Showing posts with label Content Management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Content Management. Show all posts

Monday, March 27, 2023

Enterprise Content Management as SaaS

Software as a service (SaaS) is a software application delivery model where a software vendor develops a web-native software application and hosts and operates (either independently or through a third-party) the application for use by its customers over the Internet.

Two factors are driving the movement to SaaS. One is the significant technical improvements over the last decade. Computer hardware costs like CPUs, storage and network bandwidth have dropped significantly. In the last two years, memory prices have fallen by almost 75% and CPU prices have fallen by 50%, while capabilities like processing speed and capacity have increased significantly.

The second factor is that certain software applications are becoming standardized. Due to these improvements, it is now possible to host a software application for thousands of companies with shared hardware and still provide good performance. Likewise, it is practical to accommodate the business process needs of thousands of companies using a single copy of software without having to re-write the software code for each customer.

As more software is being delivered as a service, business users now have greater control over the destiny of their business process improvement efforts. And while many SaaS projects require little from the IT department, IT is increasingly feeling the need to get involved to ensure that integration, security and compliance requirements are met. IT is now taking a more consultative role and acting as a liaison between business and vendor.

Why SaaS is Ideal for ECM?

An enterprise content management (ECM) solution has many components that need to be assembled even for the simplest of projects. Below is list of common ECM related technologies that frequently have to be integrated:

  • Search
  • Email management
  • eForms
  • Workflow
  • Records management
  • OCR
  • Fax management
  • Access control
  • Reporting
  • Electronic signature
  • Viewing and mark-up
  • Version control

In addition to the above, ECM projects require hardware and software like a database server, web server, application server for integration, writing integration code and a plan to maintain all of this and a plan for regular backup. In addition to the ease of implementation, ECM benefits from the SaaS delivery model because a lot of flexibility can be delivered via configuration instead of customization.

On-premise software gets customized very heavily and typically most of the features are not used. The customization is done by expensive staff that has to write and maintain software code. When any component of the solution is upgraded, the code has to be rewritten, making it very expensive to maintain. By contrast, SaaS configuration works like Lego blocks. Most critical business needs can be accommodated although the system is not "infinitely" customizable.

In the context of ECM, this means having capabilities like configurable search, line-of-business users can decide how much importance should be given to document properties like name, the keywords of the document and the actual content. Configurability of the user interface means that different users can choose which buttons they see. Configurable workflow allows business operation managers to adapt the workflow to their business processes. Configuration is very similar to building your own Google or Yahoo home page by making point-and-click selections instead of writing complex code. Configuration is much easier and more flexible than customizing code.

SaaS-based ECM also provides pre-built configurable applications for common business processes that are document-heavy. Examples of such processes include:

  • Accounts payable automation
  • Contract management
  • Proposal management
  • Logistics/POD
  • Mortgage processing
  • Field support
  • Training
  • Legal
  • Architecture
  • Construction
  • Insurance processing
  • Engagement management

Benefits of SaaS

Software as a service has inherent advantages that make it attractive for the vast majority of content management applications. These are the benefits of the SaaS model:

1. Democratization of turnkey software: companies of all sizes can now afford the basic applications that were historically only within the reach of very large organizations.

2. Extremely fast deployment: with SaaS you can be up and running in days, not weeks or months like on-premises solutions. And users are quick to adopt SaaS applications, so your time-to-value will be much faster with a SaaS solution. Unlike on-premises software, there is nothing to install and SaaS requires no hardware, no software, no additional network infrastructure and no IT expenses to maintain that infrastructure. All you need is a browser and an Internet connection.

3. Complete solutions: Typically, all needed components of a SaaS solution are pre-integrated. There is no need to pay for additional modules or expensive and time-consuming integration services.

4. Low cost: SaaS is delivered as a pay-as-you-go subscription. Combined with the savings in hardware, administration, and professional services, the total cost of a SaaS implementation is typically less than half of on-premises software.

5. Low risk: SaaS is easy to get out of, by simply choosing not to renew the services agreement at the end of the initial term. Usually, this is a one-year period. Often, SaaS providers (like SpringCM) will give you a free trial period, allowing you to configure your solution and try it before making the purchase commitment.

6. Easy to administer: SaaS solutions are usually administered by someone in the business unit, not by IT staff. And since there is nothing to install, no hardware, and no network management, the administration of a SaaS solution usually consists of simple configuration and user access management.

7. Easy to use: SaaS applications are always built with the mindset of getting users productive as soon as possible. For example, the SpringCM solution has an intuitive Web interface, easy configuration steps and a quick tutorial designed to get users familiar with the system in minutes.

8. Easy to integrate: thanks to robust Web services, SaaS solutions fit nicely into other business applications. Often, the document management and workflow features can be invoked from within the other application, so the users do not have to learn a new system to take advantage of the added capabilities.

9. Easy to buy: SaaS applications are easier to buy. If you were considering a $500K on-premises system, you not only have to sell the project internally and get the budget approved but also write up a detailed RFP with help from IT and think of all the ways you might use the system. Instead, when acquiring a SaaS-based application, you can try it and see if it solves your immediate problems. You can go from thinking about a solution to go-live in as little as a few weeks depending on the complexity of your requirements.

10. Faster innovation: Because SaaS solutions are multi-tenant and easier for the vendor to support and upgrade and because a SaaS vendor can very easily find out if new features will conflict with old ones, SaaS companies typically release newer versions every two to three months.

Limitations of SaaS

Although SaaS works for the vast majority of solution areas, there are a few limitations that you should take into consideration.

1. While SaaS works for common business processes, if the business processes are extremely proprietary and very peculiar to the company, then SaaS may not be the right choice.

2. SaaS can handle large volumes of transactions and data, but if your application requires constant transfer of huge volumes of data (terabytes) over the Internet with an expectation of real-time processing, then SaaS may not be the best option.

3. SaaS may not be the right option for your business if your security requirements are such that only your internal IT department can meet them.

4. Although the SaaS model has been in operation for over a decade with millions of users, there are those who prefer the predominant computing model, which is still on-premises software.

Questions to Ask a Vendor

Not all SaaS providers are equal in their ability to satisfy your needs. Not only are there major differences in solution functionality, but there are also differences in each vendor’s ability to deliver and support the type of solution you need. 

Here are a few questions that any qualified SaaS vendor should be able to answer.

1. Are you a true SaaS provider, or simply a "hosted" or "ASP" solution? All genuine SaaS solutions are multi-tenant and this is what brings you many of the benefits of a SaaS solution. A truly multi-tenant SaaS provider can demonstrate that all customers are running the same version of the software using shared hardware.

2. What has been your average outage time over the past 12 months? The answer should be way less than 1%. For example, SpringCM provides availability of 99.7% for its solution.

3. How often is new software released? Because of the flexibility and effectiveness of the SaaS architecture, you should expect new product releases much more frequently than with the typical 12-18 month cycle of on-premises software vendors.

4. Is there lag time between a new release and your applying it? If the answer is yes, this is a sign that you may be dealing with a hosted or ASP provider, not a true SaaS. With SaaS, when a new release is available, everyone has immediate access to the new functionality.

5. How much domain experience do you have as a SaaS provider? This question is very important because, whenever possible, you want to deal with a company that really knows how to deliver SaaS solutions, not one who jumped on the bandwagon to take advantage of the rapid growth in the industry.

6. Did you start as a SaaS company? Many of the so-called SaaS vendors are really on-premises software companies who have re-purposed their software code to fit into an on-demand (hosted) model. Such systems do have advantages, but they also include many of the disadvantages of on-premises solutions.

7. Can I try the software for free? Every SaaS provider worth its salt will give you access to its solution for a trial period. This gives you a feel for how the solution will work for you day-to-day. One important consideration is to make sure that any of the content capture, configuration and workflows will be fully available to you as you transition from a trial to a full account.

8. How much customization is required to make the solution usable? The best answer is "none," since SaaS solutions use the concept of "configuration" instead of customization. As we covered earlier, configuration offers many of the same advantages as customization but does not require the significant time and expense.

9. How does your application scale? Certain applications run fine when there are 10 users or 100 users but cannot accommodate larger user populations. Ask your SaaS provider if their application can scale across thousands of companies, not just thousands of users.

10. How will you keep my content and data safe? There is a natural reluctance to trust the maintenance of valuable content (both documents and data) outside the corporate firewall. Good SaaS companies host in facilities that have sophisticated power backup, earthquake/flood-resistant construction, bio-metric security, SAS 70 Type certification and bulletproof construction. Although your IT department may not be able to afford such a facility, the SaaS vendor can do so because the cost gets spread over hundreds or thousands of customers.

Monday, January 30, 2023

SharePoint Implementations

There are a few main considerations for governance and metrics in SharePoint implementations:

  • metrics to gauge maturity, success, adoption, compliance and progress in your program;
  • mechanisms for managing content across the full lifecycle including compliance with standards for tagging;
  • governance processes and policies to control site and content ownership.

Metrics

Metrics will give you measures of success, adoption, compliance and progress. What is measured can be managed. When no objective ways have been put in place to measure how well a program is functioning, it is not possible to correct or improve it. It is essential to have a way of monitoring how things are going so changes can be made to serve the needs of the program.

Maturity

The first metric to consider is overall maturity and capability. Maturity in the SharePoint space can be considered across multiple dimensions, from the level of intentionality and structure of a process to the formal presence and level of sophistication of governing bodies. 

Consider a maturity model in which each dimension is mapped with a set of capabilities and characteristics that indicate a general level of maturity. Based on the overall characteristics of those processes (reflected in the rating for each dimension), the maturity of the organization’s SharePoint implementation can be measured at the start of a program and throughout its life. As processes are installed, the maturity is increased. That snapshot in time is a good indicator of the state of the program and can be used as a general measure of success.

Because SharePoint success is indicated by the ability to locate information (“findability”) and findability is the result of a combination of factors, it is possible to describe those factors in terms of existing practices and processes as well as benchmark the level of functionality or activity (for example, content quality measures, the presence of a process or the measure of the effectiveness of that process). One governance maturity measure regards whether there are any governing bodies or policies in place. Another might be the participation levels in governance meetings.

Use cases and usability

A second important measure of value includes overall usability based on use cases for specific classes of users. Use cases should be part of every content and information program, and there should be a library to access for testing each use case. Use cases are tasks that are part of day-to-day work processes and support specific business outcomes. At the start of the program, assessing the ability of users to complete their job tasks, which requires the ability to locate content, provides a practical baseline score to compare with later interventions.

User satisfaction is a subjective measure of acceptance. Although subjective, if measured in the same way, before an intervention or redesign and then after the intervention. The results will show a comparative improvement or decrease in perceived usability. The perception can be impacted by more than design. Training and socialization can have a large impact on user satisfaction.

Adoption

One simple metric for adoption is the volume of e-mail containing attachments as compared with those containing links. As users post their files on SharePoint and send links within messages rather than e-mailing attachments, they are clearly demonstrating use of the system. Looking at that metric as a baseline and then periodically on a department-by-department basis as well as company-wide provides a valuable information regarding SharePoint adoption.

Other adoption metrics include the number of collaboration spaces or sites that are set up and actively managed, the numbers of documents uploaded or downloaded, the degree of completeness of metadata, the accuracy of tagging, and the number of documents being reviewed based on defined lifecycles.

It is important to have self-paced tutorials regarding your particular environment and to monitor the number of people who have completed this kind of training. Participation in “lunch-and-learns,” webinars or conference calls on the use of the environment are other engagement metrics that can be tracked.

Socialization includes a narrative of success through sharing stories about the value of knowledge contained in knowledgebases, problems being solved and collaboration that leads to new sales or cost savings. Publicizing new functionality along with examples showing how that functionality can be used in day-to-day work processes will help people see the positive aspects of the program and help to overcome inevitable challenges with any new deployment. Those successes need to be communicated through different mechanisms and by emphasizing themes appropriate to the audience and process. An application for executives may not resonate with line-of-business users.

Alignment with business outcomes

A more challenging but also more powerful approach to metrics is to link the SharePoint functionality to a business process that can be impacted and that can be measured. One example is a proposal process that enables salespeople to sell more when they are able to turn proposals around more quickly, allowing more selling time or reduced cost of highly compensated subject matter experts. Employee self-service knowledgebases can be linked to help desk call volume. Those metrics are more challenging because they require the development of a model that predicts the impact of one action on another or at least an understanding that causality is involved, but they also can be a strong indication of success.

Tagging processes

The amount of content that is correctly tagged provides a useful measure of adoption and compliance. How do you know if content is tagged correctly? Taking a representative sample of content and checking whether tagging is aligned with the intent of the content publishing design will detect inconsistencies or errors in tagging. 

The percentage of content that is tagged at all is an indicator. One organization left a default value that did not apply to any content. The first term in the dropdown was "lark". If users left that value in, they were not paying attention and the quality of tagging was impacted. Measuring the percentage tagged with "lark" allowed for an inverse indicator. When the "lark" index declined, the quality increased. The quality of content can also be measured with crowd-sourced feedback. Up-voting or down-voting content can trigger workflows for review or boosting in ranking.

Change triggers

Metrics tell the organization something: whether something is working or not working. But what action is triggered? A metrics program has to lead to action: a course correction to improve performance. The change cycle can be characterized by conducting interaction analysis to measure the pathway through content and how it is used (such as impressions or reading time). 

If users exit after opening a document, that exit could be because they found their answer or because the content was not relevant. It is only by looking at the next interaction (another search, for example, or a long period of reading the document) can it be determined whether the content was high value or whether it did not provide an answer. Based on this analysis, it is possible to identify a remediation step (create missing content or fix a usability issue, etc.).

Search interactions also provide clues for action. When top searches return no content, the wrong content or too much content, the root cause can be addressed with an appropriate action (improve tagging, create content, tune the ranking algorithm or search experience with best bets, auto-complete, thesaurus entries, etc.).

By reviewing and troubleshooting content interaction metrics, patterns may emerge that point to problems with the publishing process or compliance with tagging guidelines.

Content processes and governance policies

SharePoint governance consists of decision-making bodies and decision-making mechanisms for developing and complying with rules and policies around SharePoint installations. This is the glue that holds SharePoint deployments together. Mechanisms for creating a new team sites and collaboration spaces need to go through a process of review to ensure that redundant sites are not created. Abandoned sites need to be retired or archived. Content needs to be owned and reviewed for relevance. If content is not owned and abandoned sites not actively removed, the installation becomes more and more cluttered.

Without clear guidelines for how and where to post content and ways to apply metadata tags, users will tend to post content haphazardly, and eventually libraries will be cluttered with junk. Over time, people will dump content in SharePoint because they are told they need to post it for sharing but no one will know how to find valuable content. Site administrators must understand the rules of deployment and control how users are utilizing SharePoint to prevent sprawl and keep the system from becoming cluttered with poorly organized content.

Among the chief goals of governance is to prevent SharePoint from becoming a dumping ground by segmenting collaboration spaces from content to be reused and enforcing standards for curation and tagging.

Consider that every element of SharePoint has a lifecycle and that this lifecycle has to be managed. Those elements range from design components that are created based on the needs of users and rigorous use cases (including taxonomies, metadata structures, content models, library design, site structures and navigational models), to the sites themselves that are created according to a policy and process and disposed of at the end of their life, to the content within sites that needs to be vetted, edited and approved for broad consumption. All of those are managed through policies, intentional decision-making and compliance mechanisms developed by a governance group.

SharePoint governance needs to be a part of the overall information governance program of the enterprise. It is part of content and data governance with particular nuances based on how the technology functions. In fact, many tools are designed into the core functionality of SharePoint to help with governance operationalization. The overarching principle is to consider the audience and the breadth of audience the content is designed to reach.

One analogy is that of an office structure. The lobby, which has a wide audience, limits what can be displayed. The lobby environment is visible to all, so it needs to be managed rigorously. But walking into a cubicle in the office building will reveal the personality of its inhabitant: personal photos, papers on the desk, individual and idiosyncratic organizing principles. A messy desk perhaps. A shared work area might be someplace between the orderliness of the lobby and the messiness of the individual workspace.

Those gradations are the local, personal and departmental level spans of control analogously managed in SharePoint. Information that has an enterprise span needs to be carefully managed and controlled. In a collaboration space, things can be a little more chaotic. In fact, the one thing to keep in mind is that content has a different value depending on the context and span and will increase in value as it is edited, vetted, tagged and organized for specific audiences and processes.

Segment the high-value content by promoting it from a collaboration space to a shared location and apply the tags that will tell the organization that it is important. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Manage high-value content and differentiate it from interim deliverables and draft work in process. Throw away the junk or take it out of the search results so they are not cluttered with low-value information.

Many people complain that they can’t find their content in SharePoint and they want search to work like Google. The answer is to put the same work into managing and processing content as search engine optimization departments do for web content, and the search engine will return the results that you are looking for.

SharePoint requires an intentional approach to design, deployment, socialization, maintenance and ongoing decision-making. The rules are simple: there is no magic. They need to be applied consistently and intentionally to get the most from the technology.

SharePoint Beyond the Firewall: Put Your Content to Work

SharePoint is undoubtedly one of the most important and widespread enterprise productivity tools, used by an estimated 67% of medium-to-large organizations, according to research firm AIIM. Many companies are heavily invested in SharePoint, and for good reason: it’s a highly adaptable solution that can be effective for content management and file sharing across a range of use cases. But SharePoint does have its limitations.

Where SharePoint struggles is when content needs to be securely shared outside the firewall, and consumed by remote workers, partners, or suppliers. Extending SharePoint for external needs introduces IT challenges, including content protection and security, user governance and support, and initial and on-going infrastructure and license costs.

This creates a challenge for organizations with sizable SharePoint investments and large populations of users. Rather than replacing SharePoint, it’s more practical to build on existing investments to provide secure, external collaboration and document sharing, without adding unnecessary complexity and cost to IT infrastructure, or putting sensitive or regulated content at risk.

According to AIIM, security and control are the top concerns of SharePoint administrators since it is routinely used to manage highly sensitive and regulated content: 51% of users share financial documents, 48% legal and contractual documents, and 36% board of directors and executive communications.

Leverage Your SharePoint Investment for External Document Sharing

As companies start sharing sensitive documents with collaboration partners, they need to maintain tight access control. SharePoint control over document access is not as well defined as many large enterprises might want. Attributes to consider for secure, seamless content sharing that complements your SharePoint investment include:
  • Secure, policy-based document-sharing control.
  • Agile response, and easy set-up and adoption.
  • Low, up-front investment.
  • Ability to leverage existing systems without adding new complexity.
  • Provisioning and support for a community of external users.
  • Cloud-based solutions are now meeting all of these demands to unburden the in-house IT infrastructure, but still allow internal users to continue using the familiar SharePoint-based platform and applications, with little or no change or added overhead.
Maintaining Control Over the Content Lifecycle

Externalizing SharePoint is one thing. Having control over the content once it’s left the firewall is another. For comprehensive control, you’ll want to consider tools with the following:
  • Access rights for external partners. Given the large number of potential collaboration partners and the number of documents to share, you’ll need granular and dynamic document administration.
  • Encryption. As soon as SharePoint documents pass beyond a firewall, they need to be encrypted and remain encrypted both as they move over the internet and while they are at rest within the external document sharing application. Seamless encryption means hackers can’t access the data within a document at any stage.
  • Virus protection. Avoid picking up file-based viruses that could penetrate your network while content is in motion, and shared and accessed from various geolocations and devices.
  • Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM services let IT departments provide secure document access to any device—PC, smartphone, tablet—while dynamically managing content rights even after a document has been distributed. Such systems have the ability to let users view without downloading documents, and prevent printing or screen capture. Ideally, IRM should be plug-in free so that it is frictionless to users. Finally, digital watermarking identifies a document as confidential and also embeds in the document the name of the person doing the download. This helps ensure that the user will be extra careful not to lose or leak the document.
  • Monitoring and auditing. Know which people are looking at what documents, for how long, and create audit reports from this information. This verifies compliance with data privacy and other relevant regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
These security, compliance, and information governance capabilities should be accessible without requiring additional SharePoint software customization, or introducing a new user interface.

Galaxy Consulting has over 15 years experience in SharePoint implementations and management. Please contact us for a free consultation.

Monday, December 28, 2020

Electronic Signature and Content Management


 At this time of digital transformation, it is difficult to talk about managing content management without talking about using electronic signatures. E-signatures make it possible to create digital workflows, help to maximize ROI from content management, and enhance productivity, compliance, security, and analytics.

Quite a few content management tools include e-signature implementation such as SharePoint, Box, and other content management systems (CMS).

Electronic signatures, digital business, and content management are interdependent. Without e-signature capability, documents continue to be printed for signing, then photocopied, shipped, corrected, imaged back into the system, archived, and shredded. 90% of the time and cost of labor dedicated to managing paper can be saved by using e-signatures. There are also other benefits of using e-signatures such as faster decision making, shorter sales cycles, and improved customer experience.

In the last few years, financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government have embraced digital transformation. A major driver is compliance and risk. Many organizations are concerned about legal risk or they struggle with the constantly changing regulatory landscape in their industries, in part because manual processing is very prone to errors.

Rather than react to regulatory pressure with additional people, manual controls, and process complexity, organizations that adopt e-signatures have these benefits:

  • Leverage workflow rules to execute transactions correctly and consistently.
  • Capture a full audit trail and electronic evidence.
  • Minimize exposure to risk due to misplaced or lost documents.
  • Make the process of e-discovery easier, more reliable, and less expensive.
  • Demonstrate compliance and reduce legal risk through the ability to playback the exact process that was used to capture signatures.

Let's look at this example: the VP of compliance is asking for transaction records from 5 years ago. How helpful would it be to quickly produce all signed records, in good order and replay the entire web-based signing process for context.

According to Forrester Research, organizations and customers now recognize that e-signature is an important enabler of digital business.

Today, the business is digital and e-signature is a foundational technology enabling end-to-end digitization. Let's look at this example: a customer filled out an insurance application. When the package is ready to be signed by the customer, traditionally it would revert to paper. Instead, documents are handed off to the electronic signature solution. This solution would manage every aspect of the e-sign process, including notifying and authenticating signers, presenting documents for review, capturing intent, securing documents, collecting evidence, etc.

Once e-signed, the documents can be downloaded in PDF format and stored in any archiving system. The e-signature audit trail and the security travels seamlessly with the document, ensuring the record can be verified independently or the e-signature service.

A document centric approach to embedding e-signatures within signed records allows for greater portability and easier long term storage in an CMS solution. Additional metadata related to the e-sign transaction can be handed off to the CMS as well for analytics purpose.

Adopting electronic signatures is quick and easy and does require IT or programming resources. Companies who are looking for a more integrated automated workflow, e-signature plugins for SharePoint, Salesforce, Box are available.

Organizations can quickly and easily enhance approval workflows with a more robust e-signature solution than a checkbox on an approval routing sheet, while also automating archival.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Change Management and Content Management

Content Management and Change Management are connected. Change Management is needed for successful Content Management. These two subject matters support each other.

Companies can benefit from the positive relationship between these two subject matters and suitable processes about them, starting with content management. 

Improved visibility and management of documents is particularly beneficial for change management. Employees across an organization can use the same, current documents with up-to-date facts and figures, and with an automated document management system, they can do it quickly, boosting the organization’s agility in times of change.

When Content Management Takes the Lead

With a reliable and efficient content management system, individual departments and change management teams can better:

  • Integrate siloed information and standardize operating procedures across the organization, thereby allowing everyone to pull from a single source of truth.
  • Communicate any changes quickly throughout the entire organization.
  • Increase product and process quality by ensuring employees have the right document at the right time.

By-products of these activities include improved decision-making and reduced possibility of errors, miscommunication, and regulatory actions through enforced compliance. In short, Content Management helps keep Change Management in control.

When Change Management Takes the Lead

How does change management helps to keep the content management processes in check? Whether change is driven by FDA, EMEA, or ISO regulations, or by competitive business forces, it is undeniably critical to operations. It doesn’t matter whether the change being addressed in an internal change, or a process change that must be efficiently and accurately documented to ensure adherence going forward. It must be kept in control, and to do so, it commands that other inter-related processes, including content management, be reliable at all times.

To effectively manage change, an organization must be agile. Bottlenecks to operational agility might include an inability to locate data, or outdated SOPs that expose the company to noncompliance or financial, operational, or legal risk. These bottlenecks might rest within the content management processes, rendering them unreliable. Change Management would help to resolve these problems.

An effective change management system will take charge and guide content management by starting document updates during the implementation of an approved change. This action:

  • Provides a comprehensive workflow for documenting change from the initial change request through to the approvals and implementation.
  • Reduces the risk of losing documents, or storing incomplete or unapproved documents.
  • Increases the available transparency of what is being documented.

Content Management and Change Management are Better Together

On their own, these subject matters are strong but together they are extremely agile, and they drive continuous improvement and overall organizational quality. They are also high-achievers in the higher-level view from Quality Management point of view. Working in tandem, Content Management and Change Management benefit Quality operations through:

  • Accessibility: Organized, current, and visible documentation provides an easily accessible audit trail to keep the organization on track and to satisfy regulatory requirements at a moment’s notice.
  • Collaboration: When electronic change requests integrate with electronic document management, they expedite the document update process and enhance project collaboration among impacted departments and functions.
  • Security: Concise storage and accessibility of current documents, particularly SOPs, ensures that the right individuals are receiving the right documents at the right time. When change is in the focus, incomplete documents or those not applicable to certain departments cannot be accessed through a “back door.”

Organizations Should Consider Adoption

Organizations would do well to adopt both quality management processes, whether on their own or as part of an automated enterprise-wide Quality Management System (QMS).

An effective automated system will integrate document and change control procedures. It also will integrate with other solutions, providing access to approved, controlled documents in other areas of the quality system, including audits, CAPAs and employee training. In these cases, an automated system’s search and retrieval capabilities, dashboards, and repositories expedite the processes.

Industry standards and regulatory guidelines recommend quality management processes which are integrated across the entire organization.

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Create Value in Your Content

Organizations are buried in content. Some content is important, some is out of date, and some content is vital for an organization to survive and thrive. Content management can provide great help in ensuring that your organization gets the most value out of its content.

Managing content is similar to all the things that accumulate in your house. The longer you live in one place, the more things you accumulate. Most families don’t have retention policies in place for their personal things. They don’t write policies and procedures regarding furniture, electronics, or other things that they meant to fix several years ago and they are now gathering dust in the closet. At some point in time, the closet needs to be cleaned out or there will be no more space in a closet and then in the house.

Why do people decide to get rid of the stuff in their houses? It might be because they’ simply decided that they own too much or they are tired of paying extra money to keep things they are not using at a storage facility or they ran out of space in their house or they have been urged by a family member to stop what looks like hoarding behavior or they’ve decided to downsize and move to a smaller house. Whatever the reasons, the decision to divest themselves of personal goods leads people to donate their goods to a charity or hold a massive yard sale or maybe both.

Organizations do not hold yard sales. The content stored in organizations is frequently, but not always, in digital form. Enterprises are better at replacing outdated computers and worn out desk chairs than deciding which pieces of content are no longer relevant to running the business. Many organizations may not even really know how much content they own or where it resides.

Cleaning Out the Content House

Organizations need enterprise content management to keep their content fresh and to get the most value out of it. They need to clean out their content closets and their information garages from time to time.

Enterprise content management is not a new concept. Companies have been accumulating information for years and managing their content has been a part of business functions in many organizations but not in all organizations. For many, content management has been designed by IT departments and driven by regulatory requirements. It’s concentrated on compliance, with meeting the rules imposed upon them from outside.

Regulatory compliance remains a huge factor in doing business, and enterprise content management plays huge role in ensuring that organizations meet compliance requirements.

When it comes to handling inactive content, companies need to consider archiving by which he means retiring the content rather than keeping it. Retention schedule would greatly help in this task.

A Content Management System (CMS) would help to automate the process of content management. Human element is also very important in content management. It is important to humanize the experience of working with content.

The humans interacting with content could be employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and regulators. For content management to succeed, people must enjoy a digital and, an experience-based interaction. Behind the scenes, a content management system should organize content so that content findability is enhanced without too much work on the part of the person seeking information.

Breaking Down Information Silos

One barrier to content usability is information silos. Today’s content users do not want to constantly switch from one silo to another or from one user interface to another. Multiple systems are simply not intuitive and do not foster the collaboration needed to effectively run a business. So, a content management system should concentrate on changing the silo mentality, breaking down silos of content, and digitally connecting them.

Silos started with people. They store data as their department, their piece of the enterprise, thinks it should be done. They don’t take a holistic view of content. As the result, content ends up in many different systems.

It is important to manage content in place, where it is at the moment and add value to it in a modular way. To add value modularly, you need to think about the difference between different types of content. Modular content management lets you use content you need in real time.

Digital Transformation

A major change in the content management landscape has been digital transformation. It’s no longer just dealing with regulations. Newer technologies, such as cloud computing and mobile devices, put unprecedented pressure on those responsible for content management. The IT challenges are real and enterprise content management can provide significant assistance in the process.

Digital transformation affects all organizations. Think of the things people used to do in person that they now do online. The retail industry has been hugely affected by technology. Online ordering, price comparisons, product reviews, and mobile payments are now the ordinary way people buy books, electronics, household goods, and almost everything else. Even groceries can be ordered online and delivered to your door.

Digital information, with no paper equivalent, is increasingly the norm for enterprise content. It can be stored in multiple locations by numerous individuals working for different departments. Digital information creates interesting challenges for content management.

The world is becoming more and more digital. Medical records are transitioning to electronic versions. Many patients can now contact their doctors electronically, ask questions by email or in a secure forum-type environment, and view their digital records. Travelers routinely get their airline boarding passes delivered to their phones and choose their hotel room digitally before their arrival in the hotel lobby. Tickets for movie theaters and concerts have gone electronic. Restaurant reservations have also become a digital activity. Any digital activity implies content management.

Not just the consumer commerce is experiencing digital transformation. Regulatory agencies expect reports in digital form. Suppliers and manufacturers communicate digitally and complex supply chains are managed, controlled, and updated with digital systems.

Sensors track delivery trucks so that the trucking company knows where they are and when shipments are expected to arrive at their destination. Retailers and wholesalers alike use digital data for product improvement; fast and tailored distribution to stores, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities; and trend tracking.

Digital transformation makes businesses to become more agile. It is through using digital content in an agile way that allows companies to respond quickly, identify new opportunities, discard what is not working, and find new avenues of profitability. Access to information with the immediacy of digital data gives those who understand it an enormous competitive advantage.

Non-Digital Content

Even though the digital transformation is real, paper documents have not disappeared. Many organizations continue to maintain paper repositories.

Organizations make the best effort on automating and removing paper documents from core business functions and processes.

One example is clinical trials in the pharmaceutical industry. Clinical trials are essential to the new drug approval process and even 10 years ago were usually paper-based, with patients filling out diaries by hand. Today, those paper accounts have largely been replaced by electronic patient reporting to capture information, which leads to more timely and accurate responses by the patient and higher quality data for the pharmaceutical company to analyze.

However, there are still a lot of paper-based documents.

Even though paper documents are digitized somewhere during the workflow sequence, they begin as paper and are often stored as paper.

Organizations are moving from paper documents to digital, but this shift is not complete. Thus, a content management system must acknowledge the existence of paper documents.

Security Concerns

Security is foremost in organizations. Part of content management is ensuring that sensitive data is secure in an organization. This means identifying content and its access permissions accordingly.

Safeguarding content is important on both the consumer and the enterprise level. Today’s content is more distributed than ever before. It is not locked up, secured, and then made compliant. Instead, content exists, and sometimes is created outside the enterprise. However, organizations must secure content.

Security is also a function of compliance. Compliance must be in place for all systems. Keeping up with what constitutes compliance and with updates in regulatory requirements should be mandatory.

What about business rules? Every organization has some business rules, and enterprise content systems must conform to these rules. However, even though rules sometimes seem hardwired, they can change and systems need to change when rules change.

Impact on Enterprise Content Management

Digital transformation profoundly affects enterprise content management. Cleaning out the information closets starts with identifying what the organizations needs today and what no longer needed today but might be needed in the future.

Organizations must execute a set of strategies to ensure the content clutter is under control. Enterprise content management is not simply a technical issue. It is rooted in the human element.

Becoming a digital enterprise and building a digital platform comes with the territory of digital transformation. Still, essential elements of content management must be addressed. Determining value of stored content is extremely important.

Galaxy Consulting has over 20 years experience in content management. Please call us today for a free consultation.

Thursday, June 29, 2017

Connect Content With People

Despite the promise of new technologies, effective enterprise content management feels more elusive than ever for a lot of companies. Part of the challenge is that there is simply more content produced than there used to be.

While organizations still have huge quantities of documents, employees are embracing new ways to record and share information which is everything from wikis and social media to websites and videos.

These new formats open the door for more dynamic, interactive communication. But they also create content management hurdles, especially since the content tends to be unstructured and trapped in different systems.

But even beyond that, the way people access and consume content is changing to reflect a workforce that is increasingly hurried, mobile and collaborative. No one wants to read long reports or manuals any more. Employees demand just the information they need in the format they want. They assume the enterprise search function will work like Google, regardless of technical constraints, security restrictions, and cultural norms about how different parts of the business share information. And they expect content to be delivered to them seamlessly no matter where they are, what network they are on, or what device they’re using.

Organizations need to anticipate content needs and link people to the best information to support their jobs.

Putting Content in the Flow of Work

The best practice organizations use a range of tools in pursuit of the elusive goal of “findability”. It is everything from advanced search solutions to intricately crafted taxonomies and hand-picked search results for particular keywords.

However, making it easy for employees to retrieve content from repositories is only half the battle. To get the most value out of content, the best practice organizations must put it directly in the path of employees so they can access it in the context of what they are doing at a given moment.

Many best practice organizations build templates, guidelines, best practices and FAQs directly into business processes and applications and all either mandate or strongly encourage employees to use that content in the context of their jobs.

What does it mean to build content directly into business processes and applications? It depends on how an organization is structured and the type of work it does. For companies that operate according to well-defined business processes, it might mean arranging content in line with process documentation so people can drill down into information on specific tasks and activities.

But if a company's work revolves around client projects, it may want to push content directly to project team sites so relevant resources are immediately available to people in the field delivering projects. Still other companies embed how-to information, FAQs, and tips and tricks into software applications where employees do their work.

One of the most direct ways to incorporate content into the flow of work is by inserting it directly into enterprise applications where employees enter data, complete tasks and interact with customers. Companies can integrate procedures, job aids, templates and links to customer folders into the account management system and service portal so client service consultants have relevant information at their fingertips.

Underwriting content is similarly embedded in software for sales quotes and renewals. Content integration is customized by job role so that guidance is based on the specific role and workflow in question. The integration points provide a fast track to relevant resources, ensuring that employees benefit from collective knowledge even if they’re in the middle of a quote or speaking with a customer.

Provide Mobile Access with Mobile Apps

The other key to putting content into the flow of work is to make sure that people can access that content when they are working, even if they are not in a traditional office environment.

All the best practice organizations provide native mobile applications enabling access to enterprise content, regardless of location. Those apps are significantly more effective than mobile browsers, which are how most organizations currently provide access to content.

Content apps offer the same search and filtering capabilities available on desktop computers, which means employees have similar experiences in both contexts. Some apps are read-only, but others let people upload data or comments.

Regardless of the specific functionality provided, the best practice organizations agree that mobile access increases engagement and makes it more likely that employees will access content when they need it.

Mobile Security

Of course, when you start putting enterprise IP and data on smartphones and tablets, security becomes very important. The best practice organizations have thought a lot about protecting content in the mobile environment, and each has its own strategy, such as for example a secure firewall that requires login credentials.

But despite the challenges, mobile access is necessary. Organizations can’t ignore the risks, but they have to move forward. Employees expect to interact with enterprise information from their devices, and employers must deliver mobile access if they want to reap the full benefit of their content.

The best practice organizations do everything they can to ensure that relevant content is delivered directly to employees in the course of their work.

Galaxy Consulting has 17 years experience in connecting content with people and delivering it to employees when they need it to do their jobs.

Sunday, June 26, 2016

Better Business Operations with Better Data

Businesses today understand that data is an important enterprise asset, relied on by employees to deliver on their customers' needs, among other uses of data such as making business decisions and many others.

Yet too few organizations realize that addressing data quality is necessary to improve customer satisfaction. A recent Forrester survey shows that fewer than 20% of companies see data management as a factor in improving customer relationships. This is very troubling number.

Not paying attention to data quality can have a big impact both on companies and the customers they serve. Following are just two examples:

Garbage in/garbage out erodes customer satisfaction. Customer service agents need to have the right data about their customers, their purchases, and prior service history presented to them at the right point in the service cycle to deliver answers. When their tool sets pull data from low-quality data sources, decision quality suffers, leading to significant rework and customers frustration.

Lack of trust in data has a negative impact on employees productivity. Employees begin to question the validity of underlying data when data inconsistencies and quality issues are left unchecked. This means employees will often ask a customer to validate product, service, and customer data during an interaction which makes the interaction less personal, increases call times, and instills in the customer a lack of trust in the company.

The bottom line: high-quality customer data is required to support every point in the customer journey and ultimately deliver the best possible customer experience to increase loyalty and revenue. So how can organizations most effectively manage their data quality?

While content management systems (CMS) can play a role in this process, they can't solve the data-quality issue by themselves. A common challenge in organizations in their content management initiatives is the inability to obtain a complete trusted view of the content. To get started on the data-quality journey, consider this five-step process:

1. Don't view poor data quality as a disease. Instead, it is often a symptom of broken processes. Using data-quality solutions to fix data without addressing changes in a CMS will yield limited results. CMS users will find a work-around and create other data-quality issues. Balance new data-quality services with user experience testing to stem any business processes that are causing data-quality issues.

2. Be specific about bad data's impact on business effectiveness. Business stakeholders have enough of data-quality frustrations. Often, they will describe poor data as "missing," "inaccurate," or "duplicate" data. Step beyond these adjectives to find out why these data-quality issues affect business processes and engagement with customers. These stories provide the foundation for business cases, highlight what data to focus on, and show how to prioritize data-quality efforts.

3. Scope the data-quality problem. Many data-quality programs begin with a broad profiling of data conditions. Get ahead of bottom-up approaches that are disconnected from CMS processes. Assess data conditions in the context of business processes to determine the size of the issue in terms of bad data and its impact at each decision point or step in a business process. This links data closely to business-process efficiency and effectiveness, often measured through key performance indicators in operations and at executive levels.

4. Pick the business process to support. For every business process supported by CMS, different data and customer views can be created and used. Use the scoping analysis to educate CMS stakeholders on business processes most affected and the dependencies between processes on commonly used data. Include business executives in the discussion as a way to get commitment and a decision on where to start.

5. Define recognizable success by improving data quality. Data-quality efforts are a key component of data governance that should be treated as a sustainable program, not a technology project. The goal is always to achieve better business outcomes. Identify qualitative and quantitative factors that demonstrate business success and operational success. Take a snapshot of today's CMS and data-quality conditions and continuously monitor and assess them over time. This will validate efforts as effective and create a platform to expand data-quality programs and maintain ongoing support from business stakeholders and executives.

Galaxy Consulting has over 16 years experience helping organizations to make the best use of their data and improve it. Please contact us today for a free consultation!

Saturday, January 9, 2016

Personalization in Content Management

Content personalization in content management makes your users' experience more rewarding. Content personalization targets specific content to specific people. One simple example is showing code samples to developers and whitepapers to business users.

Segment Your Users

The first step to delivering a personalized customer experience is to segment your visitors so you can present them with what’s most relevant to them.

Any good personalization strategy starts with a fundamental understanding of your customer’s behavior, needs and goals. Upfront research goes a long way to building out the personas and having the insight from which to develop an approach to personalization. This may already be gathered through ongoing customer insight or voice of the customer programs, or be more ad hoc and project based. Regardless of the approach, be sure that any approach to personalization is grounded in a solid understanding of your users.

The next step in the process is to define the audience goals and objectives so you can know if the personalization efforts are successful. These may include top-line key performance indicators such as conversion rate or online sales, or be more specific to the personalization scenarios (i.e. landing page bounce rate). Try to be specific as possible and ensure that your measures of success directly relate to the areas of focus for your personalization efforts impact.

Personalize Your Content

In order to provide personalized content, it is necessary to determine which content is most effective for each audience segment. This content mapping process can be done alongside the audience segmentation model to ensure you have the right content for the right user at the right stage. If we use the business users and developers example from above, we can personalize the home page for the developers segment to talk about things related to the technology and how it can be extended while we serve business users with information related to how they can achieve their goals using this solution.

The biggest mistake organizations make with personalization is thinking too big and getting overwhelmed before they even start. It is exhausting to even start thinking about how to deliver the right message to the right person at every single interaction. Starting with a few specific personalization scenarios can help you more rapidly adopt the processes and technology and see what works on a small scale before expanding.

Here are a few example rules-based scenarios for an insurance company:
  • If a user in a specific region of the United States visits the site, show them regionally specific rates and agent information.
  • If a user has shown a specific interest in a vehicle, show images and offers that include that vehicle.
  • If a user is an existing customer (as identified through specific site actions or e-mail campaigns) feature tools and content that help them maintain their relationship with you.
  • If a user has already subscribed to the newsletter, replace the subscribe to newsletter call-out with a different offer or high value piece of content.
As you begin to think about the overall customer journey and digital experience, this list of scenarios is going to be far more detailed. However, it should not be more complicated than is necessary to accomplish the organizational goal of making it easier for audience segments to achieve their objectives while having the best possible user experience.

The process of content mapping and scenario planning will inevitably surface holes in the inventory of your existing content. Obviously, they will need to be filled. This will require some combination of recreating existing content for different audiences in addition to generating some which is completely new. Not to mention the ongoing process of updating and managing these content variations based on what’s working and what’s not.

Personalization in CMS

It would help to develop a content model and taxonomy for your CMS that is aligned to your audience segmentation approach. By tagging content appropriately you can often automate many areas of personalization. For example, display all white papers from a specific vertical industry.

Regardless of what tool is used to manage all of this complexity, it will require custom configuration. Some systems are naturally more user friendly than others but none of them come out of the box knowing your audience segments, content mapping, and scenarios. All of this information, once determined and defined, will need to be entered to the system.

Rules-based configuration is the most common type of work you’ll do with a CMS which is literally going through a series of "If, Then" statements to tell the CMS what content to show to what users. It’s important to have someone inside your organization or agency partner that owns the product strategy for personalization and can ensure it is consistently applied and within the best practices for that specific platform.

Sitefinity content management system has a simple interface for defining segments through various criteria such as where the visitor came from, what they searched for, their location, duration of their visit, etc. You can define custom criteria and have any combination of AND/OR criteria to define your segments.

Testing Your Personalization

Once your audience and content plans are sorted out and the technology is configured, it is time to test the experience from the perspective of each segment and scenarios within segments. You should test each variation on multiple browsers and mobile devices.

Some CMS allow to impersonate to test your results. For example, Sitefinity allows you to impersonate any segment and preview the customer experience on any device with the help of the mobile device emulators. This way you can be sure how your website looks like for every audience on any device.

Measure the Results

After you’ve segmented your audiences, personalized their experience and checked how your website/portal/CMS is presented for different audiences on different devices you should see the results of your work. They can be measured by the conversions and other website KPIs for the different segments compared to the default presentation for non-segmented visitors or to the KPIs prior to the personalization. Measuring will help you iterate and improve the results further.

Going forward it will be possible to revise previous assumptions with new information which is substantially more valid. Using the built-in analytics within your CMS or third party analytics, you’ll be able to watch how each segment interacts with the personalized content and if it was effective.

Galaxy Consulting successfully implemented content personalization for few clients. We can do the same for you. Contact us today for a free consultation.

Thursday, April 16, 2015

Converting Knowledge Into Content

Many of us have grown accustomed to referring to our work email accounts to find that bit of information that we received from one colleague or another. Now you discover you need that information quickly to finish a project.

Where is it? If you have faced this similar situation, it means that the amount of data and its applications have grown more complex. It also likely means that you and your organization are too loosely exchanging important information and have lazy knowledge management practices in place. This is not meant to be insulting, of course. It is simply a way to understand how to improve the process.

As mentioned in previous blog posts, big data has come to encapsulate the work we do now. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a place to cleanly and robustly organize all of the information that we come across. Well, content and knowledge management policies and programs will help you to achieve this. Read on to learn how.

Where is knowledge?

Knowledge is everywhere. In your business or organization, it is likely fostered through learning and growing and experiencing the flow of the market and the culture. Each member, employee, manager, stakeholder and so forth has a different level of that experience, giving each of them unique knowledge. That knowledge is usually transferred through the relationships among staff via verbal exchange and electronic (email, memos, research notes, etc.) and hard (paper documents) means.

This is where our knowledge lives. But as it lives in the minds of the personnel and in fragmented pieces in various formats, how easily are organizations able to attain that knowledge and deploy it efficiently to achieve goals? It must be converted, therefore, into unified content and implemented with policies, procedures and strategies. So how do we do this?

Identify knowledge and outline a plan for documentation

Now that we know where our knowledge lives, we must formulate some type of plan to extract this information. At each layer, the process may be different. It might depend on your industry, your culture and things of this nature. In any case, the main point is to identify the information, record it and put it somewhere, preferably into a centralized system that makes use of taxonomy (see blog posts on taxonomy).

At some stage, this may require you to hire a technical writer or some other documentation specialist that can interview subject matter experts in your organization to get the detailed information that will serve as your organizations knowledge base. This person can identify with processes, components, procedures, policies, records, archived data, intellectual property, financial data, secure data and a broad range of other information that must live in an environment where the appropriate members or users can access it later.

In terms of legal matters or legal information, many regulations have information handling requirements that are rigid and may require that you have certain pieces of critical information readily available to audit. Knowledge management and content management are more important in this scenario than ever. Information audits can be done to sift through organizations’ data including email, memos and other documents to make sense and make use of them.

This process of making an audit of information and knowledge is an important first step, but the next step is just as important. You must now organize the information that you have so that it can be easily found by the right people.

Centralizing your converted knowledge and content

Documents stored as files in a simple network drive will no longer suffice as the volume and complexity increases. It is also a security problem. In the cloud environment, there are backups and options to monitor and distribute storage and speed. This makes converting knowledge into content easier when a content management system is deployed to quickly and efficiently handle all of that incoming information.

The type of content management system your organization will or should deploy depends very much on how the information will be used. It might turn out that you don’t use just one CMS. You might end up using multiple CMS options or configurations for different types of content or information. Of course sensitive information and information meant for the public should be handled differently and therefore should be managed differently.

Popular newsfeed or blog platforms include Drupal and Joomla. Oracle handles various IT and other types of content systems. There are systems like SharePoint that help users collaborate on word processing, spreadsheets, charts, presentations and other kinds of documents. There are hubs where users can go to find or share information with other colleagues within the company or organization.

Of course it is always important to take some time to think about security and access privileges and develop information handling policies and procedures within the company.

Make content searchable and organized

After the information has been properly disseminated and you found the right vendor to store and manage that content, you can begin the critical process of organizing it. Usually, within a content management system, we talk about taxonomy. Taxonomy is the process of categorizing or “tagging” content to make it searchable and displayed properly in results or views for the user. Tagging content within a content management system is an integral part of enabling the user, whoever that might be, to quickly locate bits and pieces or entire batches or wholes of information quickly and efficiently.

You must ultimately decide how to organize content in terms of how it will be used. Web content for the public, for example, may need to be audited for its SEO quality (how easily can it be found by search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL, etc.). Your internal search systems, glossaries, thesauruses, style guides, policies, manuals and so forth will only be as good as their databases and program functionality as defined by the organization. Try to audit these systems for usability and continually try to improve the way information, both simple and complex, should be handled by internal systems.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

508 Compliance and Content Management

Section 508 compliance seems tricky and confusing, but its implementation on content management systems is vital for many organizations. According to the United States Census Bureau, about one in five Americans are impaired with some sort of disability. That is a rather large number of people that you do not want to ignore.

All federal and state agencies of the U.S. government are required to meet section 508 standards for accessibility. This law was established in 1998 to require that all technology used by the federal government to be accessible to those with disabilities. This includes those with visual, audible, physical or cognitive impairment.

Assistive Technology

Those with disabilities often use assistive technology. This would include things like screen readers for the visually impaired user. Jaws and Microsoft Narrator are a couple of popular software titles that are used for these purposes.

The Standards of 508 Section

There were 16 standards developed to make information and technology accessible to users with disabilities. These standards are the core requirements to making your content section 508 compliant with the federal government. There is no one automated solution that will magically make your site compliant, unfortunately.

These days, it is still a mix of manual and automated processes that drive a site’s compliance. Below are the 16 standards. Sites must be accessible by keyboard only (without a mouse). All screens should be readable by screen readers that can also display alt tags and descriptions of images. Closed captioning should be available (or transcripts of audio/video). Online forms should be able to completed using assistive technology (or only the keyboard).

Good Tips for Usability

Good technology applies great user experience, user interaction and design principles. This is often referred to as UX/UI in the creative and IT industries. The two terms evolved from the guidance involved in usability principles, an area of expertise that has grown over several decades.

Good usability means the user is able to quickly perform a task with little to no difficulty. This often involves employing sensible and logical navigation, understandable required action items, well defined terms, clean design and smooth workflows. There are other options to consider that vary from project to project, but these are the most basic caveats to understand when dealing with usability as it pertains to section 508 compliance.

Software and Technology Function Essentials for Section 508

The software and technology fundamentals here are designed to make computing life a bit easier for those with a disability. Your CMS should follow these guidelines and tips. Remember that all things should be executable from the computer keyboard, without a mouse. Some people can’t use a mouse. This should include shortcuts, object/image manipulation and dropdown list operation to name a few on the computer keyboard side. StickyKeys, FilterKeys, MouseKeys and High Contrast are some useful functions for this.

Your organization should also maintain a well-defined on-screen solution for focusing. An indicator that moves with the other interface elements is the preferred method for your CMS. Assistive technology should help with focus controls.

Web browsing comes natural to most of us that can use all five senses, but someone with impairment will have trouble. That is why it is important to have sufficient information about the user interface, such as identity, operation and state of the elements, available to the assistive technology. An image that represents a program element (icons) should also display text to define that process. Meaning should also be consistent with icons or bitmap images that are used to define elements of an application.

Textual information should be provided through the operating system’s (OS) functionality for text display. Text content, text input caret location and text attributes are the minimum textual information that should be displayed in the CMS.

Display options also need to be tweaked for this with vision impairment. For example, applications should never override a user’s selected contrast levels or color selections on the screen. Display functions should accommodate those with a disability. When there is animation, it should also be available to users as non-animated content or information. The user should also be able to choose the presentation mode of this content prior to viewing or consuming it.

Organization is also key for some. For instance, for section 508 compliance in the CMS, it is important to label items clearly so they may be easily understood. Color coding or highlighting items should not be the sole way to handle the process of conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response or distinguishing a visual element. A large range of color and contrast items also helps users stay organized with large loads of information that may need to be categorized and organized in a certain fashion within folders, directories, etc.

There are also some key elements to avoid. One good example is blinking or flashing elements. Not only can they be annoying and distracting, but they can also be problematic for the end user. The frequency should be somewhere between 2 Hz and 55 Hz.

Assistive technology should also be available to users who are filling out digital forms. It should be able to assist with accessing information, modifying information and submitting information.

Contextual information is also very important. Users with all five senses may take certain elements for granted, but these items should be accessible to those with disabilities too. Items in color should also be available without it, like markup or context clues for the user. Documents should be readable without a style sheet. Redundant text links should be there for each active region of a server-side image map (replacement of image elements with text elements). Table data should be clearly defined, including row or column headers. Even frames should be clearly defined as an element.

There are many other standards and compliance rules of thumb to follow. It is best to consult with an expert on maintaining section 508 compliance.