The Enterprise Document Management Maturity Model

Transcription

1 The Enterprise Document Management Maturity Model WHITEPAPER Author: Mark Goodwin, Principal Architect May 2006 : Revision 2

2 Introduction In organizations managing business-critical engineering content, a lack of document management can be absolutely devastating to the business. Losing a document or referencing the wrong document can create project delays, unnecessary rework, missed profits, angry clients, litigation, financial penalties and, in the worst cases, even injuries or fatalities. Effective document management is an organizational behavior that encompasses people, practices and processes. To address these issues, companies are investing in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies. ECM technologies and applications manage a wide variety of content types, ranging from general business content to multimedia files to business critical engineering content such as drawings, correspondence, procedures and specifications. However, it is important for organizations to recognize that ECM technology alone is not the end-all solution. Rather, effective document management is an organizational behavior that encompasses people, practices and processes in addition to technology. Even with the right technology, solid document management practices are not always natural or intuitive for the people needing to apply those practices. In addition, today s global, multicultural work environment presents another set of challenges; including language and cultural barriers, conflicting processes and the increased likelihood of unintentional error. Therefore, an effective document management strategy should focus on managing the practices, processes and people involved with the creation of a document. In this paper, we will present a conceptual model that will help you improve the way you use ECM technology whether you are formulating an initial strategy for deploying one, or simply evaluating your current situation. We will introduce best practices for achieving a successful ECM strategy, and discuss how your organization can mature through stages of document management to ultimately realize a higher and faster return on investment from your ECM technology. In addition, we will elaborate on how you can avoid the costly in-house reinvention of the document management wheel by using standardized ECM technology provided by content applications like McLaren Software s Enterprise Engineer. The Natural Evolution of Document Management Maturity As previously noted, an effective document management strategy focuses on the practices, processes and people involved with the creation of a document. We believe that the natural evolution of such a strategy includes three progressive phases, or concepts: Active Document Management, Intellectual Work Management and Knowledge Worker Management. Active Document Management, or ADM, involves automating best practices to ensure that documents are consistently filed, classified, and secured as they move through the document lifecycle and business events are recorded. ADM extends the ECM platform to ensure consistent management of information assets. Intellectual Work Management, or IWM, involves applying Business Process Management techniques and workflow technology to optimize the performance of a knowledge worker team. By developing working practices and embedding them into ECM technology, your workforce may work interdependently and efficiently. This requires a flexible ECM technology, one that can automate your specific business rules and processes easily and quickly without becoming a never-ending development and support project. An important part of IWM is the metrics reporting, which gives Management valuable insight and the ability to better plan for future projects. 2

3 McLaren Software s products help organizations to bypass the early stages in this model and achieve a higher level of maturity more quickly. Knowledge Worker Management, or KWM, focuses on optimizing the performance of the individual knowledge worker. It is important to differentiate this from the traditional Knowledge Management, because the latter only focuses on the intellectual asset and not the worker creating it. In this stage, the system is running efficiently and best practices have been identified and automated. Managers are able to focus on the individual worker, using the available metrics to monitor individual staff profiles and drive performance development. This natural progression is the basis of our Document Maturity Model, which is the focus of this paper. McLaren s Document Management Maturity Model The Document Management Maturity model has been developed informally over the years by McLaren Software. It helps our customers ascertain how effective they are at document management, and allows them to benchmark their situation against other companies. Before we describe the model we must first ask, Why don t organizations manage documents and content effectively? Here are some of the scenarios we have encountered: They are not aware that they are doing a bad job of managing documents. Document management is something that was done for them in the past, and they have little or no knowledge of how it was done. Historically, the business never required a document management protocol, but the business and the volume of documents have grown so rapidly that everyone is struggling to manage all of the information. They do not realize the impact their working practices have on the effectiveness of others. They cannot imagine what effective management of documents would be like. They do not see the benefit of a document management strategy, and perceive document management as an unnecessary time consuming overhead. They are afraid of sharing because it means letting someone see that you are making mistakes. The technology provided is too complicated, or it does not fit with their view of how they should do their work. Document management processes evolve in a particular sequence. The next section outlines the cumulative stages of maturity that individuals and organizations will experience in their quest to achieve effective document management practices. McLaren Software s products help organizations to bypass the early stages in this model and achieve a higher level of maturity more quickly. 3

4 Maturity Levels The document management maturity levels characterize the level of understanding of the people who work with documents within your company. The document management maturity levels do not describe the potential offered by ECM technology. Rather, they characterize the level of understanding of the people who work with documents within your company. The only people who are exempt from document management are those who do not use documents (or drawings, letters, etc.) or do not produce documents that are read by anyone else. 5. Collaborative Working 4. Guaranteeing Relevancy 8. Integration Across Enterprise Applications 7. Optimizing Worker Productivity 6. Managing and Automating Business Processes 3. Consistent Organization 2. Having a Secure Repository 1. Working Together Working in Isolation Fig1. Document Maturity Model Level One: Working Together The first time someone thinks about sharing electronic documents, they think about a location that everyone can access. They put some files in this location and invite others to access them. This location is likely to be a share on their PC, a network share, an FTP site, a Web collaboration application, or even the first step of an ECM system. Many organizations are immediately satisfied when they initially roll out a Web collaboration application, as content is quickly added and shared. While this model is perfectly acceptable for a group of less than five people in close and continuous communication, it is not effective for larger groups. Therefore, for the majority of organizations, the satisfaction quickly turns to disregard, as the system results in a chaotic jumble of random folder creation, file naming, and overwritten document versions. The organization has little, if any, control over the information being created and shared. Documents with names such as final final draft appear, and people stop using the unreliable system. Level Two: Having a Secure Repository Having a secure repository means that there is at least one copy of safely stored documents that are required to keep your organization in business. At this level of maturity, documents are still created and edited in the chaos of the shared folder level, 4

5 but they are archived at the end of the project. Electronic document management is not embedded in the main business processes, so there is no applied consistency in the creation or management of documents. ECM technology should not be considered a replacement for the people who understand the document work process. Imagine the old central records office (central document registry) located on the third floor of the traditional engineering company. An engineer would deposit drawings by physically handing them to the central document registry with an accompanying form. Others would then file a form to request access to these drawings. This model was used in engineering companies for hundreds of years. With the advent of electronic documents, this process was naturally adopted as the model for a document management solution. The best outcome for a Level Two organization is to give the Central Records department access to ECM technology to manage their engineering documents. Instead of depositing paper, the engineers hand over electronic documents. The worst example of Level Two maturity can be seen in organizations who build business cases for implementing their first paperless office solutions around the downsizing of the only department within the organization who actually understood document management processes. ECM technology should not be considered a replacement for the people who understand the document work process. These are the very people who are at the crux of moving the organization to higher levels of maturity, levels at which the business gets the value of ECM that comes from improved collaboration and business process automation. Level Three: Consistent Organization This level of maturity recognizes the need for consistent organization and classification, reliable searching and an understandable security model. The first genuine attempt at a document management solution can be described as a self-service library services solution. This involves rolling out a vanilla ECM system to all company knowledge workers, along with the commitment by everyone in the company to use it for all documents. This environment produces some startling results. Imagine 10,000 workers piling documents into a repository. You can watch the numbers grow 1 million, 2 million, 3 million, and so on. Surely, this is a cause for celebration and an indication that the business is realizing a return on their investment. But take a closer look. Is it a chaotic, unusable mess? The answer is yes. A simple example illustrates this chaos. What will happen if your workers are given the ability to classify and file documents however they choose? Imagine just 100,000 documents being imported without a mandatory classification scheme, automatic filing, automatic numbering and validation of property values. Could someone in one office reliably find a document created by someone in another office without phoning or ing to ask where it is? Will the author remember where he or she filed it two months after the fact? Or what name they gave to it? And whom should they phone anyway? Should thousands of people be phoning and ing each other when they have a document management system? There are companies who add intelligent search engines to compensate for these problems rather than establishing a basic organization and classification structure. But is this a solution? Imagine a system telling you that there is only a 70% chance that a particular document is the correct emergency safety procedure. Another aspect of this level of maturity is realizing the need for a security model. From a technology perspective, security is about policies and permissions. From a business perspective, we refer to a particular business role (not a person but a job function) that 5

6 is allowed to take a certain action (create, edit, delete, version, approve, etc.) with a particular document in a specific set of circumstances. Typical models in engineering companies may focus on project team organizational structures, engineering disciplines or organizational entities like divisions, facilities or departments. Without a business security model, how can anyone apply security technology? Once a company has grasped organization, classification and security, it needs to take on the issue of relevancy. Level Four: Guarantee Relevancy Once a company has grasped organization, classification and security, it needs to take on the issue of relevancy. The entire company can now find a drawing, and the right people can see or edit it - but can they use it in a particular situation? Is it ready to be used for procuring equipment? Is the design ready for production to use to manufacture a part or for construction to work on a job site? Is it safe to be used in facility operations? These questions do not only arise when documents are in the ECM repository. What happens when these documents are printed out and copied an unknown number of times? The bottom line is that people can die if the wrong copy of an SOP is used. Technology can help by providing functionality such as audit trails, non-linear lifecycle management, electronic signatures, watermarking, title block synchronization, revision control, reference file management, reference file binding and rendering. Let us further illustrate the need for guaranteeing relevance by taking a look at the business process for approving engineering documents. The steps would include: archiving information to support a decision, recording the approval event, and changing access security permission. In an industry-specific example: when approving using an electronic signature in accordance with the Pharmaceutical industry s regulatory standard FDA 21 CFR Part 11, you need to provide: A double blind signature entry (username and password). The reason for signing (as fit for procurement, as meeting H&S standards, etc.). An audit record of who did what, and why and when they did it. A signature manifestation reflecting when the document is viewed or printed (who, why, and when). In another industry, the Nuclear Information and Records Management Association (NIRMA), is driving the U.S. Nuclear Industry in the same direction as the FDA with TG , Authentication of Records and Media. Issuing involves giving formally approved documents to named recipients for a particular reason. Commercially, issuing is more significant than an informal release; issues are made to named recipients so that a technical and commercial baseline can be set and used to do apples-to-apples evaluations of bidders as well as to purchase a product or service. Additionally, issues are made so that subsequent revisions and addenda are issued to the right recipients. Surprisingly, revising (or managing document change) is something that is not universally understood or consistently approached. A best practice approach for revising engineering documents is having both a version and revision reference. A version number, for example 1.0 or 2.3, serves as the system counter that represents the number of times a new iteration of a document has been created since it first appeared in the repository. The revision number represents the revision stage of a particular version. It has its own business significance and stays with a document wherever it goes. If you receive two successive documents, the revision number will clarify if you have missed any review cycles or if it is an officially sanctioned version. 6

7 In summary, the complexities of asset and change management require a solid process. Revising documents needs to be done in accordance with a document change process, one in which changes to issued documents are assessed, approved, implemented, tracked and communicated in a controlled manner. An effective ECM technology must track and resolve version and revision synchronicity with the real world use of these concepts in order to guarantee relevancy of the content and support the needs of the business. Business Processes need to use documents to carry out work, and they produce documents as a consequence of doing work. Level Five: Collaborative Working Up until this point, the focus has been on Active Document Management. Now, the attention shifts to planning, coordinating and controlling the business processes, or Intellectual Work Management. Business Processes need to use documents to carry out work, and they produce documents as a consequence of doing work. After applying Level Four, then you have a culture with a good awareness of document management. Level Five is about managing commercial risk while improving the efficiency and quality of collaborative work between internal and external organizations. By using online collaboration, you accelerate project schedules and delivery dates. Work is completed in a single day, versus sending electronic documents or paper and then waiting a day for a response. You spend less money on travel - significantly less if you consider large international projects. Online collaboration also increases the quality of reviews, because you are more likely to get the top expert s time because it is easier to grab a couple of hours than a couple of days with travel. To provide an example, document review is one of the most complex but essential parts of all document management processes. The person requesting the review needs to: Snapshot or baseline the required interdependent documents. Deliver them to the correct reviewers inside the company and within external organizations. Coordinate the progress of the review. Identify and agree follow on actions. Manage all comments through to a resolution in collaboration with all interested parties. Provide audit-trails of the activities. In another example, controlled transfer (often called management of correspondence, transmittals and submittals) is important within an engineering organization to manage commercial risk. Consider the representatives of various parties involved in a major construction project debating why a wall has been built in the wrong place. Their real concern is who will pay for the mistake to be rectified? Did the builder use the wrong drawing, or was it the engineering consultant who cannot prove that the builder received the newest revision of the drawing at the correct stage in the project? Mistakes, traceable to incorrect information, are so common in the construction industry that organizations are leaving themselves commercially exposed (often to multi-million dollar uninsured risks) if they do not maintain an audit record of the transfers and immutable copies of documents. A final example is managing the process of receiving and incorporating vendor document deliverables. These deliverables are typically identified when the vendor is engaged and are used as the basis for milestone payments. 7

8 Level Six: Managing and Automating Business Processes Automated document management work practices give the organization a health and resilience that does not exist in a non-automated world. The next maturity of a business is achieved when the organization has efficient and effective working practices that allow it to achieve its goals and to provide better service than the competition. The organization is applying the full capabilities of the ECM technology to automate business work practices and achieve these business goals more quickly, with better collaboration and coordination, improved safety and reduced man-hour and schedule cost. Automated document management work practices give the organization a health and resilience that does not exist in a non-automated world. By providing best practices for how the business performs work, it raises the productivity of less mature workers up to that of the far fewer top performers. These top performers understand the why and wherefore of achieving a specific business goal. Less mature users are not generally aware of the importance of proper document management (filing, automatic numbering, etc.), so the system improves productivity and security by taking charge of this on their behalf. At this level, the system is really performing the role of the old paper based central records department, allowing the management of documents to become an invisible activity with each worker instead focusing on their main job. The technology functioning outside of the users primary focus ensures that documents are effectively managed. A simple example of ECM automation would be the automatic collection of meta-data during document production to reduce errors in subsequent processes. In this case the approval of an engineering document package for procurement should automatically initialize a process which uses meta-data collected during document production to render the documents into the correct format, automatically file them correctly, apply the correct security and deliver them to the right Procurement Engineer. Level Seven: Optimizing Worker Productivity At this level of maturity, organizations have come full circle; they have moved from managing documents, to automating and managing the processes for creating and developing those documents (IWM), to now ultimately focusing on Knowledge Worker Management, or managing the performance of the individual worker who is creating a knowledge asset. This stage is all about measuring, monitoring and managing the productivity of the knowledge worker to ensure that they are part of a productive, process-driven team. By continuously measuring and capturing all of the processes and information flows involved with creation and management of a knowledge deliverable, you can proactively improve your knowledge worker productivity and capitalize on the value of the knowledge that is captured. Management gains valuable insight into project deliverables and potential issues or roadblocks. As a result, they can proactively address or resolve any issues, better predict the delivery of intellectual work and plan for future projects. This highly evolved organization has a process for how they review the performance of a project and the performance of the individual employee, and they use that performance to improve overall productivity. As an example, companies in today s business climate often need to react to market pressures and opportunities by quickly downsizing or expanding their human resources. This can bring a loss of organizational experience. Capturing business work practices as automated processes in an ECM system minimizes the impact of this loss. ECM also gives protection against both accidental and malicious data loss when an employee must leave the company. 8

9 A company that is concerned with integration wants to reduce their islands of automation. Conversely, expansions and up-turns have their own challenges. Today, the competitive edge of many companies is often their productivity how well they have adapted their business practices to the demands of their market. When you introduce a large number of new hires, cost-effective contract employees, or employees gained through an acquisition with their own independent working practices into this fine tuned, well-balanced business machine, then management cannot maintain the same level of productivity. Automated document management business processes can drastically reduce the effort, time, and cost spent training these new employees. The business practices which are key to maintaining that competitive edge become ECM process templates that guide new employees down the routes the organization needs to follow to achieve a profitable level of productivity. Level Eight: Integration across Enterprise Applications Document management is not an activity that occurs in isolation. Real business processes cut across organizational and application boundaries. Rather than a departmental solution, the business needs an enterprise solution. A company that is concerned with integration wants to reduce their islands of automation, the amount of manual effort and risks associated with maintaining multiple copies of the same information in different systems across their enterprise. Once an organization has control over its documents and intellectual processes, it can effectively begin sharing across organizational and application boundaries essentially freeing up high-value content for processes beyond engineering. For example, Enterprise Engineer properties dialogs can be configured to dynamically select team members from PeopleSoft, project numbers from SAP and then, in addition to updating property values in the ECM repository, kick-off an automatic process in another third party application. ECM Integration is primarily about: Transferring ownership to/from external organizations and applications. Linking documents to/from external applications, and; Publishing information into a form and format that is suitable for the recipient. In the engineering world there are many specialized applications that can generate engineering deliverables, ranging from electrical load simulators to structural analysis applications. Some of these are implemented as standalone desktop applications, others as extensions to CAD applications, and some provide a data-centric model for multi-disciplinary collaboration. What is common to all of these applications is that the deliverables need to be managed and transferred in a controlled manner if the project is to be a success and the company is to avoid losing money. Implementing the Maturity Model Managing documents reliably at an enterprise level is a difficult endeavor. As this task increases in scale and importance, problems become magnified. These problems can be overcome through a focused and sustained effort at building an environment to effectively apply ECM technology and good document management practices. To build this environment, organizations need ways to appraise their current ability to perform good document management practice. They also need guidance to improve their process capability. 9

10 The progression from immature, chaotic, document management practices to a mature, well-managed document management process starts with the understanding of where you are and where you need to be. The Maturity Model provides a perspective on the world of document work management. It can be used to help companies delineate the characteristics of mature, capable document work management processes and thereby benchmark their own maturity. To do this you may need to develop questionnaires, carry out process audits and interview key personnel. The Maturity Model can also be used to help you to develop your enterprise document management strategy and evaluate which ECM vendors have the best fit with your strategy. Knowledge Worker Management Intellectual Work Management Active Document Management Working in Isolation 3. Consistent Organization 2. Having a Secure Repository 1. Working Together 5. Collaborative Working 4. Guaranteeing Relevancy 8. Integration Across Enterprise Applications 7. Optimizing Worker Productivity 6. Managing and Automating Business Processes The progression from Fig2: Document Work Management immature, chaotic, document management practices to a mature, well-managed document management process starts with the understanding of where you are and where you need to be. You need to decide how far and how fast, because transitioning an established culture is much harder than delivering technology. The recommendation is that you aim your next solution at a level of maturity that would be realistic for your organization. One of the most important aspects of managing change is measuring it; you should develop some process metrics to see how your culture is maturing. You need to ensure that your organization reaches the target level before you implement subsequent solutions. Many of the organizations we encounter have previously made the decision to just roll out a vanilla ECM technology. They have consequently found that they have millions of documents that are in chaos, and have since learned the Level Three maturity lessons. They are now stuck in a never-ending cycle of in-house development that struggles to roll out solutions. There are many of these organizations out there that have identified this problem, but cannot see how to change course. McLaren Software offers the easy and low risk solution to this problem. Enterprise Engineer Gives You a Jump Start on the Maturity Model ECM platforms like Documentum and FileNet provide powerful functionality, but it takes applications to enable an organization to effectively benefit from them. To elaborate, thousands of users are able to logon and use the platform, but are they collaborating in a consistent, controlled and effective manner? Is there technical scalability and business scalability? A parallel can be drawn between the evolution of data management applications and document management applications. In the past, a relational database could be thought of as an application that was customized to satisfy a business requirement. Today, major applications rely on a relational database infrastructure as a platform. In recent years the same phenomenon has been seen with enterprise document management platforms. McLaren Software s Enterprise Engineer is a suite of applications built on leading ECM platforms. 10

11 Configured Business Applications Built into Enterprise Engineer is a decade of experience implementing document management solutions for major engineering companies and owner-operators around the world. Enterprise Content Management System Relational Database File System Fig3: Configured Applications built on ECM platform infrastructure Built into Enterprise Engineer is a decade of experience implementing document management solutions for major engineering companies and owner-operators around the world. Enterprise Engineer is an engineering-centric suite of applications that manages engineering documents and CAD drawings, their lifecycles and associated business processes in a secure and auditable way based on industry best practices. Enterprise Engineer can save your organization a lot of pain by enabling you to jump straight to Level Four and move up the ladder quickly. At Level Five (Collaborative Working), Enterprise Engineer s pre-configured best practice processes for managing the review, approval, and issue of controlled documents and drawings, correspondence, vendor documents and transmittals. These out-of-the-box configurations leverage functionality provided by ECM platforms to help cultures realize success more quickly and progress to Level Six. At Level Six (Managing and Automating Business Processes), Enterprise Engineer automates your processes, such as the use of retention and disposition policy configurations to ensure that SOPs are updated. A policy may be defined to generate an notification to the owner of the SOP three months before the valid until date has expired. If the owner has not issued a new revision of the SOP by one month before this date, then the owner s manager gets the same notification. At Level Seven (Worker Resource Planning), Enterprise Engineer provides the necessary metrics needed to manage and optimize the performance of an individual and that individual s team. These metrics give Management the insight into performance data so that they can proactively take actions to improve the productivity of the worker. At Level Eight (Integration across Enterprise Applications), it is common within companies to have applications for planning and managing enterprise resources. Many of these applications may need to reference managed documents produced elsewhere in the organization and produce document deliverables that themselves can be candidates for effective enterprise document management and distribution. Enterprise Engineer can assist, and in some cases (such as Maximo Asset Management software) provides built-in integration with the application. 11

12 Conclusion There are many reasons why software projects fail, most of them having less to do with the technology, and more to do with the people. ECM technology alone will not solve a company s document management problems. Before you can have successful document management solutions, the document management maturity of the workers within your organization must be addressed. By combining education with the development of working practices and embedding them into ECM technology, you can transform your workforce into one which effectively manages documents and works interdependently. Most of the ECM technology that supports the levels of maturity as described in this paper is available off the shelf today, in some cases uniquely from Enterprise Engineer. The lessons described in this paper, which have been embedded into McLaren Software products, were learned when delivering solutions to major companies involved in significant engineering and construction projects or who own and operate major assets and facilities; companies who have been able to successfully apply these lessons and technology to other areas of their business. For companies today, implementing major business analysis and software development projects is not something embarked on lightly, and certainly not without considering the total cost of ownership and defining the expected return on investment. Odds are that most companies around the world have embarked on software projects that cost thousands, millions, or tens of millions of dollars which then failed to meet expectations. There are many reasons why software projects fail, most of them having less to do with the technology, and more to do with the people. The Maturity Model approach will not solve all of your personnel, skills and process issues. However, if you have a team that is genuinely focused on delivering business benefits above inventing new technology, then McLaren Software can help. Software development projects today deliver business benefits by lowering costs, managing commercial risk, and providing competitive advantage not by reinventing standardized functionality. Why spend money repeating the mistakes that other organizations (even those with great experience of document management) have already made? Consider the even greater long-term cost of keeping a custom solution in line with business expectations as business processes mature. Some final questions to consider: How much of your company s Intellectual Capital is tied up in uncontrolled documents? Do you have controlled collaboration that protects your intellectual property? What is your current level of exposure to risks resulting from document incidence? In other words, incidence caused by the wrong document being received, sent or used? How much more efficient and profitable would my organization be if we improved and streamlined processes? Can you afford, or do you event want to, spend many, many months with almost as many false starts and restarts, customizing an ECM technology that then demands years of dedicated support, bug fixes and redesigns as business requirements change? As a Manager, do I have insight into the performance of ongoing projects, or do I find out about business-impacting issues at the last minute? Are resource constraints delaying profits or causing me to miss business opportunities? 12

13 McLaren Software has years of successful experience implementing best practice document management for organizations just like yours. Enterprise Engineer addresses all of these issues. For more information on Enterprise Engineer application suite, visit to find out how McLaren can help you: Get ECM out into the organization right from the start. Foster your document management maturity without custom development on your behalf. Have total confidence in a solution with full support that is backed by years of experience. McLaren Software has years of successful experience implementing best practice document management for organizations just like yours. We understand your needs and requirements, and can help you match your solution to your maturity model with Enterprise Engineer. 13

14 McLaren Software Inc Richmond Avenue Suite 825 Houston, Texas USA Tel: Fax: McLaren Software Ltd No. 3 Atlantic Quay The Broomielaw, York St. Glasgow, G2 8LN UK Tel: +44 (0) Fax: +44 (0) McLaren Software GmbH Quattrium Business Center Kaiserswerther Str. 115 D Ratingen (Düsseldorf) GERMANY Tel: +49 (0) Fax: +49 (0) McLaren Software develops engineering-centric intellectual work management applications for the oil and gas, utilities, life sciences, and engineering, design and construction sectors. McLaren helps organizations optimize their engineering design and asset change management processes to maximize the value in their engineering documents while mitigating the commercial risk associated with their use. Copyright 2006 McLaren Software