free market gurus on letting them managing our own social security!

In conclusion, it is really inefficient in both sides and the insurance companies are not looking for our benefits more than AIG and Citibank do. Many are objecting to the single payer system, the fact is, we already have a single payer system, called a TAX PAYER.  we all, the tax payers are paying our share of the coverage of the 18% uninsured American through the inefficient of emergency rooms, crimes, jails, Medicaid, charities  and government supporting agencies. 

I am sure that there is a simpler way to achieve a universal coverage than what we have now, even if we have to trust our government …!

EMC acquires Kazeon … what is next ?

Beep … beep ….. My iPhone alerted me that EMC has acquired Kazeon

Yesterday I got the news while I was in the middle of writing a new post.  Somehow unfavorable view of the SourceOne offering for the federal government, particularly in the area of (or lack of) records management capability and compliance with NARA directives. 

Kazeon, the privately held company and an eDiscovery niche player in the area of indexing service.  I am sure Source One, will become much stronger competitor to other archiving and eDiscovery companies specially Mimosa and MimeCast

Although, Kazeon is not a stranger to EMC, its technology already being used in sourceOne, but for now, I will hold off my opinion and wait for the new combination roadmap introduction; hopefully I may see more robust features that can help federal government agencies

Congratulation to both parties

eDiscovery in Government: The need for a Practical Approach

 In my current position, I’m helping a government agency in addressing content management, records management and eDiscovery issues.  I meet with many of the Industry vendors from all sizes and views. With regard of eDiscovery, the common ground among all of them is their fear tactics.  The first few slides of their presentations talk about the millions of dollars of legal fees, public dismay and all types of legal damages.

These eDiscovery vendors breakdown to two major groups, one that comes from a traditional DM/RM background who see eDiscovery as the opportunity that never materialized  with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), and its opportunity to sell the idea that best answer is to build well structured Document management system armed with DOD 5015.02 records management system. The second group comes mainly from the traditional search vendors who promote the idea of searching every storage device in the organization even my personal USB flash drive.  This group makes a point that lawyers and judges do not care if it is a record on not, they wanted all.

 Between the two campuses , my client cross-functional  team ( legal, RM, IT and LOB) is confused between the two approaches, one that asks them to build a costly empire that will take years to finish, if ever and the other, asks them to boil the ocean……..!

 Beside the fear tactics, there is one common link is the EDRM eDiscovery model.  It is clearly a business process (workflow) that starts with a flawed assumption called information management, which is an objective that can only achieved over an extended period of time and stringent practices that many organizations and government agencies lack one or even both. Furthermore, the model, like any other process, has a bandwidth and an upper limit for the expected outcome.

 

The fact that eDiscovery is a real and is becoming the nightmare of all legal departments in the government and large corporations. Many of the trial attorneys are exercising the right to request eDiscovery.  While some are doing that in good faith, many are misusing it, especially with often inexperienced eDiscovery and technology illiterate lawyers.

 It is important that we come to a middle growing ground between building a sand empire and boiling the ocean.  A practical approach to eDiscovery can be summarized as following: 

One size does not fit all

Developing the perfect policy that covers everyone is very complex, not even achievable.  This is my personal opinion. However, managing risks is more feasible; assessing the vulnerable areas within the organization, establishing priorities and plans based on risk, exposure, fiscal and public image impact, will help minimizing the eDiscovery readiness efforts

Top-Down view of information

eDiscovery request can hit organizations at any moment and unexpected areas. A top-down global view of the information is critical to allow for proper segmentation in accordance to the requested information. It is essential that organizations start assessing their information pyramid before they experience a real eDiscovery request.  It is more practical to invest the time on the critical risky areas and their aggregates rather than trying to understand every document, record, process, which will lead to an endless task.

Utilize appropriate resources when it is desirable

Internal resources provide indispensable knowledge of history, context, information content, gap and risk factors. On the other hand external consulting forces can provide the eDiscovery subject matter expertise, objectivity and the bandwidth to reach goals on the right schedule.

Technology is a great help

 The use of the right mix of technology can help organizations become proactive status with regard to eDiscovery.  A reactive status can be very costly. Even an in-progress Document management program, compliance policies and eDiscovery investigation process can save organizations a significant amount of time and money responding to any request. 

Metadata and logs counts

One of the growing trends that trial attorneys start asking for is the metadata and system logs with contents.  There were many successful cases that came out of these smoking guns. The fact,  it may matter more when did you login to the system and open your email than the mail content or if you viewed the file content, even if you did not alter it.

Educate the attorneys

Many of the famous eDiscovery cases were lost because of the technology illiterate attorneys, in this age of eDiscovery, trail attorneys must understand clearly the extent and the limitation of the available technologies.

Continuous improvement

It is essential to review asses and audit the eDiscovery readiness in regular bases and make appropriate changes to the procedures, processes and technologies in a proactive mode.