Content Management Goes Enterprise-Wide
Recipe for Success
At Prudential Financial, where an ECM solution is developing around Documentum for DM, Vignette (Austin, TX) for WCM and Lotus Notes for a little of both, Mandelbaum says, ""we haven't seen an all-embracing solution that's a significant leap forward from where we are today, and there are huge conversion costs to move all of this content from one system to another.""
For insurance companies considering moving to ECM, there is another kind of cost that is all too easy to overlook, according to John Mancini, president, AIIM (Association for Information and Image Management, Silver Spring, MD). ""If there's one thing people underestimate, it's the cultural and educational aspect of making a process change,"" Mancini says. ""The people who have viewed their organizations as a system of business processes and then tried to apply the technology to make those processes work more effectively have been a lot more successful than the folks that just adopt technology for its own sake.""
Technology Warnings
Companies also are prone to underestimating the hazards of untried technologies, says The Hartford's Calibey. The ECM buzz reminds him of the enthusiasm that greeted enterprise data warehousing promises. ""The tools were rudimentary, the concepts were unrefined, we didn't understand what we were trying to do, and many companies spent tens of millions of dollars,"" he says. ""I think we're at a similar point with ECM: The promise is in front of us, but we haven't understood the most complex issue around it""—the human factor, Calibey says.
Caution in considering ECM opportunities should be tempered by openness, according to The Hartford's Calibey. Technology decisions should ""look for opportunities, especially where they make sense at the grass roots level,"" he says. ""Try to implement these in a way that could be extensible if further opportunities present themselves. Run pilots—use opportunities to learn these tools."" Companies should also choose solutions that provide open standards, he advises. ""If, at the end of the day, your content is in an Oracle database and is accessible through XML, you can't get in trouble,"" according to Calibey.
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Work is Where You Are
When new management came to Netherlands-based Interpolis, N.V. ($13 billion in assets), it brought along a new office concept: ""Your place of work is wherever you are."" In order to make it a reality, the carrier's new chairman summoned to his office Jac van Daal, senior business consultant, Interpolis. ""He said to me, 'If you succeed in getting all of our documents in one box in a corner, and every employee can reach them, then you've done a fine job!,'"" van Daal recounts.
The solution sought was essentially an enterprise archiving solution to work in concert with existing workflow and management solutions, says van Daal. But this was no small task for a company that was growing rapidly through acquisitions.
Owing to FileNET's supporting the AIIM document management alliance standard for an open solution, and the fact that Interpolis had FileNET workflow solutions, the carrier chose products from the vendor's Panagon suite to craft a custom solution. Implementation began at the end of 1998, ""when we had an infrastructure with which we could define domains, each with its own set of search elements,"" van Daal says. That step was essentially the first stage in a project ""that will never be completed,"" he adds. That's because the infrastructure serves as a template to extend capability over different parts of the growing enterprise. ""At the end of 2000 we had six implementations,"" van Daal says. ""Today we have 17.""
That enables 1,200 employees-or about 60 percent of Interpolis' staff a year ago-to work ""where they are,"" but van Daal still has his work cut out for him: M&A activity has since swelled the ranks to 5,000.
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Speeding Content to Agents
Farmers Insurance Group (Los Angeles, $18.6 billion in assets) was struggling to keep information fresh on its customized ""agent dashboard,"" Web portal because updating procedures were causing a bottleneck, says Mike Binns, vice president, business and technology integration.
Seeking a solution compatible with IBM's (Armonk, NY) Websphere—the carrier's application server layer—Farmer's brought in Interwoven's (Sunnyvale, CA) TeamSite tool and tied it into the dashboard application with help from Jacksonville, FL-based consultancy Encore Development. ""Getting our internal IT infrastructure staff up to speed on something they had no experience with was a challenge, but we got great support from the Interwoven and Encore team,"" Binns says. When TeamSite was implemented, a small group of ""power users"" on the business side were trained to use it.
The application ""took the burden of creating HTML pages and updates to text and published content from the programmer to the business person,"" freeing developers to work on technological ""heavy lifting,"" Binns says. TeamSite automatically launches Macromedia's (San Francisco) Dreamweaver content creation tool, which the users interact with directly.
The solution has cut the content publishing cycle from days to minutes, according to Binns. ""Now key users access TeamSite to create their own content,"" Binns says. The application then renders the content virtually so the creator can see what it will look like online. ""Then they simply push it into a QA environment, where a couple of other eyes look at it to make sure it's OK. In minutes it's in production on the Web site, Binns adds.
Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio
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