Optimize Web Experience Management

Leading enterprises strive to acheeve higher levels of customer engagement through online channels, and this means they must easily, quickly and cost effectively provide fresh, personal, relevant content anytime, anywhere, on any device, through a consistent and dynamic user experience.

Traditional web content management system (CMS) solutions are no longer sufficient, and a richer and broader range of capabilities that enable web experience management - managing and optimizing the site visitor experience across the web, mobile apps, social networks and more - must now be leveraged in this new era of engagement.

The Need for Web Experience Management

Over the last few years, the Internet has undergone a tremendous amount of fundamental change in its landscape - socia1, personal and mobile.

1. Social - The Web is becoming increasingly more social and much less anonymous. The power of sharing can enhance or destroy brands in seconds.

2. Personal - While the Internet is continuously expanding in terms of ubiquity, at the same time it's becoming much more local and much more personal in terms of user experience.

3. Mobile The growth of mobile access to the Internet is rapidly expanding to the point where access from tablets and phones will soon exceed that from desktops and laptops.

The very way we communicate with customers is changing, and when fundamental change like this occurs, those who recognize the change and move quickly to adapt will benefit the most.

A New Era of Engagement

Each of these trends reinforces the others and fuels further adoption and innovation. It is these technologies, the behaviors and capabilities they foster that have brought us to a new era which Forrester calls the "era of engagement."

Driving these trends are people - our friends, leads, customers, critics, and fans. This is our audience and the other half of the conversation, and in today's age of engagement, they want to participate and expect us to engage them on their terms, on their schedule, in the context of their location, in their language and optimized for their device. To effectively tackle this challenge of serving a mass audience with limited resources, enterprises require strategy and effective tools to help get the job done.

Web experience management (WEM) provides us with the tools to take on this otherwise daunting task. The capabilities of WEM allow you to create, manage and deliver dynamic targeted and consistent content across various online channels including your website, social media, marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, etc. It takes a lot more than a traditional Web CMS to meet these new demands.

Key Principles of Web Experience Management

To effectively implement WEM, enterprises must start with their business strategy and goals which should drive their messaging and engagement strategy and which in turn should drive their content strategy. In other words, the strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities that businesses face should be considered first and foremost.

Too often organizations fail to do this by jumping straight into a technology selection without due consideration of the business drivers. Around this foundation, we wrap the fundamentals of basic Web content management. It is important to remember that content is still king. Business users and marketers need easy to use, yet powerful, content authoring and publishing capabilities.

They need rich content models that allow them to create engaging visitor experiences, to easily create new content assets, to quickly find and re-purpose existing content, and to preview content and the site visitor experience for all online channels.

Upon this foundation, an effective WEM solution provides a comprehensive collection of capabilities that allow organizations to create, manage and deliver dynamic, targeted and consistent content and visitor experiences across multiple touch points -corporate website, dedicated marketing campaign sites, mobile applications, social media sites, etc.

While WEM requirements are going to vary from organization to organization, some of the most critical features needed by essentially all enterprises include content targeting and personalization, mobile device support, faceted search and navigation, multi-channel publishing, integrated Web analytics, and campaign management.

Knowledge Management Applications - Coveo for Service and Support

In my last two posts about Coveo products, I described Coveo search applications - Coveo for advanced web search and Coveo for advanced enterprise search. Today, I will complete describing Coveo products with Coveo knowledge management application - Coveo for service and support.

With Coveo, knowledge required to solve cases faster can be found wherever it resides, within and beyond the knowledge base. Many companies are challenged with the proliferation of data, in multiple systems, communities, on-premise and in the cloud. Knowledge is everywhere and hard to manage.

Coveo solves this challenge by placing information from anywhere, related to the agent’s context, directly in front of them. Coveo technology automatically "reads" case information, established context, and instantly shows contextually relevant content and experts directly within the CRM such as Salesforce, or within a separate Insight Console. Coveo creates information mash-ups regardless of where the information resides, combined with advanced enterprise search and navigation abilities that bring your entire knowledge ecosystem to your agents.

Such knowledge availability decreases case resolution time, increases first contact resolution, and empowers lower level agents to become productive faster and to solve more complex cases. The results show dramatic impact on contact center capacity and customer satisfaction.

Features

Solutions and experts from anywhere - Coveo automatically presents 360° views of customer, case, or product information and communications, as well as experts who can help. Using advanced data enrichment, solutions and customer insight can stem from multiple sources, across enterprise, community, and social content.

Advanced enterprise search and navigation - expanded views enable deep, broad, knowledge exploration for cases, securely, across any enterprise content.

United indexing - Coveo federates searches and mash-ups from cloud, enterprise, and social data securely and in real time—regardless of format or source. It indexes source data from Salesforce, SharePoint, databases, file shares, Exchange, Dropbox, Lithium, Gmail, etc.

Expertise finding - dynamically, through context and topics, from internal colleagues to external experts, Coveo locates people with experience relevant to each case and customer.

Customer is in the center - Coveo cuts across departmental and system silos and enriches cases with sales or engineering content, thus providing richer and more relevant customer interactions. Conversely, other departments benefit from information generated by agents to inform product development and sales.

Virtual interaction - consolidates all customer and prospect communication and interactions from any channel, bringing together opportunities, cases, transactions, e-mails, events, cases, calls, tweets, etc.

Customization - The intuitive admin interface enables customization of any objects and combinations of information, including custom fields.

Search Applications - Coveo - Advanced Website Search

In my last post, I described Coveo for advanced enterprise search. In this post, I will describe Coveo for advanced website search.

Coveo takes your existing Web Content Management to a new level of insight and productivity. Coveo creates a virtual integration layer between your WCM and all your company’s key information sources (knowledge bases, databases, cloud content) to provide powerful, consolidated insight.

Coveo recommends the most relevant content to visitors, powered by indexing and search across any set of diverse systems. You can increase customer satisfaction by finding the missing content your customers are looking for. Smart navigation and search makes relevant content quickly apparent for your users. Website visitors will be presented with relevant, related content without the administrator having to create the links and without the visitor having to search!

You can instantly correlate content from your WCM/CMS such as Sitecore with other key information sources, including your Salesforce, SharePoint, Exchange, Lithium, and more.

Features

WCM Features

Out-of-the-box usability - you can start getting insight immediately without any difficult set up or configuration.

Related Topics - automatically correlate site content to relevant content based on similar themes and attributes.

Composite Views - composite views that combine relevant site content with other corporate system outside WCM (Communities, Intranet, CRM, Social, etc.)

Modular, flexible design - Template-based rendering for easy customization, reusable and extensible user controls for deep customization.

Computed Facets - configurable facets ideal for eCommerce websites, providing dynamic calculations of relevant product information such as average or summed prices, as well as filtering by price ranges.

Native integration with leading WCMs - API-Level Integration with Sitecore, SharePoint and SDL Tridion provides support for live indexing, security trimming and metadata search.

Faceted Search and Navigation - More intuitive, complementing traditional keyword searches with guided navigation and conversational search that leverages metadata for increased relevance and precision.

Search Analytics - Provides valuable information about visitor search behavior, content usage (top queries) and gaps in content (unsuccessful queries), offering unparalleled insights into key trends and more agile decision-making.

Indexing

Audio-video Indexing - The speech in audio or video files can be indexed with the optional Audio Video Search module. It creates an accurate transcript of speech content that is aware of the enterprise's vocabulary (i.e. proper names, employee names, domain terms), and allows users to effectively search audio and video content as easily as they search document content. When searching, the exact location of the searched terms are highlighted in the timeline of the audio or video player.

Connector Framework - Connector APIs enable easy integration with most repositories, including a flexible security API to support the security models of the indexed repositories.

Converters - Tens of file formats are supported out of the box, including PDFs, Office documents, Lotus Notes, HTML, XML, Text files, etc. Metadata contained in audio and images file formats is also indexed, while the text contained in images can be index with the optional OCR module.

Languages - Languages are automatically identified at indexing time, improving content processing and relevance algorithms.

Metadata mapping - Regardless of the actual naming for the metadata in the indexed repositories, the system supports configurable mapping to a specified internal field representation. For instance, an index containing both Exchange and Lotus Notes emails will merge the “From” and “To” and “Subject” metadata even if they use different names for these fields.

OCR- The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module allows the indexing of text content from files such as scanned documents stored in image or PDF files.

Pre/Post conversion scripts - Conversion scripts are hooks in the indexing pipeline that allows administrators to fully customize the way documents are indexed. There are two types of scripts, those that are executed before and those executed after the conversion of the document from its binary representation to indexable metadata and text.

Push API - Provides a simple way to integrate with external systems. All the calls necessary to support all the advanced features of the indexing pipeline are available through this API.

Tagging - Metadata can be injected on documents at search time, enabling search and facets on these new metadata in real-time. An example of usage is the addition of user-created tags on documents.

Security

Document Level Security - Data sources can be configured to index document permissions with content, making Early-binding security possible, or permissions can be set directly for all documents of this source.

Index Security - Security is integrated directly in the index structures to ensure that users only see content they are entitled to see. Early and Late security binding are both handled at the index level to deliver the best performance and security.

Index Segmentation - In addition to the document level securities reflecting the underlying repository permissions, the index can be segmented into collections with their own access restrictions.

Security Freshness - Changes in the group/user structure are constantly monitored and refreshed in Coveo’s security cache. An administrator can also force a refresh of the cache if required

Security Normalization - Securities from different systems are normalized within the index so that users are automatically assigned with all proper security identifiers when accessing Coveo. This ensures that users see all the content they are entitled to see.

Super User Access - The main system administrator can grant temporary and audited rights to a specified user to search and access content for which he normally does not have access rights. Typical uses are e-Discovery, forensic, etc.

Reporting and Analytics

3rd party analytics integration - The Coveo analytics database allows the use of third-party reporting tools for more complex or custom reporting. An administrator can also easily configure the search interfaces to integrate third-party Web Analytics systems such as Google Analytics.

Advanced Query Analytics - Captures data on all user interactions with the search interfaces including result click-through and the use of different search UI functions. Reporting interface allows administrators to analyze the captured data, to elevate the most popular results, or select the correct result, for given queries.

Query & Indexing Logs - Comprehensive reports and statistics with graphical views on system status, queries, content, history, etc. Live console gives administrators a real-time view of what is going on the system.

Text Analytics

Configurable Text Analytics - An administrator can configure a workflow that will create new metadata based on content analysis, rules and context, such as Themes, Named-entities, Regular Expressions.

Incremental updates - An administrator can configure update schedules to capture recent changes in the index.

Interactive Fine Tuning - Extraction parameters, normalization and blacklisting can be refined and metadata regenerated without re-indexing the full documents set.

Named Entity Extraction - Entities such as persons, locations, and organizations are automatically extracted from indexed content. Additional entities can be configured in the system.

Plug-ins - Additional, 3rd party, plugins can be added to the Text Analytics workflow. For example, domain/organization specific taxonomies can be used in the process.

Rule-based Extraction - Configurable rules can be used to add specific metadata to documents.

Theme Extraction - Themes are Topics and Concepts automatically extracted from indexed content.

Next time, I will complete describing Coveo products with Coveo for service and support.

Search Applications-Coveo-Advanced Enterprise Search-Part 2

Yesterday, I mentioned that Coveo offers three products - Coveo for advanced enterprise search, Coveo for advanced website search, Coveo for service and support. I presented the some features of Coveo for advanced enterprise search product.

Today, I will complete presenting this product.

User Interface

Coveo InsightBox - different field values are suggested while a user types a query.

Facets: AND/OR mode - for specific facets, multi-selection can be switch from OR (default) to AND

Facets: Computed Fields - computations can be applied of specific facets: Sums (Avgs, Mins, Maxs).

Facets: Search-as-you-type - search-as-you-type on all unique values of specified facets.

Facets: Sort-by - facet values can be sorted based on their label, count or computed value.

Mobile UI - user Interface compatible with iOS browsers.

Relevance Ranking - results are ordered by default based on user profile, social and other context. This can be easily tuned and configured by an administrator.

Result Sort-by any Field - results can be ordered by any field. This is configured by the administrator.

Secure, Federated search - log in once in Coveo and search, navigate and consolidate dozens of different data sources simultaneously. Trim results based on user permissions.

Sort-by any Field - results can be ordered by any field, as configured by the UI administrator.

Faceted Search and Navigation - relevant metadata and fields can be used to populate facets within a result set. User can select multiple facet values dynamically and get instant changes in the result list.

Advanced User Interface

Export Results to Excel - results can be downloaded and opened in Excel. Administrator can select which metadata to include in the export.

Floating Searchbar - Windows users can activate a floating Search bar and search Coveo without the need to start a Web browser.

Outlook Sidebar - Outlook users get contextual results based on their context and selection. They can also search for emails, files, people and SharePoint without leaving Outlook.

Tagging - users have the ability to add custom tags and annotations to results. Tags are searchable, are applied in the index in real-time and are available to other users.

Widgets - an administrator can configure widgets to display results in advanced visual representation.

Windows Desktop Indexing - Windows users can search their local files and email archives. A desktop agent is required to capture content and synchronize it with the centralized Coveo index.

Relevance

Configurable Ranking - administrator can assign weight on more than 20 ranking attributes, such as Term proximity, TFIDF, dates, Terms in Title, Content reputation.

Query Correction - the spelling of the query is checked against the index content in order to suggest proper spelling even for words that are not normally part of general dictionaries (example: internal project codes, people names, etc.)

Query Ranking Expressions (QRE) - for each UI, an administrator can configure specific ranking rules, based on context and result set. This is an easy and flexible way to promote content based on profile attributes of the current user, such as locations, history, languages, roles.

Stemming - variations of a keyword with a similar basic meaning are treated as synonyms, broadening the search when required.

Thesaurus - an administrator can create a thesaurus and link it to the query. Thesaurus can be created from scratch or imported from existing enterprise content.

Top Results - an administrator can assign specific results to appear at the top of the list for specific queries.

Collaborative/Social ranking - click through data and Manual document rating are used in relevance calculation. This is automatically shared among colleagues based on their social proximity.

Administration and Configuration

Admin Roles - the main system administrator can delegate partial administration permissions based on roles (interface designer, system administrator, collection administrator, etc.)

APIs - administration APIs allow custom development and integration of the administration functions into external systems.

Audience Management - administrator can define multiple audiences and assign specific UIs to them.

Installation Kit - everything is installed and initially configured using an install kit for easy deployment.

Interface Editor - for each User Interface, an administrator can configure Result templates, CSS, Facets, Sort-keys and other parameters.

Monitoring/Email alerts - different system conditions are monitored and email alerts can be sent to report important system events, such a disk space running low.

Web-based Administration UI - simple, Web-based UI for easy administration.

I will describe Coveo for advanced website search in my next post.

Search Applications-Coveo -Advanced Enterprise Search - Part 1

Coveo offers three products - Coveo for advanced enterprise search, Coveo for advanced website search, Coveo for service and support. Today, I am going to present Coveo for advanced enterprise search. This product has many features, so I will start presenting them today and will finish tomorrow.

Coveo for advanced enterprise search is the enterprise search solution that automatically organizes your company’s information into actionable, on-demand knowledge. Coveo's powerful enterprise search engine correlates and analyzes all your company’s data information sources, wherever they reside. All the information in your Sharepoint, CRM, email, Cloud content, and File servers are now instantly accessible from one place.

Features

Access Real-time information from anywhere - federate searches on enterprise, social and cloud data securely and in real time—regardless of format or source.

Transform how your users access information - seamlessly integrate within existing applications and workflows to maximize impact and minimize disruption.

Digest, synthesize and utilize information faster - automatic metadata and entity extraction, themes and tagging combine to help users discover content and share findings.

Navigate content with ease - dynamic, searchable facets provide an ability to navigate to the most relevant content.

Simple to set-up and deploy with existing resources - as easy to use as any consumer web app, coupled with enterprise-grade robustness and scalability.

No hassle security integration - secure configuration out of the box is safe and easy.

Indexing

Audio-video Indexing - the speech in audio or video files can be indexed with the optional Audio Video Search module. It creates an accurate transcript of speech content that is aware of the enterprise's vocabulary (i.e. proper names, employee names, domain terms), and allows users to effectively search audio and video content as easily as they search document content. When searching, the exact location of the searched terms are highlighted in the timeline of the audio or video player.

Connector Framework - connector APIs enable easy integration with most repositories, including a flexible security API to support the security models of the indexed repositories.

Converters - multiple file formats are supported out of the box, including PDFs, Office documents, Lotus Notes, HTML, XML, Text files, etc. Metadata contained in audio and images file formats is also indexed, while the text contained in images can be indexed with the optional OCR module.

Languages - languages are automatically identified at indexing time, improving content processing and relevance algorithms.

Metadata mapping - regardless of the actual naming for the metadata in the indexed repositories, the system supports configurable mapping to a specified internal field representation. For instance, an index containing both Exchange and Lotus Notes emails will merge the "From", "To" and "Subject" metadata even if they use different names for these fields.

OCR - the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) module allows the indexing of text content from files such as scanned documents stored in image or PDF files.

Pre/Post conversion scripts - conversion scripts are hooks in the indexing pipeline that allows administrators to fully customize the way documents are indexed. There are two types of scripts, those that are executed before and those executed after the conversion of the document from its binary representation to indexable metadata and text.

Push API - provides a simple way to integrate with external systems. All the calls necessary to support all the advanced features of the indexing pipeline are available through this API.

Tagging - metadata can be injected on documents at search time, enabling search and facets on these new metadata in real-time. An example of usage is the addition of user-created tags on documents.

Reporting and Analytics

3rd party analytics integration - Coveo analytics database allows the use of third-party reporting tools for more complex or custom reporting. An administrator can also easily configure the search interfaces to integrate third-party web analytics systems such as Google Analytics.

Advanced Query Analytics - captures data on all user interactions with the search interfaces including result click-through and the use of different search UI functions. Reporting interface allows administrators to analyze the captured data, to elevate the most popular results, or select the correct result for given queries.

Query and Indexing Logs - comprehensive reports and statistics with graphical views on system status, queries, content, history, etc. Live console gives administrators a real-time view of what is going on the system.

Scalability and Fault Tolerance

Distributed Indexing - indexing process distributed in many Index Slices, each one indexing part of the content. Slices can be hosted locally (on local drives or on a SAN) or on separate servers (through IP connection) providing highly scalable architecture.

Failover and Query Scalability - index mirroring system provides high availability (if one mirror fails, the others can continue serving queries). The number of queries that can be answered per second can be doubled by doubling the number of automatically synchronized mirrors.

Performance profiles - configurable performance profiles to balance indexing total throughput, query performance and time-to-index.

Query Federation/GDI - federate queries to other instances of Coveo and merge the results from all instances into a single result page while also leveraging the ranking algorithms from the different instances.

Security

Document Level Security - data sources can be configured to index document permissions with content, making early-binding security possible, or permissions can be set directly for all documents of this source.

Index Security - security is integrated directly in the index structures to ensure that users only see content they are entitled to see. Early and late security binding are both handled at the index level to deliver the best performance and security.

Index Segmentation - in addition to the document level securities reflecting the underlying repository permissions, the index can be segmented into collections with their own access restrictions.

Security Freshness - changes in the group/user structure are constantly monitored and refreshed in Coveo’s security cache. An administrator can also force a refresh of the cache if required.

Security Normalization - securities from different systems are normalized within the index so that users are automatically assigned with all proper security identifiers when accessing Coveo. This ensures that users see all the content they are entitled to see.

Super User Access - the main system administrator can grant temporary and audited rights to a specified user to search and access content for which he normally does not have access rights. Typical uses are e-Discovery, forensic, etc.

Text Analytics

Configurable Text Analytics - an administrator can configure a workflow that will create new metadata based on content analysis, rules and context, such as Themes, Named entities, Regular Expressions.

Incremental Updates - an administrator can configure update schedules to capture recent changes in the index.

Interactive Fine Tuning - extraction parameters, normalization and blacklisting can be refined and metadata regenerated without re-indexing the full documents set.

Named Entity Extraction - entities such as persons, locations, and organizations are automatically extracted from indexed content. Additional entities can be configured in the system.

Plug-ins - additional, 3rd party, plugins can be added to the text analytics workflow. For example, domain/organization specific taxonomies can be used in the process.

Rule-based Extraction - configurable rules can be used to add specific metadata to documents.

Theme Extraction - themes are topics and concepts are automatically extracted from indexed content.

More features of this product tomorrow...

Realities of Online Self-Service

Forrester Research says that business leaders must dramatically revitalize the self-service experience offered on customer facing websites just to keep pace with evolving consumer expectations. There are key realities of modern online service that expose the gap between customer expectations and website performance, and how you can take steps to close that gap starting now.

1. Customers have grown tired of your old online help tools.

Customer satisfaction with today's most common web self-service features is abysmal and is getting worse. In 2011, only 51% of consumers who used online help sections or FAQs for self-service were satisfied, down from 56% in 2009. As more companies rectify this by deploying next generation self-service solutions and virtual agents, fewer customers will tolerate antiquated self-service help tools online.

2. Customers now expect a superior experience online, not just a good one.

Exceptionally positive online experiences are now setting the bar for what customers expect when they visit virtually any website in search of answers and information. According to Forrester, 70% of online consumers expect businesses to try harder to provide superior online customer service.

3. Consumers arc impatient and protective of their time.

Consumers cite "valuing my time" as the most important thing a company can do to deliver a good online customer experience. Yet most websites are complex, hard to navigate and filled with content that provides multiple possible answers rather than a single, swift path to resolution.

4, Customer service has gone mobile.

Mobile phones are now ubiquitous. Nearly 88% of US adults own them, and 27% of US adults are already considered "super-connected" consumers, using their phones for information. research and commerce. What is more, digital tablet sales are predicted to outpace sales of PCs by 2015. Convenience and ease-of-use are the hallmarks of these mobile form factors. Websites that offer experiences contrary to these attributes will only raise the ire of today's increasingly impatient and unforgiving mobile consumer.

5. Social media is increasingly embraced as a customer service tool.

Back in 2009, just 1% of consumers used Twitter for customer service. This number jumped to 19% in 2011. Delivering a consistent service experience across multiple channels is critical, especially today, as consumers are not shy about using social media sites to publicly complain and vent frustration about any interactions with companies that fail to satisfy.

6. Dissatisfaction online = hijacked revenues.

One of the most appealing benefits of delivering a positive experience in the web channel is the opportunity for organizations to provide information that supports and encourages purchase decisions. Online, the shift from a customer service conversation to a purchase consideration conversation can be a very natural and systematic progression. This progression is thwarted, however, the moment a self-service experience fails to satisfy.

The impact of the self-service experience on revenues should not be underestimated. Fully 45% of US online consumers agree with the statement: "I am very likely to abandon my online purchase if I cannot find a quick answer to my questions."

These trends underline the urgent need to revitalize the online service experience offered by most companies. Online self-service is in need of resuscitation. Useful web self-service and virtual agent technologies that can deliver an enhanced customer experience are currently underutilized.

Where To Go from Here?

What should your organization do as the first step toward improving the online customer experience?

Begin with an honest and objective assessment of the self-service experience your website offers today. Looking at your customer facing website, ask yourself these three questions...

1. Is there a single, highlly visible starting point for self-service activity?

Today's consumers are task oriented when they go online. Your customers want their self-service journey to begin immediately and move swiftly to completion. Looking at your home page or most highly trafficked customer service page, ask yourself if the average customer would be able to identify the clear starting point for any customer service-related task in a matter of seconds. Any required navigation or clicking through to new pages is viewed as time waste and is out of alignment with their expectation.

2. Is issue resolution generally a multi-step or a single-step, activity?

When looking for information online, customers want a single accurate answer that is accessible in one step. Any content page that offers more than one alternative answer or path to an answer, requires your customer to take additional steps for sorling, scanning content and/or comparing answers. On your website, when results are served, is the customer presented with a single answer, or multiple results to sift through?

3. How will you measure how your site is performing?

A quantitative assessment of your self-service performance is the first thing you will need to establish for any improvement to the self-service experience. A free online self-service assessment tool, created by Forrester and InielliResponse, is vendor-agnostic methodology you can use for scoring your site's performance and charring a path for improvement.

Current Trends in Content and Knowledge Management

Current KM trends changed the way we work in KM environment. Let’s look at these current trends and how they affect KM.

Big Data

According to Cisco study, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabyes annually by 2016 which is fourfold increase from 2011. By 2016 there will be 19 billion global network connections, the equivalent of two-and-a-half connections for every person on earth. Huge amount of data needs to be moved, collected, stored, and analyzed to create value out of it.

With social networking and global depression and exponential rate of information growth, the question becomes: how are you going to store, manage, and utilize this information in a way that meets your organization objectives. You need to be able to derive value from your information.

Social Computing

During last decade, social computing has widely spread in the work place. It has emerged as integral part of enterprise productivity. Social tools changed ways people work together. The proliferation of social software in the enterprise demonstrates that users find value in this new generation of tools.

In just a few years, social media has gone from cutting-edge phenomenon to a main-stream channel that companies use to engage clients, partners, and vendors.

Gartner predicts that by 2014 social networking services will replace email for interpersonal business communication for 20% business users.

Some statistics:

• 65% of world’s top companies have an active Twitter profile.
• 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog.
• 58% of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate Facebook account.
• Facebook has 901 million monthly active users.
• Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, sending 340 million tweets every day.
• Enterprise social software solutions are being used in 67% of organizations surveyed in 2013, up from 43% in 2011.

This highlights the fact that social software is becoming part of business processes in the work place. Employees want to engage socially with the people they work with and build stronger relationships within their companies. Traditional content management and collaboration solutions are incorporating new features to satisfy the social and information sharing demands of the enterprise.

Enterprises are using these emerging social computing technologies to improve collaboration among employees, clients, and vendors around the globe.

Tools such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, social tagging and bookmarking, discussion boards with comment fields. Individuals comment on case studies, exchange ideas, and contribute their own material. Employees can follow up with people, search for subject matter experts, get updates on projects, participate in conversations that are going on.

The use of social software for collaboration in a business environment is most successful when there is a business purpose. The social capabilities of enterprise applications will continue to be extended because of the value that collaboration brings to a wide variety of business activities. Meanwhile, enterprise social software products, which have matured considerably over the past 5 years, are achieving increasing acceptance by corporations.

Challenges

Emergence of social networking has been a two-edged sword for organization. On one blade rests knowledge sharing. On the other is a ton of useless information and you need to dig thought it to get to what you need. In other words, they have added to the noise, volume and diversity of information.

When it comes to social networks, the question used to be: how much you want to connect vs how much you want to collect? The new version is: how much do you want to curate vs not curate?

Non-curated content is typical unmanaged social network content. The question is: how much of it do you want to have control over?

Companies must understand how social media use may impact the company’s ability to manage risk. It is important to understand how business and employees engage in social media, develop and deploy policies and solutions necessary to stay compliant, to meet business requirements and be flexible at the same time.

Companies need to increase information control and visibility.

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing gained significant adoption as a way for companies to shift from capital-intensive model of buying and running infrastructure and software to renting usage of shared infrastructure and applications.

With the power of cloud computing, small businesses can have the same level of IT infrastructure as Fortune 500 companies with vastly limited overhead.In addition to hosted servers, small businesses can purchase software as a service (SaaS) that is hosted online and completely scalable. Forrester predicts growth in SaaS applications.

While some companies are replacing licensed software with SaaS applications, most are using SaaS for new product categories that complement their existing on-premise software.

Benefits

With software purchased as a service, a small business no longer needs IT personnel on site to install and maintain software and hardware. SaaS allows businesses to purchase software without multi-year contracts and without painful software installation.

Rapid Deployment - with no hardware or software to install and no servers to buy, cloud content management virtually has no setup time. So, it can be deployed very quickly.

Access Anywhere - A cloud content management solution offers an application available anytime and from any internet browser. Information is always accessible and data can be shared instantly. The cloud gives the company centralized control of info while allowing users to access it from any computer or device.

Easy Collaboration - Since it can be accessed anywhere, cloud content management systems allow any authorized personnel to access and collaborate on content. Sharing lets you get information to those who need it instantly, and from anywhere in the world.

Low Cost - Cloud ECM solutions offer a highly-affordable alternative to on-premise solutions.

Speed - Cloud ECM implementations typically take 24% of the time of similar on-premise projects. That rapid time-to benefit translates directly into the higher ROI that business managers want.

Flexibility - Cloud ECM implementation gives the business this flexibility, both in terms of right-sizing capacity and in terms of aligning ECM capabilities with changing business needs.

Reduced Risk - Cloud ECM projects don’t require large outlays for uncertain results. And a variety of protections can be written into vendor contracts. For these and other reasons, the cloud fits well into today’s corporate risk mitigation strategies.

For activities that involve collaboration, SasS browser access to an application is far more superior to running it behind a firewall.

It enables IT to respond quicker to business requirements. Cloud vendor often provides an effective mobile client which otherwise you would have to undertake yourself if you were to customize your on-premise platform.

Challenges

Cloud is no panacea. Even the largest cloud vendors can experience outages.

Multiple File Formats - The documents that you might like to upload into your cloud content management system may be in many different formats. The device that is being used to display the content often may not have the correct software needed to display the document or image.

A common solution is to convert the files on the server to a generic format that can be viewed by many devices. For example, most browsers and devices today can display JPEG or PNG formats for images, Microsoft Office or PDF format for documents, CAD for drawings, etc.

Document Size - It is very important to consider the size of the document, either the number of pages or the physical size of the file. Downloading the entire document can take a long time depending on available bandwidth. This is especially an issue on mobile devices with slow or crowded data connections.

A system that provides a preview of the document can help the user to determine if they want to download the document would help.

Browser compatibility - Another challenge is that there are various browsers that are used to access the Internet and not all of them work the same way. Each browser has differences in how they operate and how the code works under the covers.

Mobile viewing - With today’s on-demand business world, it is imperative to be able to support viewing documents on mobile devices. But not all the devices behave the same way, and different operating systems are used on the various devices. Without a consistent mobile viewing platform, separate viewing applications may need to be installed on each device and results will vary. Using a single technology that supports many document types is very important in a mobile environment.

HTML5-based viewers can help resolve some of the challenges associated with browsers and mobile devices. Older versions of the browsers that are used in many government, education and businesses do not support HTML5.

Understanding that these common challenges are a possibility and preparing for them before you encounter them is important. Providing a single platform with multiple viewing technologies, including HTML5, Flash and image-based presentation, can help to ensure that all users can view documents, regardless of their specific device, browser or operating system.

Responsibility for your information in the cloud still falls on you: data ownership continuity, security, compliance. Take the same test-based approach to selecting cloud solutions as you would on-premise solutions. Focus on user experience.

Mobile Computing

The workspace is becoming increasingly mobile. Mobile computing enables access from anywhere. Forrester predicts that by 2016, smart phones and tablets will be used by a billion of global customers. Looking ahead, employees and customers will expect and demand that all business applications support mobility. Need to be able to deliver mobile experience - Ability to access content from mobile devices.

Content and systems must be optimized for mobile devices. Employees working in the field must be able to access content from their mobile devices. Employees use mobile devices to collaborate on docs, take meeting notes, create presentations, and collect data in the field. Decide what content and services make the most sense for your organization mobile devices.

"Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD)

It is becoming a reality of office life these days. It is a natural consequence in a world where people bring iPads, iPhones, Androids, and Blackberrys to work. This trend is relatively new and it continues to grow. As a result, organizations have been compelled to open up their networks to a wider variety of these devices that their employees want to use.

For corporations, trying to save IT $, it is good news – employees are now paying to acquire and maintain phones, tablets, and laptops that were once funded by IT. These organizations realized that encouraging employees to bring in their own devices can be a win-win situation for them as well as for their employees.

On the downside, the ever growing variety of BYOD devices and the fact that they are owned/controlled by employees poses serious security, workflow, and IT management issues for employers.

Employees are using their own smart phones and tablets to conduct business. While the actual device belongs to an employee, business info does not. This creates new twist in info governance initiatives.

If employees upload corporate data into a consumer-based public cloud, the cloud operator has de-facto ownership of this data.

Also, there are hackers accessing corporate data through relatively insecure consumer devices, challenge of integrating BYOD platforms with enterprise-wide corporate software, and extra IT funds being required to support a myriad of BYOD platforms.

A company can’t dictate which devices are used, in which security parameters and under what conditions.

Therefore, define and control what levels of access BYOD equipment has to a company networks, applications, and corporate data.  It is vital to establish a comprehensive governance policy.

Companies need to keep their employees happy and productive while protecting and leveraging the info they create and consume.

Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 3

In part 1 and 2 of my post about governance, risk, and compliance, I have described why information governance is important, where to begin with the information governance, and I started to describe what needs to be considered in information governance polices. In this my post I will describe information governance policies as they relate to crisis management and e-discovery, and list general information governance control points.

Information Governance for Crisis Management

Crisis management is set of procedures for unplanned situation that would prevent you from doing critical functions on your job.

Such situations can be:

• Availability – illness, weather, turnover, fire, flood, severe weather, facility issues
• Technology – phone cut-off, system outage, applications is down, network problems
• Volume/Capacity – huge number of calls (in the example of call center)
• Special situations – pandemic, loss of facility, tornado, etc.

An approaching storm or disaster does not provide much leeway to assess your disaster recovery preparations.

For example, if your CMS is down, what happens to those departments who need to use critical documents?

Solutions:

What you need to do is to develop a plan for each crisis situation. It should be designed to implement disaster recovery. Planning is very important.

Prioritize requirements – short, medium, long-term. Assess business needs. For example, how do you want to handle spike of calls (if you are in the call center)? Short term plan could be such as – re-route calls for live answer where there are people. Medium to long term could be such as plan for alternative site, work from home.

Make your plan flexible. Have incident coordinator. Create communication plan which should include who is responsible for coordinating the recovery process. Create crisis team which could include IT, QA, management, business partners. Outline responsibilities and procedure in the document.

Test this procedure at least once a year. Do post-analysis – timing, access gaps, communications of results, recommend changes and training plan for next testing, maybe next quarter, not next year. Evaluate your systems when you have no crisis.

Other points:

• Address disaster recovery in addressing planned and unplanned downtime.
• Virtualize your data center.
• Ensure swift restoration of content items following corruption or accidental deletion.
• Maintain all metadata during and after recovery events.
• Ensure seamless transition to a warm stand-by system should the main system fail.
• Plan what to do if outage happens.
• Maximize platform up-time and swift restoration of platform following a disaster event.
• Users need to feel confident that the system will protect content and will be available regardless of any disaster, otherwise user adoption will fail – users will go back to their old habits essentially halting KM effort in its tracks.

Information Governance for E-Discovery

E-Discovery preparedness makes it imperative for organizations to develop an enterprise wide strategy to manage the volume of electronic information. The discovery process affects many individuals in an organization, not just lawyers and others involved in discovery, but also IT professionals and records managers, who have to be prepared to produce electronic content for discovery and litigation.

You need to have an ability to respond to legal request, to solve litigation issue, mitigate the risk of sanctions, reduce impact and cost associated with future litigation.

For legal counsel, it means having a review process to determine what discovered content is relevant to the case. For an IT person, it means restoring backup tapes to show evidence on file shares, content management systems, e-mail systems, or other applications. But for records managers, this work will have begun long before any lawsuit with managing records for retention, placing legal holds, and finalizing disposition.

E-discovery could be costly because it requires organizations to retrieve content from servers, archives, backup tapes, and other media.

In some cases, an organization is unable to execute a discovery order because it is unable to locate all content in a timely manner, or it is unable to place holds on all content and some of it is deleted during the lawsuit. The inability to do this correctly also has a cost, and it can be considerable.

To address these costs, many organizations are looking at e-discovery solutions that will enable them to review the found content and take it through litigation.

But organizations can also lower costs for archiving and restoring, legal review, and sanctions by simply cutting down how much content it retains. Less stored content means less content on which to perform discovery.

Developing a strategy and a plan of action for handling e-discovery will help organizations mitigate their risk and save them a significant amount of money in the event of litigation. Organizations need to have a retention policy to determine which content can be destroyed and at what time and which content should be kept and for how long. The key is to have a retention program that is flexible enough to keep content for the right retention period.

By categorizing content, creating a catalog of the content, creating a retention plan, implementing a hold methodology, and having disposition procedures, an organization will benefit in many ways.

Solutions: Integrate e-discovery into information governance practice. Include key capabilities:

• understand and secure – identify and categorize docs; docs are distributed globally; find and correctly identify them
• automate and enforce - extend policies to docs within unmanaged repositories such as file shares, SharePoint, etc. Automate processes in a transparent manner to manage and control docs. Retention and disposition policies that can be enforced within ECM.
• protect and control – regulate how docs accessed and used; security controls over docs; control who can access protected docs
• discover and produce – ability to produce relevant docs upon demand is a mandatory requirement.

Develop retention programs. Create committees within your organizations and bring their expertise together with legal counsel and IT to prepare for e-discovery and litigation.

General Governance Controls

• Understand your data topology – holistically across the enterprise: how much, where, who owns it, and what value does it provide.
• Employ real-time indexing of content – to keep track of its changes.
• Store the intelligence about your content (metadata).
• Create an information intelligence service center and include data analysis, governance analysis.
• Employ change management to stay current of new forms of content and new business requirements.
• Become proactive in deploying policies for securing data, storing data, sharing data and enforcing compliance.
• Remove obsolete or unnecessary content.
• Define content life cycle and retention policies.
• Tier your access to enable relevant data to be closer to users and devices that are local.
• Educate the organization on the value of good governance; it is less about control and more about raising the intelligence and health of information.
• Categorize your information and determine its value and rank.
• Use content approval function in your CMS.
• As deployments grow, organizations must also find ways to efficiently store records in compliance with retention of records management policies.
• Create retention schedule, content controls, consistent disposition of content in accordance with records management policies for content preservation, remediation, retention.
• Keep track of what info is created, stored, and accessed.
• Use auto-classification and semantic tools within the search engines.
• Move relevant documents from desktops and shared drives to your central docs repository.
• Create efficient document versioning and check-in/check-out management for information consistency.
• Create robust administration of users to ensure that each as access rights for only documents that they are authorized to have access to.

Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 2

In my last post about governance, risk, and compliance, I have described why information governance is important and where to begin with the information governance. Today, I will describe what needs to be considered in information governance polices and will give some recommendations.

What needs to be considered in information governance polices?

Government mandates - If you are in a regulated industry, you need to consider first and foremost government mandates such as GMP/GxP, ISO 9001. You need to make sure that your documents management and IT are compliant with these requirements.

Proliferation of content - there has been explosive growth in the creation and collection of content by organization and individuals. Content is stored in CMS, data warehouses, physical warehouses, desktop computers, file shares, back-up archives, mobile devices, cloud services, employees personal computers and other devices such as tablets, smart phones, etc. To complicate matters this information is also geographically disbursed.

In SharePoint, for example, you get a small department that has a site, other departments take notice and start their own sites. Suddenly you have small SharePoint instances pervading everywhere. What organization should do instead is take those separate silos of SharePoint and combine them into one centrally managed environment. It is the matter of having a plan in place first, then applying the technology to achieve those business goals.

Information governance policies should cover desktops and shared drives, CMSs, databases and data warehouses, email systems, cloud based apps, social media platforms, physical warehouses. Content may be stored with the 3rd party, this needs to be considered.

Employees send email with documents attachments. This email and attachments have significant value to the business whether they contain contract terms, meeting notes or even employees opinions on a given topic. Email requires governance and so it needs to be included in your information governance policies.

Big data – are you prepared? What measures your IT has taken to help with this issue?

Cloud computing – If you use cloud computing, you need to create governance policy for it.

Mobile Devices - Employees use mobile devices to do their job. Many companies don’t have policies that cover things like tablets and handhelds. They are starting to, but it is just a beginning. You need to create polices for mobile devices and a mechanism to enforce those policies. And in the regulated environment, you would need to prove that you are enforcing those policies.

Social media - effectively leveraging social media while protecting the organization from non-compliance.

Create comprehensive social media governance plan. It should include compliance, supervision to interactive social content; perform conceptual search and policy-based monitoring of all info, inside and outside the firewall; establish social media usage policies and procedures and then train staff on them; preserve and collect relevant social media content for compliance and litigation purposes.

Consider all content and access methods involved as users connect via smartphones and tablets.

Employ solutions that capture additional approval on a site-by-site basis to verify assent for capturing and monitoring.

Wherever possible create separate business identities for social media to minimize capture of personal or private information.

Govern employees interactions. Most regulated organizations are taking a measured approach to social media, starting with small number of employees and approved social media sites.

Monitor and capture inside-based interactions within a corporate networks. Moderate inside-based interactions. Be mindful of legal and regulatory guidelines.

BYOD phenomena – “bring your own device”. People bring their iPads, iPhones, etc. to conferences, work, taking notes, making presentations, responding to email, updating pipeline, etc. All this content belongs to the organization but the device is not. What happens when this employee leaves the company? Or that employee loses the tablet? What happens to information?

I read about the case where a doctor had all his patients’ medical records unencrypted on his laptop. The laptop was stolen.

It could also be that there are multiple versions of documents floating around, gets passed from one person to another person, may be tweaked a little along the way. And they each are legally discoverable.

Be sure that the official version of the document is stored in your CMS and managed by your governance program.

It is imperative to have a policy to protect this information and to enforce that policy across all those devices.

Security – sensitive information must be protected – encrypted. LinkedIn got hacked and all passwords got stolen. What are you going to do that this does not happen to your organization?

Intellectual property - What about a pharmaceutical company developing a new drug, not yet under patent protection, and an employee takes that information to a competitor?

Of special importance is information related to future revenue. For example, a pharmaceutical company should place a high priority on protecting information related to future products which are not covered by patents.

It is vital for companies to have a system in place to protect sensitive content such as for example product roadmaps, manufacturing plans, vendor supply lists, marketing and promotional strategies.

In my next post, I will describe information governance for crisis management and e-discovery.

Information - Governance, Risk and Compliance – GRC - Part 1

Governance is about securing the information and also about using information for greater value. People don’t talk much about value of information but information is strategic asset of a company.

What makes a company great among other things is the ability to take information and use it as an asset. Information is what drives an organization, whether it is through development of new drugs, new products, looking into new geographic regions to expand to, etc.

Governance is like an insurance policy that you feel like you are paying for nothing, until you need it. You don’t know when and if an “accident” will happen and you don’t know how big it will be, but when it does happen, you are very happy that you have that insurance policy. Until then you resent having to pay for it. Governance which is controls is your insurance policy.

KM can be costly in terms of fines, brand reputation, legal fees. In case of a legal discovery, the lack of documents means a disaster. Absence of document control in place will result in violating regulatory compliance.

To an increasing extent, organizations are focusing on risk management as a central issue in GRC equation. Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is now a bigger driver for GRC than Sarbanes-Oxley or other compliance requirements. Organizations want a top-down viewpoint on risk, whether it is resulting from non-compliance or operational issues and want to know what is being done to mitigate it. ERM is increasingly considered as a strategic tool to support governance and improve business performance.

Governance and compliance are essential business functions. Risks need to be understood and managed. Risk management does not mean that every risk can be anticipated but it can plan for the risk and have alternatives ready.

Information governance – effective content controls, allowing all info to be securely and properly shared across departments, geographic locations, and systems.

Organizations need a closed loop environment for assessing business risks, documenting compliance and automating control monitors to sift through their business systems.

For example, SharePoint is widely adopted system for knowledge management. According to a recent AIIM report, more than 60% of organizations have yet to bring their SharePoint deployment into existing compliance, retention, and long-term archive policies.

To prevent potential exposure of sensitive or classified information, it is imperative for organizations to bring their SharePoint in line with existing compliance policies.

Benefits of information governance: helps management to enforce focus on business mission, employees have information that is accurate, current and is in suitable format for their use; employees are more efficient and productive; removing duplicate and unnecessary content reduces the time needed to find information, derive higher profits; operational cost is lowered; retention management optimizes cost-effectiveness of storage platforms; legal fees are reduced in case of litigation.

Where to begin?

To start information governance initiative, create steering committee – CIO, legal officer, compliance officer, other main stakeholders.

Outline the scope, timeline, and budget.

It should be rolled out from the top. This way everybody will be on the same page.

Have a strategy. Strategy should drive what is measured and monitored for compliance and performance.

Information governance strategy must account for the value of information and how it is classified and accessed.

Information governance policies should support all of the organization’s governance controls – retention, disposition, legal hold, data privacy and security.

Policies need to be scalable, enforceable, and measurable. It is better not to have a policy than to have a policy which can’t be enforced.

Policies should change depending on new business requirements, regulatory demands, rising costs, litigation. Companies must have a process to update, validate, deploy, and enforce these policies. They should be deployed without negatively impacting users and operations.

Rank the value of information depending on its type and where it is coming from. For example, information created by VP of sales should be ranked higher that information created by a marketing intern.

More about governance in the next post.