cms primer

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Productivity Growth for Services

Altametric LLC Page 1 [email protected]

A Middle Market Primer on Content Management Systems

Requiring the System

Moving Away From Paper

One bright day, your company decides its time to operate in the 21st Century and migrate to apaperless (or at least a reduced paper) office. Great, this is good news! Youre tired of tripping overrandomly distributed filing boxes in the hallways. You surmise a content management system wouldput those megabytes of trash on a couple of redundant hard drives. Moreover, those tiresomepeople that are always trying to find that one electronic document at 5:00 pm on Friday will besatiated. A network based system would allow any salesman or customer to find that lost invoice ontheir own time. Wonderful! All your headaches will be reduced to a set of defined procedures. Every

company document will be indexed and stored, out of sight, forever. Now, heres the bad news. Youand your department have been assigned this instillation effort. Where do you begin?

The Challenge

The urge to build a content management system for your company is no surprise. Since the majorityof American businesses are involved in the service industry, most activities at these firms dependheavily on codifying ideas and processes. The easiest way to formalize and maintain firm specificknowledge is with some form of electronic content management system (CMS). Moreover, theemerging regulatory environment that governs public companies (e.g. SOX, SEC, NASD, HIPAA,Homeland Security) requires CMS design be compliant with legal guidelines.

The challenge for most organizations is how to do this with a quantifiable return on investment.

Were discussing real returns, not some simple spreadsheet based model laced with overly optimisticassumptions. Management wants the money back in a measurable way, not via some fictitious totalcost of ownership model, capable of growing financial trees to the moon.

Often these projects are driven by senior managers, but are implemented by sub-CIO level officers.Consequently, these individuals are given the Spartan edict: Come back with your shield or on it!This is not a task carried out by rudimentary contractual coders. This assignment requires a seasonedsystem integrator that understands that a CMS system is a business critical system. Imagine everyidea from the past year is dropped in one box only to evaporate the next day. In other words, if thesystem doesnt work, you firm losses money - lots of it.

Content Management Systems

Modern document management systems are essentially file assembly lines consisting of four majorcomponents:

Document Construction In this stage, the publishers create the documents or messages theywant to push to the CMS system. The document construction stages often utilize standardeditors. These applications operate on the actual ASCII and binary components of a file.

Contribution Workflow - Following the construction stage, the document enters the submissionworkflow. A workflow consists of a series of logical operations and queues. A workflow system

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can assist in assigning other components to the document (such as metadata and taxonomy) anddelegate administrative tasks.

Storage and Retrieval - As the document exits the workflow, all electronic content enters areferential data collection. The information references are created directly via metadata taggingor machine indexing.

Subscription and Distribution - The final component of a document management system is theretrieval interface. Documents are queried and distributed with a number of programmaticinterfaces. These interfaces can use SOAP, JMS or any other standard protocols. Gateways toindividual systems are built over the standard interfaces. The document query can be executedusing either a search engine or SQL.

Many Solutions in a Fragmented Industry

Complicating matters, content management systems exist in all forms and capabilities.Problematically, this is one of the most fragmented segments in the software industry. Multiplevendor packages and a whole host of open source projects dot the technology landscape. Any oneof these solutions can be based on a complete spectrum of technologies. The code base can be Java,Python, Perl, C++ etc. There are even solutions using functional languages like Haskell and Erlang.Additionally, some systems can be deployed on a variety of operating systems and hardwareconfigurations.

Implementation and Planning

Requirement and Processes

The most important step when selecting a content management system is the requirementsengineering phase. This is usually conducted by business analysts and systems architects. Thisplanning stage will begin with compilation of a feature list, moving next to business requirementsand into technical requirements. Once the system constraints are finalized, the system analyst willcreate a set of use cases accompanied by business process maps. Once the documentation phase iscompleted, the systems architect will design the components and define the technical specifications.Smaller projects may combine the analysts and architects role.

Economic Gain and Pain

The business justification for this new technical strategy may include: customer requirements,regulatory requirements, storage costs or business effectiveness. In most cases, unlike large firmswith decades of electronic data processing experience (e.g. financial service firm, insurance providersor a global goods distributor), moving critical (and not so critical) information to a completelyelectronic format is dauntingly unfamiliar and difficult.

If you are not familiar with document automation, you are in for a surprising amount of work. Theeffort that goes into specifying, designing, building and testing a document management systemrequires trained and dedicated resources. These costs do not scale with the number of documentsbecause the system is designed to minimize individual document costs. Unfortunately, most costsare generated during project implementation and operational oversight. The implementation costsare largely related to the number features the system must have as dictated by the requirements. The

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operating costs are related to data maintenance and system administration. Fortunately, a goodsystem pushes the creation and subscription efforts onto the users.

Removing Legacy Methods

In some cases, an enterprise may rely on a number of small departmental systems constructed in anunplanned environment. Replacing this diverse application base can reduce costs by consolidatinglicensing and software support costs. Since enterprise CM systems are scalable by definition, costsare also reduced with a significant reduction in complexity. Reducing a family of heterogeneoussystems to a set of distributed, but identical points of presence will reduce training, integration andsoftware modification costs. Simplifying the content management system will also lessen integrationcosts with third party subscribers. Moreover, reducing system complexity and creating a unifiedsystem eliminates many costs associated with data schema design and storage components.

User Experience

Most legacy systems provide little utility for active contributors. A unified content system shouldprovide full previewing, staging and rollback capabilities. Administrators will also require improvedmonitoring and data manipulation features. These allow administrators to easily specify workflow,metadata, taxonomies and thesauri.

Finally, the end user should be able to access content in a simple and effective manner. Themetadata and the application interface should accurately deliver the appropriate content as requestedby the subscriber.

Each industry group also caters to its subscribing users differently some prefer to distributelengthy documents in PDF format, others require instant delivery of timely information over an RSSfeed and some just want simple, formatted web pages. Others industries deal heavily in analyticalinformation, tabular reports in simple text and models created in Excel spreadsheets. Clearly, acontent management system must support a diverse array of content types and delivery mechanisms.

Long Term Operating Goals

Increasing scale will require the system to handle more documents faster. With the increases in scale,the system will also need to implement inexpensive redundant systems. Expanding scope willincrease the number of actors and roles in the system along with the amount of metadata. Theincrease in scope will require the system to be extendable programmatically. This is also important toservice a growing number of external, third party systems subscribing to firm wide content.

Content Management System Concepts

Data and Content

Metadata is simply data that describes other data. For content management systems, metadata isoften referred to as tagging. The metadata can either be created deterministically or inferentially.The deterministic creation of metadata requires actors (usually the author) to create the set ofmetadata. Metadata created inferentially is generated by another piece of software that examinesthe context of the text itself. The metadata usually consists of a set of sets. Each subset consistsof sets of terms that are related.

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Taxonomy or categorization organizes the associated metadata into a mesh of relationships.The relationships are usually abstracted in hierarchical form. This results in a taxonomy tree thatcategorizes the individual files in a logical set of groupings.

Thesauri (specifically metadata thesauri) are cross-referenced catalogs that map sets of metadatato other sets of metadata. Thesauri are useful for transforming a set of documents from one setof taxonomy trees to another, for use across different lines of business.

Snippets are small units of body text. An atomic snippet is a single string of text between twometadata tags. Snippets can consist of other snippets.

Base Documents are the most basic form of file in a content management system. These canbe plain text files, XML files or any other form of document.

Document Transformations initiate the constitution of another document from a basedocument. Typically, these mappings are one-way transformations.

Version Control measures the incremental changes in a file. These incremental changes aresometimes committed to an archive in case of rollback.

Locking occurs during stages in a workflow. Locking establishes dynamic access controldetermined by both actor roles and document state in a workflow. The version control systemcan also lock access to specific documents moving through a workflow.

Activities

Workflowconsists of a logical progression of operations. Furthermore, a workflow consists ofqueues and logical operations. The queues and logical operations are arranged in a networkacross the workflow design.

Origination (creation) initiates the content management workflow. Content creation results in anew file in the system. The new file is usually an approved document type.

Modification of content is an activity in the workflow that changes the contents of a file. Disablement occurs when files are removed from the workflow. The file physically resides in

the system but is placed outside the content management workflow. Deletion occurs when content is excised permanently from the system via a complete expulsion

from the file system.Approval of content occurs when a designated file is approved by the current system overseer

and is moved to the next step of the workflow. Reviewrequires that a content file must be opened and read by an actor in order to complete an

audit step in the workflow.Assembly of content is a workflow step where two or more independent files are unified to

form a single, self-contained document.

Actors

Contributors are users that supply content to the document management system. They areauthorized to create, modify and disable documents.

Content Administrators are a group of actors that can modify or disable a content file. Thisgroup can also force a review and an approval workflow cycle on another user.

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Data Architects are a user group controls the metadata and taxonomy design andimplementation. Data architects can also create modify or delete a workflow.

System administrators can create, modify and delete users and roles. System administrators caninsert and remove metadata and taxonomy structures form the system. System administratorscan create, modify or delete a workflow.

Software Solutions

Open Source

This approach utilizes a central code base selected from a major open source project. Currently,there are a large number of open source projects supplying document management code. The mostimportant factor when selecting an open source project is scale. Many projects work well fordepartment level systems, but fail when used for global, enterprise systems.

Each open source project is usually comprised of the document management core components. Tofully meet the requirements for any firm, an open source code base would need additionalenhancements. These may result in some design and construction risk.

An open source approach can also utilize a service-based architecture. These systems can beextended for data importation and exportation. Service based architectures can also use remote callsand external operations to the actual construction and management of documents.

Vendor Hybrid Solutions

Hybrid strategies consist of a purchased applications supplemented with either additional vendorproducts or open source components. A typical out of box solution, selected as the system core,should meet over 80% of the business requirements. The vendor core should also solve all criticalbusiness and technical requirements prima facie. As in the Open Source solution, if there are anymust save legacy system components, they can be harvested and connected to a vendor suppliedprogramming core. This strategy provides a simple solution, but can increase the risk by neglectingsome business requirements.Turnkey Solutions

A turnkey approach depends entirely on a vendor delivering a complete solution that meets allrequirements. The primary vendor acts as a general contractor, sub contracting out criticalcomponents to other vendors. Turnkey strategies reduce execution and delivery risks, but requiresubstantial up front investments. Moreover, the requirement process becomes critical for success.Turnkey solutions usually require extended contractual maintenance.

Conclusion

Selecting a CMS solution is complex. A successful CM solution depends on the specific businessoperations within each firm, and in turn, the specific requirement from each industry. Complicatingmatters is the wide variety that is available from the vendor and open source communities.Fortunately, the activities within this software realm can be broken down into four major categories:origination, workflow, storage and distribution. The crucial factors for successful implementationinclude a thorough compilation of all business processes and rigorous supplier selection.

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About Altametric

Altametric, LLC formed in mid 2005 under the direction of Antonio Anselmo. Previously, Dr.

Anselmo worked for 12 years at J.P. Morgan Chase in the Financial Engineering and ElectronicCommerce groups in the Investment Bank. Prior to this, he was a Scientist at Varian Associates for4 years. He holds a B.Sc., M. Eng. and Ph.D. from Cornell University and a M.B.A. from the AmosTuck School at Dartmouth College.