Case Study – Immersion Corporation - SharePoint Deployment

In the "Case Studies" series of my posts, I will describe the projects that I worked on and lessons learned from them. In this post, I am going to describe the project of SharePoint deployment in the Immersion Corporation.

Immersion Corporation is an electronics company specializing in haptics. The company’s content was stored in multiple shared network drives, wiki systems, CVS systems, and personal computers. In addition, documents in hard format are being used because they are not available in electronic format. There is no unified place for storing and accessing content.

Spreading out content in multiple locations made it difficult to find, re-use, and update. This also discouraged further adding of the new content and thus created areas where no documentation existed and the knowledge instead of being shared was being stored in personal computers. Storing the content in personal computers presented a risk of it being lost because it was not backed-up.

Existing content storage systems did not meet users’ requirements. The existing content was not categorized optimally and therefore the browsing function was inefficient. There was no search mechanism to search shared network drives.

Wiki and CVS systems search function was ineffective because of either wrong metadata or its lack. All current content storage systems did not have version control and audit trails necessary to control documents changes. There were no workflows in these systems. It was not possible to set up optimal security permissions in these systems.

There was a lot of obsolete content because no content owners have been formally identified and no retention schedule has been set up. In addition current storage systems did not have functions that would flag the obsolete content.

Collaborative work on the documents and projects was accomplished by sending documents as an email attachment which was inefficient and time consuming. There were no functions for project management.

I performed the users study. I identified stakeholders within each Immersion team and created the questionnaire for collecting teams’ requirements for a content management system and the usability issues. I held meetings with all teams’ stakeholders, managers and individual contributors. In some cases, I held few meetings were with one team.

Since Immersion used Agile software for the document control purpose, CRM for its customers management, Oracle system for financial operations, I also held meetings with Agile and CRM stakeholders and users. During these meetings I asked team members about their existing methods of finding the information and collaborating on documents and projects.

All users unanimously stated that:

• the information was spread out among few places and that it should be in one place; 
• it was very difficult and took a long time to find the information; 
• users had to ask somebody where the information was if they could not find it; if this somebody was not available, they would either try to re-create the information or would give up and try to work without the information; 
• it would have been very helpful and made their job easier to have a content management system to manage documents and records and collaborate on projects and documents; 
• the system for managing documents should have optimal browse and search functions, version control, audit trails, workflows, and optimal security permissions; 
• content should be organized and consistent in its structure; 
• the system should have high-relevance search; obsolete documents are present and are not being updated and there are areas where no documents exist; 
• the content management system should be administered by a content manager to oversee the quality of the content and metadata, the content organization, and the system content functions.

Since the company has already acquired SharePoint, during these meetings I gave teams an overview of SharePoint features and benefits and the overview of SharePoint itself. I asked teams if they would use the system. Each team expressed an interest in using SharePoint as the tool for document management, records management, project management, collaboration, and business solutions. All teams agreed that SharePoint would make them more efficient and productive.

A representative within each team was identified to be the primary contact between their team and myself, and for the purpose of getting the feedback from their teams, collecting teams’ requirements, and determining usability issues. The questionnaire for collecting teams’ requirements for SharePoint and the usability study was distributed to teams. Responses to the questionnaire were submitted to me which along with meetings findings served as the base for the functional requirements for the CMS deployment.

Since teams expressed interest in using SharePoint, I recommended to the management to proceed with its deployment. The project was approved. I created functional requirements which were submitted to IT. I have reviewed the document with the IT staff so that we would be in agreement about functional requirements and users’ needs.

IT staff has brought in a SharePoint architect to help to install SharePoint hardware and the architecture. SharePoint was installed. After it was installed, Immersion IT and I started working on setting up information architecture, taxonomy, metadata, content functions, and search.

Based on stakeholders’ feedback, I defined and created the information architecture, taxonomy, metadata, and content types. A decision was made on how SharePoint would integrate with Agile software, Oracle system, CRM, etc. as well on defining document types that would be uploaded into each system.

Then I created sites, libraries, and lists. Metadata, workflows, and information management policies were set up for each content type. I have created advanced search and configured metadata for it. IT has configured the metadata and the crawler on the server level. IT has also set up all applications functions on the server.

Document owners for each document were identified and entered into metadata. Retention schedule was identified for each content type and three-state workflow was set up to flag the content that would reach an expiration date.

Upon the reaching the expiration date of a document, a document owner and me would get an email-alert from the system that this has reached an expiration date. This alert would allow the content administrator, in this case me, to contact the document owner for the decision on what should be done with this document: review and update, move to an archive, or delete.

Based on department managers’ decision, security permissions for documents were set up. The system was set up for content approval before it is published which provided assurance that documents are uploaded in the correct place and the correct metadata is populated. I was approving content before it was published. Procedures for information governance were defined and supported by the company management.

User acceptance testing of the system was performed. Users were satisfied with the system set up and functions and it was deployed. Information governance was set up from the very beginning. Group and individual training was conducted on ongoing basis.

After the SharePoint was deployed, users started uploading their documents into it. The plan was created for migrating content from network drives and other systems into SharePoint.

The project was a success. Company management and users were very cooperative in helping to make this project a success.

SharePoint deployment helped to increase efficiency and productivity and thus saved Immersion cost because employees did not waste any time on searching for documents or recreating documents that already exist. The system later was adapted by multiple users for multiple purposes.

Lessons learned

1. User-centered design is paramount to the project success. When you design and build the system based on users’ requirements, they are going to use it. Users have the sense of ownership of the system which provides excellent starting point. They know that the system you are building will be what they need. 
2. Top-down support is critical for the project success. Management support is a huge factor in employees' encouragement to use the system and in setting up and enforcing procedures for information governance. 
3. Assurance of users from the very beginning that they will not be left alone with the system provided their cooperation. 
4. User acceptance testing helped to encourage employees to start using the system. When they participate in this process, this gives them the feeling of ownership of the system. 
5. Ongoing training after the system deployment made user adoption smooth.

User Adoption Strategies

Here is the situation. Your documents are stored on your network drives and you are contemplating to implement a content management initiative. At the same time you have an apprehension about how your users will adopt to your content management system (CMS).

Well, your apprehension is very much valid. User adoption task is not to be taken lightly. So, what do you do?

Good news is that it is possible to have your users to adopt to your content management systems. What are the strategies do accomplish user adoption? Let's look at them.

1. Point out benefits and usefulness – how it is better than what a user is doing now before you even started working on your deployment. This would create a good start to your project. It would prepare your users that the change is coming. The change is difficult to accept and so the earlier you start preparing for it, the easier it will be for you to implement it.

2. Collect user requirements and create use cases. Select your system and deploy it based on these requirements and use cases. I preach user-centered design. User-centered design is a cornerstone of user adoption. Never underestimate user-centered design. You deploy the system for users, make it they way they need it as much as possible.

3. Provide assurance of training and assistance from the beginning of your project. Let your users have confidence in you from the very beginning that they are not going to be left alone when the system is in place.

4. Make everything very easy and very intuitive.

5. User acceptance testing is paramount to user adoption.

6. Provide training early on.

7. Provide documentation describing in detail how the system works, what are the new procedures, etc.

8. Demonstrate that it is easy and consistent with what the user already knows or already does.

9. Let the user try it in safe, verifiable increments. Do not ask the user to make immediate switch from his accustomed way of work to your new system. Do it gradually.

10. Accept that user adoption is not a single event or decision on the part of a user. It happens in phases, which are affected by the frequency of product use. Use progressive user adoption strategy.

11. A progressive user adoption strategy consciously moves a user to new levels of product acceptance over time, through an orchestrated sequence of exposures to the product’s functionality.

The overall strategy for progressive user adoption starts with the solid foundation of a satisfying user experience of a product’s core functionality, then builds a logical progression from that base by identifying moments of opportunity and appropriate interventions.

12. Consider the following steps.

Identify core functionality. Core functionality is the basic functionality that, if not achieved, will guarantee the user will reject the product.

Make the core functionality bulletproof from a usability perspective. From a product design perspective, initially, the main goal should be to optimize the user experience that touches the core functionality.

The unspoken rule here is this: "Don’t break the core functionality as you add features". Promoting or adding advanced features can also add real or perceived complexity, disrupt compatibility with users’ established routines, and increase a sense of risk. All three of these consequences can stop adoption.

Identify sequences that go from core functions to advanced functions. Identify the next layers of features and functionality that could represent logical steps for users to take over time, once they have increased familiarity with the product.

Construct product interventions to move users to advanced functionality. An important goal of this step is to identify moments of opportunity that indicate readiness on a user’s part to advance to a new level of functionality. You must make it easy for a user to ignore the intervention.

What is of tantamount importance is that the intervention not be overly intrusive, impacting the core functionality. By all means, make it noticeable but don’t force users to change their habitual task flows in order to reject the option or suggestion. Not disrupting the core user experience is a key requirement for those interventions.

I will give you two examples of a progressive adoption strategy.

Banking industry has created online banking and invited us to use it. It was very much optional. Then they said that we can choose between paper statements and electronic statements. And then they said that there will be no more paper statements any longer and that we must go online to see our statements. So, the online banking has now become mandatory.

Similar example can be used in content management. When you have a CMS in place, announce to your users that they can choose where they can store their documents - either on network drives or in your CMS. But point out benefits of your CMS as compared to network drives. In your next step, announce to your users that certain types of documents must now be stored in your CMS. Provide continuous training and one-to-one assistance if necessary.

In the following step, announce to them that you are closing network drives and that all documents must now be stored in your CMS. After they got used to basic documents uploading into your CMS, you can introduce other features of your CMS, like Wikis, blogs, personalized sites, etc.

Do You Really Need a Content Strategy?

The answer is Yes.

You have many discussions about content activities, methodologies, and deliverables. But if you don’t have a conceptual framework for those activities, you are not practicing content strategy.

It is impossible to design a great user experience for bad content. If you are passionate about creating better user experiences, you can't help but care about delivering useful, usable, engaging content.

Content strategy is not a single solution or deliverable. It is a process and a mindset. If you approach your content management initiative knowing that it will constantly evolve, and that you are guiding its evolution, then you are practicing content strategy.

Content strategy evaluates business and customer needs and provides strategic direction on how improved content and content processes can help to achieve specific objectives. It’s a continual process of improvement.

Content strategy requires more time and resources upfront, but your content management initiative is much more likely to succeed with a solid strategy supporting it. Content strategy activities are scalable and can be modified to fit any budget. You don’t necessarily need a large, formal content strategy. You just need to take the time to think things through and determine your goals, resourcing, workflow, and success metrics, which can save you from the high cost of ineffective content.

You can’t expect to get where you want to go if you don’t know where that is, what you need to do to get there, or how to even recognize it if you stumble across it.

Content strategy starts with the big picture and then drills down to a granular level that can be implemented and measured. It encompasses everything that impacts content, including workflow and governance.

The content-strategy process is not so much circular as it is spiral, starting at the big vision and then repeating at each stage as you drill down to more details. To make matters worse (or more fun!), content strategies, tactics, processes, and even specific pieces of content are often shared between projects, products and business units.

A good content strategy looks across organizational silos and integrates the different business needs, goals, and tactics. It makes sure that the end product promotes consistent, effective and efficient user experiences and business processes.

Reasons for developing a content strategy:

1. Better Content

Developing a content strategy will enable you to create content that will be more engaging. A content strategy will allow you to clearly identify the elements that will add more value and create more interesting experiences for your users over time.

2. Consistency in Messaging

This is traditionally done within a marketing strategy, but the problem is that content extends beyond the marketing department. Within a content strategy you can outline guidelines,standards, quality control processes, branding, voice tone and messaging, so that anyone creating content of any format has some rules for the road.

3. Optimization

A content strategy will help you optimize your content. When developing content, it is critical to identify user personas, and create individual content paths for each of them (all fitting into one content strategy). Since each has their own questions, concerns and interests, you’ll need to develop content around these specific characteristics. By doing so, you will optimize for search by using the right keywords, and your content will be more relevant to those searching for it. The reason you need to consider this within your entire content strategy is because your content lives in various locations; your website, social networks, press, etc.

4. Limitation of Friction

A content strategy will help you to avoid friction in your content management system. You want to facilitate an engaging environment, so if there are disconnects between your information architecture or formats, you will create discomfort and stress for your users. You want to make sure their experience is easy. This ease will come from clearly defined goals, research, content paths, content processes, and the tactics that have been identified by the content strategy. This will also ensure that everyone responsible for content creation is on the same page, even if they are not on the same team or in the same department.

5. Improve efficiency

There are many ways to re-use content, like posting a blog post into a web site or a series of documents, or maybe an ebook. The idea is that you repurpose content to be consumed in various way, so you can always reach who you want while staying relevant and adding value. A content strategy outlines the thematic content and how it can be used throughout the year so you are not constantly trying to reinvent the wheel. It will help you organize an inventory and plan for releasing various kinds of content throughout the year, as well as streamline the internal processes needed to achieve the content goals.

Things to think about when developing your strategy:

There are many elements you will need to consider. You will need to know what content you have, what content you will need, who your users are, how they like to consume information, and who will be responsible for what. All of these things will be important in developing a realistic strategy for your content.

Here is a brief list of questions to ask:

• What content do we have? 
• Who are the content sources? 
• What does the current content creation process look like? 
• What are the content channels? External web: website, social media, partner sites, email, webinars. Internal: intranets, wikis, training sessions, seminars. Traditional: PR, print, events, outdoor, direct mail. The reasoning behind a content strategy is to make informed recommendations about the creation, delivery and governance of content. 

 Your content strategy should outline the following:

• current content and what you will need;
• how content should be structured in various formats Long-term plan–starting point and ending point What will this mean in terms of business objectives?

With the current proliferation of social media, and web based tools, including your web site, it is very important to have a content strategy. It is important that everyone is on the same page. This is difficult for most companies, but the development of a strategy and plan will only help things run smoothly, and actually have the business impact you are looking to achieve.

Content Management Systems Reviews - TeamSite

In my previous posts, I described component content management. A component content management system (CCMS) is used for managing component content.

A component content management system (CCMS) is a content management system that manages content at a granular or component level rather than at the document level. There are few of them in today's market including Interwoven, Documentum, AuthorIT, DocZone, Vasont, SiberLogic, Trisoft, Astoria, Tridion. In this my post, I am going to describe Interwoven.

This system is made by Interwoven company which was purchased by Autonomy which in turn was purchased by HP. Autonomy TeamSite is a market-leading content management system for content authoring, site design and layout, content targeting, advanced analytics, workflows, and archiving.

Interwoven TeamSite® is the industry’s most advanced Web Content Management System. For enterprises, TeamSite powers corporate and ecommerce web sites, employee intranets, support portals, marketing microsites, and extranets as well as e-mail, wireless, and print.

Product Architecture

TeamSite is built on a high-performance repository that stores and manages all asset types, including file-system content, database content, XML, digital and brand assets, media files, documents, and application code.

TeamSite supports multi-channel content strategy. By exposing and re-purposing content across multiple customer, partner, and employee touchpoints, companies get more value from their investments in content development and deliver more consistent messages.

Features

TeamSite provides a set of application services to manage content and automate business processes, including:

• flexible, easy to manage workflows for automating critical business processes; 
• library services for creating, browsing, searching, transforming, and viewing assets; 
• parallel development support; 
• templating capabilities; 
• version control, access control, and search services; 
• metadata management services; 
• archival services; 
• multi-stage deployment and provisioning; 
• taxonomy and navigation management.

Multi-site management and archiving

TeamSite has branching and collaborative development model. This approach enables organizations to manage multiple sites —corporate sites, micro-sites,intranets, extranets, support sites, portal, or multi-channel publishing initiatives — all from the same infrastructure. TeamSite maintains archived copies of individual assets, as well as snapshots of whole sites, so users can compare, track, or roll back individual assets or applications, site sections, whole Websites or documents.

Parallel, collaborative content development

TeamSite’s extensive parallel development capabilities are ideal for companies who require frequent changes to multiple sites, want to retain control, and deliver high quality experiences. With parallel development, separate teams can work independently on different projects without additional software or hardware costs. Collaboration capabilities allow users to simultaneously make changes to content, data, and code—on the same site. Users visually review and merge changes, then test the entire Website as if it were live.

Administration and security

TeamSite has robust security with granular permission management. Sophisticated roles and rules features make it easy for non-technical business users to manage multiple initiatives and sites within specific, predefined boundaries. Using TeamSite to delegate administration and contribution reduces demand for resources and enables companies to get accurate, relevant content to the web faster.

Ease-of-use

Designed for all types of users, TeamSite provides the industry’s most intuitive, simple, and customizable user experience. The platform is easy enough to use for business professionals and other non-technical content contributors, yet powerful enough for project managers, site designers, developers, and administrators.

TeamSite includes:

ContentCenter Standard — a clear, easy portal-like interface with wizard-driven, point-and-click content contribution features for non-technical business users; interacts with business content, workflows, and forms.

ContentCenter Professional — an advanced interface for power users, project managers, and administrators, who can perform the most advanced content management with just a few clicks. Project managers can quickly and easily track and manage the content publishing lifecycle. Administrators can take advantage of in-context administrative functions to set up environments and monitor content contribution.

FormsPublisher — provides for structured, form-based content authoring by nontechnical business users. FormsPublisher is most often used by common or frequent content contributors as an interface for authoring such content types as press releases, announcements, or events as well as content that is likely to be repurposed across multiple channels (such as Web, wireless, and print) and/or multiple sites.

SitePublisher — a WYSIWYG content contribution interface with a reusable component based architecture enables powerful drag-and-drop assembly for efficient page management as well as in-context editing for point and click page editing. “Smart” templates, out-ofthe-box site functionality, and point and click navigation management also help organizations quickly create dynamic web sites, and then easily customize their presentation, content, and functionality to meet changing business needs.

Point-and-click customization

By easily making customizations directly on the page, with point-and-click simplicity, page owners can quickly modify content and its look and feel to fit changing business requirements.

In-context review and edit

Authorized team members can easily modify content in the context of any Web page they are browsing—without having to go to a separate content management interface.

Portal Integration

Interwoven includes connectors for leading enterprise portal applications including SAP, BEA, and IBM. The connectors are designed to deliver content, code, and metadata to portal repositories and enable business users to manage content directly from within the portal interface. Customers can also integrate TeamSite with leading enterprise applications software from vendors, including Siebel, Peoplesoft, and Oracle.

Platform extensions

TeamSite platform extensions ensure seamless integration across the enterprise. TeamSite is fully compatible with all is fully compatible with all Interwoven Web solutions, including:

Interwoven LiveSite - a content delivery engine, provides delivery of dynamic, targeted, and interactive.

Interwoven ReportCenter - allows site administrators to track and report all content management and publishing activities.

Interwoven Content Transformation Services - allow business users to automatically transform documents into PDFs and HTML—prior to publishing.

Interwoven MediaBin Digital Asset Management Server - for rich media asset management.

Interwoven WorkSite Collaborative Document Management Server - for document security, storage, collaboration, and retention.

Interwoven MetaTagger - content intelligence services for automated metadata extraction and recommendation.

Interwoven OpenDeploy - content distribution and publishing services - for multi-stage content and code provisioning.

Key Features

Key Feature	Description
Advanced information management	Provides extensive search services so people find content quickly; associates content with editing, testing, reuse, auditing, and publication processes.
Reusable component based architecture	Enables rapid site rollout with reuse of content and site functionality for creating and managing Web pages and entire sites without additional coding.
Drag-and-drop layout	Layout sites, templates, and pages by dropping components onto pages, dragging them into place, and making powerful customizations with a point and click interface.
Navigation management Inheritable templates	Easily manage site navigation through a drag and drop, point and click interface
Metadata management services	Sophisticated templates automatically distribute updates and permissions across sites
Visual annotate	Supports easy commenting and page mark-up directly from browser
Visual publish	Empowers content contributors to access and edit content directly from within Web browser
E-mail interface	Supports in-line, actionable content management tasks such as approve, edit, tag, and preview, directly from Microsoft Outlook
Front Office	Enables content authoring, submission, and publishing directly from Microsoft Office
Administration User Interface (UI) Localization	Fully internationalization and localization of administrative UI for English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Traditional and Simplified Chinese—all from a single instance
Optimized workflow— with an easy, drag-and drop visual modeler	Extends a combination of flexible, rigid, or fully-customized creation, review, notification, and publishing processes, supporting quality controls and business process automation of multiple online and offline initiatives
XML object store	Manages XML content and varying object models for element-level collaboration, reuse, management, version control, and search
Security access control	Provides configurable asset locking model with SSL/LDAP, Microsoft Active Directory, and CA SiteMinder® support, and native operating system file and directory permissions support
Central control and delegated administration	Allows centralized control of the entire platform with flexible groups and roles-based delegated administration
Granular permissions	Simplifies control of activation, restriction and access rights for any role or user, with each function, folder, or asset within the system

Component Content Management

In my last post, I described how DITA is used in dynamic content management. I will continue the subject of dynamic content management in this post.

DITA was conceived as a model for improving reuse through topic-oriented modularization of content. Instead of creating new content or copying and pasting information which may or may not be current and authoritative, organizations manage a repository of content assets – or DITA topics – that can be centrally managed, maintained and reused across the enterprise. This helps to accelerate the creation and maintenance of documents and other deliverables and to ensure the quality and consistency of the content organizations publish.

Dynamic content management is also called component content management. It is also called single source publishing. DITA is its foundation. A component content management system (CCMS) is used for managing component content. A component content management system (CCMS) is a content management system that manages content at a granular or component level rather than at the document level. Examples of such systems are Interwoven, Documentum, AuthorIT, DocZone, Vasont, SiberLogic, Trisoft, Astoria, Tridion.

What exactly is a component? Each component represents a single topic, concept or asset (e.g., image, table, product description). Components can be as large as a chapter or as small as a definition or even a word. Components in multiple content assemblies can be viewed as components or as traditional documents. Reuse allows the core component to be edited and maintained in one place, and then be assembled into thousands of documents where it is needed.

Each component is only stored one time in the content management system, providing a single, trusted source of content. These components are then reused (rather than copied and pasted) within a document or across multiple documents. This ensures that content is consistent across the entire documentation set. Each component has its own lifecycle (owner, version, approval, use) and can be tracked individually or as part of an assembly.

Component Content Management can be regarded as an overall process for originating, managing, and publishing content right across the enterprise and to any output.

Component content management provides significant benefits and cost savings over traditional document authoring and maintenance methods. Some of these are:

• greater consistency and accuracy;
• reduced maintenance costs;
• reduced delivery costs;
• reduced translation costs.

And more specifically:

• Faster time to market because authors spend far less time creating and recreating the same content, reviewers spend less time reviewing, translators spend less time translating. Publishing to print, Help, and Web formats is fully automated. This is achieved by controlling standards, eliminating duplication, and effectively managing creation, localization, and publishing of content.
• Efficient use of resources by eliminating repetitive creation and maintenance, more of your resources can be devoted to improving the quality of the content and adding value to your documentation.
• Slashed translation costs: content is translated only once no matter how often it is reused. Translators only ever work on new or changed source content, so you don’t pay for them to handle unchanged text. Real projects have shown reductions in translation word count in excess of 30%.
• Improved quality and usability of content: through easy definition and enforcement of standards you can guarantee consistent documentation structure and formatting, increasing readability and usability. Using single-source content ensures 100% consistency wherever it appears.
• Improved workplace satisfaction: free authors from tedious, time-consuming tasks such as formatting and repetitive updates, so they can concentrate on creating and improving content. Reviewers gain by reviewing content only once, regardless of the number of end deliverables. Writers save 95% of the time they usually spend formatting content.
• Increased customer satisfaction: consistent, accurate documentation of all types means fewer calls to customer support, because you are providing the right information, at the right time, in the right format.

Generating content takes time and money. As such, content should be treated as the valuable business asset that it is. To get maximum value from your content, you should be able to do a number of things:

• You should be able to re-use content across documents without copying, so that you can write it once, and maintain it in a single place no matter how many times you have used it.
• You should be able to use content created for one purpose equally well in other contexts and for other purposes.
• You should be able to translate re-used content once and have it automatically reflected anywhere it is used.
• You should be able to publish to print, help, and web outputs without having to modify or make different versions of your content.

These measures provide the potential for increasing the quality and consistency of your documentation, for reducing the cost and time involved in producing it, and for gaining more value from every piece of content that you create.

In my future posts, I will describe component content management systems.

DITA and Dynamic Content Management

In my previous post on DITA, I mentioned that DITA, Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is an XML-based architecture for authoring, producing, and delivering information. In this post, I am going to describe more details about DITA and how it is used in content management.

At the heart of DITA, representing the generic building block of a topic-oriented information architecture, is an XML document type definition (DTD) called the topic DTD. The point of the XML-based Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) is to create modular technical documents that are easy to reuse with varied display and delivery mechanisms.

Main features of the DITA architecture

As the "Architecture" part of DITA's name suggests, DITA has unifying features that serve to organize and integrate information:

Topic orientation. The highest standard structure in DITA is the topic. Any higher structure than a topic is usually part of the processing context for a topic, such as a print-organizing structure or the navigation for a set of topics.

Reuse. A principal goal for DITA has been to reduce the practice of copying content from one place to another as a way of reusing content. Reuse within DITA occurs on two levels:

Topic reuse. Because of the non-nesting structure of topics, a topic can be reused in any topic-like context.

Content reuse. DITA provides each element with a conref attribute that can point to any other equivalent element in the same or any other topic.

Specialization. Any DITA element can be extended into a new element.

Topic specialization. Applied to topic structures, specialization is a natural way to extend the generic topic into new information types (or infotypes), which in turn can be extended into more specific instantiations of information structures. For example, a recipe, a material safety data sheet, and an encyclopedia article are all potential derivations from a common reference topic.

Domain specialization. Using the same specialization principle, the element vocabulary within a generic topic can be extended by introducing elements that reflect a particular information domain served by those topics. For example, a keyword can be extended as a unit of weight in a recipe, as a part name in a hardware reference, or as a variable in a programming reference.

Property-based processing. The DITA model provides metadata and attributes that can be used to associate or filter the content of DITA topics with applications such as content management systems, search engines, etc.

Extensive metadata to make topics easier to find. The DITA model for metadata supports the standard categories for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. In addition, the DITA metadata enables many different content management approaches to be applied to its content.

Universal properties. Most elements in the topic DTD contain a set of universal attributes that enable the elements to be used as selectors, filters, content referencing infrastructure, and multi-language support.

Taking advantage of existing tags and tools. Rather than being a radical departure from the familiar, DITA builds on well-accepted sets of tags and can be used with standard XML tools.

Leveraging popular language subsets. The core elements in DITA's topic DTD borrow from HTML and XHTML, using familiar element names like p, ol, ul, and dl within an HTML-like topic structure. In fact, DITA topics can be written, like HTML for rendering directly in a browser.

Leveraging popular and well-supported tools. The XML processing model is widely supported by a number of vendors and translates well to the design features of the XSLT and CSS stylesheet languages defined by the World Wide Web Consortium and supported in many transformation tools, editors, and browsers.

Typed topics are easily managed within content management systems as reusable, stand-alone units of information. For example, selected topics can be gathered, arranged, and processed within a delivery context to provide a variety of deliverables to varied audiences. These deliverables might be a booklet, a web site, a specification, etc.

At the center of these content management systems are fundamental XML technologies for creating modular content, managing it as discrete chunks, and publishing it in an organized fashion. These are the basic technologies for "one source, one output" applications, sometimes referred to as Singe Source Publishing (SSP) systems.

The innermost ring contains capabilities that are needed even when using a dedicated word processor or layout tool, including editing, rendering, and some limited content storage capabilities. In the middle ring are the technologies that enable single-sourcing content components for reuse in multiple outputs. They include a more robust content management environment, often with workflow management tools, as well as multi-channel formatting and delivery capabilities and structured editing tools. The outermost ring includes the technologies for smart content applications.

It is good to note that smart content solutions rely on structured editing, component management, and multi-channel delivery as foundational capabilities, augmented with content enrichment, topic component assembly, and social publishing capabilities across a distributed network.

Content Enrichment/Metadata Management: Once a descriptive metadata taxonomy is created or adopted, its use for content enrichment will depend on tools for analyzing and/or applying the metadata. These can be manual dialogs, automated scripts and crawlers, or a combination of approaches. Automated scripts can be created to interrogate the content to determine what it is about and to extract key information for use as metadata. Automated tools are efficient and scalable, but generally do not apply metadata with the same accuracy as manual processes. Manual processes, while ensuring better enrichment, are labor intensive and not scalable for large volumes of content. A combination of manual and automated processes and tools is the most likely approach in a smart content environment. Taxonomies may be extensible over time and can require administrative tools for editorial control and term management.

Component Discovery/Assembly: Once data has been enriched, tools for searching and selecting content based on the enrichment criteria will enable more precise discovery and access. Search mechanisms can use metadata to improve search results compared to full text searching. Information architects and content managers can use search to discover what content exists, and what still needs to be developed to proactively manage and monitor the content. These same discovery and search capabilities can be used to automatically create delivery maps and dynamically assemble content organized using them.

Distributed Collaboration/Social Publishing: Componentized information lends itself to a more granular update and maintenance process, enabling several users to simultaneously access topics that may appear in a single deliverable form to reduce schedules. Subject matter experts, both remote and local, may be included in review and content creation processes at key steps. Users of the information may want to "self-organize" the content of greatest interest to them, and even augment or comment upon specific topics. A distributed social publishing capability will enable a broader range of contributors to participate in the creation, review and updating of content in new ways.

Federated Content Management/Access: Smart content solutions can integrate content without duplicating it in multiple places, rather accessing it across the network in the original storage repository. This federated content approach requires the repositories to have integration capabilities to access content stored in other systems, platforms, and environments. A federated system architecture will rely on interoperability standards (such as CMIS), system agnostic expressions of data models (such as XML Schemas), and a robust network infrastructure (such as the Internet).

These capabilities address a broader range of business activity and therefore fulfill more business requirements than single-source content solutions. Assessing your ability to implement these capabilities is essential in evaluating your organizations readiness for a smart content solution.

Information Governance Uncovered

Content management is useless without information governance. In fact, it does not exist. You cannot successfully manage content if you don't have policies and procedures in place to govern it.

In my previous post on information governance, I mentioned that information governance is set of structures, policies, procedures, processes, and controls implemented to manage information at an enterprise level, supporting an organization's immediate and future regulatory, legal, risk, environmental and operational requirements. Let's look closely at these structures, policies, procedures, processes and controls.

Content Types

Before uploading content into your CMS, you need to determine what types of content you have now and/or will have in future. Knowing this will help you to set up the taxonomy and metadata accordingly and to make sure that your CMS contains documents that you would expect to find there. Uploading documents that are not included in your content types list, would create havoc in your CMS. If you have multiple systems in place such as document control systems, CRM, ERP, etc., you need to determine what documents each system will contain and what interactions these systems will have with each other.

Document Owners

You have a content management system (CMS) in place and you have uploaded your documents there. And you keep uploading them. At some point in time, you are going to have thousands of documents in your CMS. Well, they can't just stay there indefinitely without somebody taking some action about these documents such as update, move to the archive, delete, etc. In addition, when users look at these documents, they may have questions about content of these documents. Somebody has to own these documents. Each document should have a document owner. It could be a group name. The document owner should be entered into the document metadata. This will allow users and the CMS administrator to find owners of documents.

Retention Schedule

If you upload documents into your CMS and do nothing about them, the time will come when your search for documents will retrieve obsolete documents which will over-flood the system. In order to prevent this from happening, retention schedule needs to be put in place. Determine document types for your content. For each document type, determine the period of time, during which this document type is current and active.

For each document type, set up a workflow which would trigger an email to the administrator that this document type has reached an expiration date. This workflow is based on the expiration date of the document type. Upon receiving this email, the content administrator should contact the document owner who would make a decision whether this document needs to be reviewed and updated, moved to archive, or deleted. If the document is reviewed and updated, re-set the workflow for the next period of time.

Change Management and Control

When you set up taxonomy, metadata, naming conventions, systems functions, etc., they should not arbitrarily be changed. There should be a procedure in place for a change management. Changes like this, should go through a workflow and be approved. In addition, users feedback should be obtained.

Naming Conventions

For each document type, you need to establish naming conventions. Users should be able to have a very good idea what the document is about without opening it. This would save a lot of time for users.

Approval and Publishing Documents

Set up a workflow for content approval and publishing documents. Users upload documents and populate metadata. They may upload documents in a wrong place or enter wrong metadata. These errors would impact search and browse functions. The administrator should check to make sure that the document has been uploaded into the correct place and the correct metadata is entered. Errors should be corrected before the document is published.

Time for Check-out Documents

In a CMS environment, users need to check out documents if they need to edit them. They may check out documents and leave them checked out for a long time. While documents are checked out, other users can't edit them. Set up a policy with the time frame that users can have their documents checked out to them. Monitor checked out documents. If you see a checked-out document with expired check out time frame, contact the user and request that the document would be checked in. You can also check in the document yourself or discard the check out.

Permissions

Determine your users groups. For each document type, determine which permissions should your users groups have, e.g. read and write or read only. It is highly recommended that only CMS administrator has full permissions to the system. Users should not be allowed to change the system.

These are main and most important procedures. Depending on your specific requirements, you may have other procedures in place. Set them up from the very beginning of your CMS deployment and educate your users about them. Create these procedures with users feedback. When users provide their feedback to you, they will agree with these procedures and will follow them.

Enterprise Search

Enterprise search is the practice of identifying and enabling specific content across the entire organization to be indexed, searched, and displayed to authorized users.

How does Enterprise Search affect your organization? When individuals within your company are searching for documents, are they finding the correct and most current information? When customers visit your website, are they locating the products and services with ease? These are essential questions to make sure your company maximizes its profitability.

Business intelligence and enterprise search solutions allow both your employees and customers to locate the information they need to make the most informed decisions. Universal Enterprise Search is the key way in which companies organize their information and allow individuals to locate exactly what they are looking for.

Companies may have few managed content repositories. It could be few content management systems, knowledgebase applications, wiki applications, CRM, ERP, etc. They are usually isolated from one another. Companies also may have unmanaged content repositories such as network drives. These repositories grow fast thus resulting in disconnected enterprise knowledge assets.

In a situation like this, it would be a good idea to have a search tool that would allow users to search all these repositories at the same time. "Universal Search" term was born. Another term that was born is "Content Management Interoperability Services" (CMIS) which offers to connect some of those repositories. Companies are looking into Enterprise Search (ES) as a shortcut to their findability problems.

Enterprise search is not an alternative to ECM systems. Even though there are search applications that allow the search across different platforms, enterprise search alone is not a solution to the findability problem. While enterprise search provides great value, it does not mean that you can give up integrating your repositories or leave your content on network drives.

Whit Andrews, Gartner VP, distinguished analyst, and author of Gartner's 2009 "Magic Quadrant for Information Access Technology" report (Gartner includes enterprise search as a part of "Information Access Technology") stated that with having right enterprise search you can get search that will be very effective, but it isn't the same as 100% success. He also acknowledged that you cannot simply buy, install, and walk away from powerful ES systems. Both ES and ECM systems require diligence and governance.

Leslie Owens, a Forrester Research analyst, is also skeptical about the likelihood of an ES quick fix, although she too is a strong proponent of targeted search applications.

In addition, out-of-the-box search may get you part of the way to findability, but [it] generally works best when enhanced with supporting semantic information-such as controlled vocabularies.

Every content repository should have two access points - search and browse. Users are going to use the Search access point if they know exactly what they are looking for. They are going to enter keywords in the search field and retrieve results. If they retrieve too many results, the presence of metadata will allow them to limit the search to specific results.

If users don't know what they are looking for, they are going to browse the content to get some ideas of what is available in the content repository. At some point during browsing, they may switch to search.

Therefore having only search as one access points is not enough to ensure findability of content. Metadata and taxonomy are invaluable tools to ensure that search and browse access points work properly. Taxonomy that is intuitive would greatly help the browse access point. The successful taxonomy is the one that is not too deep and not too wide. The users should be able to get to content with as few clicks as possible and yet the list of documents should not be too long. Users are not going to scroll through long lists of documents.

Naming conventions are extremely important. If users can figure out the contents of a document from its name without opening it, it will greatly speed up the time the user will spend browsing for documents.

Having information governance in place will make sure that the content resides in the correct place, that is has correct metadata, and that the content follows procedures to keep it accurate and up-to-date.

So is it ECM or ES? The answer is both.

In my future posts, I will review search applications and will further address search strategy. I will also review few case studies in ECM and ES.

Consequences of GxP/GMP for Information Technology

In my last post, I described the GMP requirements for document control. In this post, I am going to describe the GMP requirements for information technology used in a GMP company.

For a drug to be produced in a GxP compliant manner, some specific information technology practices must be followed. Computer systems involved in the development, manufacture, and sale of regulated product must meet certain requirements such as:

• secure logging: each system activity must be registered, in particular what users of the system do, that relate to research, development and manufacturing. The logged information has to be secured appropriately so that it cannot be changed once logged, not even by an administrative user of the system;
• auditing: an IT system must be able to provide conclusive evidence in litigation cases, to reconstruct the decisions and potential mistakes that were made in developing or manufacturing a medical device, drug or other regulated product;
• keeping archives: relevant audit information must be kept for a set period. In certain countries, archives must be kept for several decades. Archived information is still subject to the same requirements, but its only purpose is to provided trusted evidence in litigation cases;
• accountability: Every piece of audited information must have a known author who has signed into the system using an electronic signature. No actions are performed by anonymous individuals;
• non-repudiation: audit information must be logged in a way that no user could say that the information is invalid, e.g. saying that someone could have tampered with the information. One way of assuring this is the use of digital signatures.

GMP guidelines require that software programs must be validated by adequate and documented testing. Validation is defined as the documented act of demonstrating that a procedure, process, and activity will consistently lead to the expected results. The software validation guideline states: “The software development process should be sufficiently well planned, controlled, and documented to detect and correct unexpected results from software changes."

To validate software, it must be:

• structured, documented, and evaluated as it is developed;
• checked to make sure that it meets specifications;
• adequately tested with the assigned hardware systems;
• operated under varied conditions by the intended operators or persons of like training to assure that it will perform consistently and correctly.

It is important to notice these requirements since a document management system is required to control documents, so this document management system must meet these requirements for information technology.

GxP/GMP and Document Control

In the regulated environment, the document control is the cornerstone of the quality system. It is so important that if an external audit identifies deficiencies in the document control system, the entire organization can be shut down.

In my last post, I talked about the connection between ISO 9001 and document control. ISO 9001 is one example of the regulated environment. It is usually used in engineering types of companies. In food, drugs, medical devices, and cosmetics industries, GxP/GMP regulations are used. Today, I am going to talk about the connection between GxP/GMP and document control.

GxP is a general term for Good Practice quality guidelines and regulations. The titles of these good practice guidelines usually begin with "Good" and end in "Practice", with the specific practice descriptor in between. GxP represents the abbreviations of these titles, where x (a common symbol for a variable) represents the specific descriptor.

For example: Good Clinical Practice (GCP), Good Laboratory Practice (GLP), Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP), Good Safety Practice (GSP), and many others.

A "c" or "C" is sometimes added to the front of the acronym. The preceding "c" stands for "current." For example, cGMP is an acronym for "current Good Manufacturing Practice." The term GxP is only used in a casual manner, to refer in a general way to a collection of quality guidelines.

The purpose of the GxP quality guidelines is to ensure that a product is safe and meets its intended use. GxP guides quality manufacture in regulated industries such as food, drugs, medical devices, and cosmetics.

The most central aspects of GxP are traceability - the ability to reconstruct the development history of a drug or medical device and accountability - the ability to resolve who has contributed what to the development and when.

GMP is the most well known example of a GxP.

Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) are practices and the systems required to be adapted in pharmaceutical and medical devices companies. GMP is the guidance that outlines the aspects of production and testing that can impact the quality of a product.

Many countries have legislated that pharmaceutical and medical device companies must follow GMP procedures, and have created their own GMP guidelines that correspond with their legislation. Basic concepts of all of these guidelines remain more or less similar to the ultimate goals of safeguarding the health of the patient as well as producing good quality medicine, medical devices, or active pharmaceutical products.

In the U.S. a drug may be deemed adulterated if it passes all of the specifications tests but is found to be manufactured in a condition which violates current good manufacturing guidelines. Therefore, complying with GMP is a mandatory aspect in pharmaceutical and medical devices manufacturing.

Documentation is a critical tool for ensuring GxP/GMP compliance.

This is what GMP states about document control:

Each manufacturer shall establish and maintain procedures to control all documents that are required. The procedures shall provide for the following:

1. Document approval and distribution. Each manufacturer shall designate an individual(s) to review for adequacy and approve prior to issuance all documents. The approval, including the date and signature of the individual(s) approving the document, shall be documented. Documents shall be available at all locations for which they are designated, used, or otherwise necessary, and all obsolete documents shall be promptly removed from all points of use or otherwise prevented from unintended use.

2. Document changes. Changes to documents shall be reviewed and approved by an individual(s) in the same function or organization that performed the review and approval of original documents, unless specifically designated otherwise. Approved changes shall be communicated to the appropriate personnel in a timely manner. Each manufacturer shall maintain records of changes to documents. Change records shall include a description of the change, identification of the affected documents, the signature of the approving individual(s), the approval date, and when the change becomes effective.

These requirements are consistent with document control requirements stated in ISO 9001 which I described in my previous post.

The role of QA, in regards to the document system, is one of management and overview. QA ensures that all documents are maintained in a controlled fashion and that all procedures are being used within a company are approved by the appropriate subject matter experts, are consistent with other documents, and are the most current version. One way that QA ensures this is by being the last signature on all approved documents. All documents; current, obsolete, superseded, as well as all the history on the creation and revision of the document are kept in Quality Assurance.

These are the steps of the document control procedure:

Creation

Any knowledgeable employee should be able to write or revise documents as needed.

Revising

When revising a document the redline changes along with detailed justification of the changes should be routed.

Routing

The document control function of QA is responsible for routing documents for review and approval. It is suggested that a pre-route be done to ensure that all affected parties are in agreement with the document before it is submitted to QA. There should be a documented process detailing how documents are submitted for review and approval.

A controlled form listing all the changes made to the document, justification for the changes, and a list of personnel who need to review the document needs to be routed along with the document. At a minimum the author’s manager, all affected department heads, and QA need to review the document. Other Subject Matter Experts can be included.

Approval

Once all affected parties have agreed to the changes, document control will prepare the document for approval. All changes will be incorporated into the document. For new documents the version # will be 00. For each revision of a document the version number will increase (01, 02, 03, etc). A master document will be routed for approval signatures.

Typically the approval signatures are the Author, the Department Head, and QA. QA must be the last signature on all documents. Usually the approval signatures only appear on the first page of the document. Once the master document has been signed, and effective date is stamped onto each page of the document. The effective date must be far enough in advance to allow for the document to be trained on before it becomes effective (typically this is 5 days).

Distributing

On the effective day copies of the signed master document are routed to the affected departments. The departments will remove the old version and replace it the new version (for revised documents). If the document is new, there will be no replacement document to remove.

The old versions must be returned to document control. On a periodic basis document control personnel should audit the binders to determine if they contain the correct versions. Each document binder should contain a table of contents and only those documents that the department is responsible for. A full set of all approved documents should be in the QA department as well as in a central company location.

Archiving

Old revisions of documents will be stamped as superseded. No document revisions will be discarded or altered. A file will be maintained within QA that contains all the superseded documents and the signature approvals of personnel who agreed to the revisions.

Obsolete

If a document will no longer be used by any department in the company it can become obsolete. The document must be stamped as Obsolete and all copies removed from all document binders. It is a good idea to place a notice in the document stating that the document has been Obsolete.

Good manufacturing practice (GMP) regulations require that all documentation be issued, managed and controlled using a document management system.

In my future posts, I will further describe GMP regulations pertaining to documentation and documentation management systems.