024 Choosing ECM Technology Learn how to choose ECM software that s right for your users and your organization. Release date: December 2011 Authors: Amanda Holtstrom & Hayleigh Wronski
Table of Contents Introduction...03 Value indicators...04 Cost and Risk Indicators...06 Summary...07 About non-linear creations inc....08 References...09 2
Introduction When enterprise organizations embark on projects to implement Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, they re beginning a journey that will lead to a multi-million dollar technology decision. This decision will impact the work lives of every person in the organization: it will change how they find information, how they work with their colleagues, and the nature of their work. It will impact how your organization can search, retrieve and archive information, impacting compliance and competitiveness in your industry. As the owner of an Enterprise Content Management ecosystem you will be working with the technologies you ve chosen, and defending them, for many years. In this whitepaper we describe non~linear creations approach to choosing technologies to recommend to our clients. We will identify most of the areas that impact project success and focus on two, often ignored but highly critical elements; usefulness and ease of use. We will introduce our proprietary Performance Framework process and describe how following this process can increase the likelihood of overall technology selection success. Our goal is to find the right software fit based on the value the software brings to the organization, rather than focusing solely on the cost of the implementation or the brand name of the vendor. Don t be Misled by Analysts At a recent technology event hosted by a well-respected analyst firm, the topic was technology selection. At the conclusion of the presentation, the speaker announced, if you want help selecting technology, choose us because we aren t biased. While the speaker probably believed what she was saying, the reality is that everyone is biased. But bias is not necessarily a bad thing, It is simply important to understand where the bias is coming from and to recognize if it is going to help or hurt you in your decision-making process. Bias comes from experience, personal agenda, affiliations and goals. The role of analysts like Forrester and Gartner is to (make) it easy for you to make well-informed decisions. 1 The advice they re offering is generic; the you they re referring to is anyone looking to purchase technology, independent of size, industry or needs. Their recommendations are based on the vendor s sales strategy, financial viability, business model and understanding of the market. This is excellent information and can form part of a picture for companies looking to acquire a technology offering in a particular market. But it is not particularly useful for an individual organization because it does not and cannot consider the context in which the technology will be used or the types of users which will be using it. By simply following the generic lists provided by the large analyst firms, newer vendors that might be able to solve a particular business problem might not show up on the radar as viable alternatives and therefore not become visible on a purchasing list. Making the Right Choice At non~linear creations we believe that the technology must be chosen with your organization s success in mind. And success for an ECM solution requires broad, enthusiastic adoption: In real life, a content management system only delivers on these promises when it is widely and enthusiastically adopted by content authors and editors. And it only delivers the hoped for business value when careful attention is paid to the non-technical issues of content ownership, governance and user roles and responsibilities. Randy Woods, co-founder of non~linear creations, 2005 Many factors, such as requirements analysis, project execution, change management and executive support, will contribute to the level which the ECM solution will be adopted within your organization. We believe that two commonly overlooked factors will prevent adoption in the case where all other factors are aligned for success: usefulness and ease of use. 3
In the following sections, we explore how the usefulness and ease of use of various software offerings contributes to their value and how we incorporate these factors into the recommendations we give our enterprise customers. Value Indicators The following questions are key to understanding how well a solution will be adopted by your organization, which in turn indicates the value that a solution will present. We recommend the value factors below contribute to 50-75% of the overall score of a vendor s offering. What features will your users perceive as useful? Recent research 3 has found that users who perceive software as useful will more likely be enthusiastic adopters. Enthusiastic adopters will act as catalysts for change, affecting the uptake and attitudes of other stakeholders, ultimately influencing the success of the implementation. Enthusiastic adopters can also be defined as engaged employees. Most companies claim they want enthusiastic, engaged employees and with good reason. Employee engagement and financial performance are connected. A recent study by Aon Hewitt, for example, found that companies with high levels of engagement outperformed the stock market in 2010. And yet Gallup research indicates that more than 70 percent of employees in the typical company are not engaged or actively disengaged. What s the reason for this failure? In my view, it boils down to a startling disconnect between how companies try to promote engagement and what truly inspires and motivates employees. Including employees to help drive the requirements and selection criteria during an ECM project is an excellent opportunity to drive employee engagement resulting in higher levels of end-user adoption as the project is rolled out. During non~linear creations Performance Framework methodology, we work with clients to evaluate the high-level business needs for each department or practice area in your organization. This information indicates the users needs and allows us to evaluate the functions that a piece of software offers that are needed and will be used by your users. The user requirements we elicit during stakeholders sessions will be captured as user stories. Each one will be tagged with a high level theme and then evaluated based on the impact on and importance to the organization. These stories will form the basis for a functional comparison of the products being evaluated. We have learned that it is important to involve all areas of the organization who can contribute toward forming a complete picture or story, representing your company s needs. The more people involved outside of the core project team, the more likely you are to get a complete representation, validate the perceived value of the employee, increase their interest in engagement, and contribute to the overall likelihood of project success. This approach is supported through research: After controlling for project characteristics, size of core project team and other factors related to participation, the number of noncore contributors was a positive and significant predictor of success. Why Project Networks Beat Project Teams, Jonathon Cummings, Carol Pletcher, MIT Sloan Management Review, Publication date: Apr 01, 2011. Rob Markey, Engage Employees Using Customer Service Tactics Harvard business Review Blog, October 10, 2011 4
Which product is appropriate for your needs? Our next step is to provide a list of potential vendors. This list is developed based on your organizational roadmap, existing investments as well as current and future needs. While we are always looking to consolidate for cost reduction, and capitalize on current architecture and internal skills where it makes sense, this will not be the primary driver for ECM selection. Once the vendor list has been confirmed, we begin with assessment. Each user story receives a value on a three-point scale for each vendor. We use 0 to indicate the functionality is not available, 1 to indicate the functionality is available in an additional component or poorly supported and 2 to indicate the story is part of the core strengths of the product. At the end of this exercise, each product will have an overall score relative to the organization s needs. Ignore the market and you ll be surprised what you find. We ve come across several cases where the clear market leader scored much lower functionality scores than software vendors whose offerings are perceived to be weaker. The reason is that users will use only about 20% of the features any piece of software offers 2 and it sometimes happens that a vendor who is considered to be lagging from the world s perspective may be perfect for your organization. The following example illustrates the results where a client was looking for Enterprise Search capabilities within their existing ECM technology. We worked with our client to refine a long list of 15 vendors into a short list of 3 vendors before performing following comparison: RAW SUM OF RATINGS Key Criteria Importance for Client Microsoft FAST Endeca Google Scalability - Number of concurrent searches 4 10 10 8 Scalability - Number of items that can be indexed 4 8 10 7 Spped of indexing 4 8 10 7 Spped of results returned 10 10 10 10 Google Endeca Microsoft FAST Precision of algorithms/relevance of results 10 9 9 10 Faceted navigation for unstructured content 10 10 5 2 Faceted navigation for structured content 2 9 10 5 Corporate stability 10 10 7 10 Ability to tune algorithms 10 10 8 2 Indexing of external sites 10 10 8 10 Reporting features 8 8 10 4 Value 10 10 4 10 0 20 40 60 80 100 120 In this case the market leader, Google, while an excellent technology solution for many organizations, was not the best match for the particular needs of the client. By including a large representative group of employees who contributed to the overall story and rating system, not only was the right technology selected, but employee buy-in and adoption was gained at the outset when they were included in selecting the technology as most useful to them. 5
Which solution provides the best experience? The field of human-computer interaction research has discovered several good measures that can be used to evaluate the usability of a piece of software. We use a subset of these measures to evaluate the experiences provided by the products and we engage two groups to gather a complete understanding: our experts and your users. Interaction experts Our interaction design experts can use their understanding of design principles and patterns to evaluate how usable a piece of software is. They will perform heuristic evaluations and informal usability evaluations on the various products user interfaces to assess attributes that have been found to indicate how usable a product is. Your users Using the stories that will be most common in your environment, we will create a short demo script and invite each vendor to demonstrate the functionality during multiple sessions your stakeholders. During each session, the stakeholders will be asked to answer eight questions related to the experience they ve seen demoed. By rating the various experiences on attributes like perceived credibility, ease of use, how well the software maps to the user s work and complexity you will get a good indication of your users preferences and appetite for various solutions. This evaluation, particularly across products that were acquired and are now being offered together, indicate the vendor s commitment to creating software that users want to use. Cost and Risk Indicators The cost associated with an ECM system or solution is a great deal larger than the cost of the licenses and yearly maintenance. Factors like training IM and IT staff on new platforms and applying patches within the environment vary across system architectures and deployments, but are much less than the cost of training a user base who is declining to adopt a new system. For this reason, we recommend that cost and risk carry much less weight in the assessment than value. What are the costs for each solution? We break the costs associated with a particular deployment into two categories: coherence of architecture describes how well the system fits together and how well it fits in your organization; while total cost of ownership describes the cost of purchasing and maintaining the systems. Factors you expect to be included Licensing and maintenance costs for both hardware and software are included, as well as estimates for support and implementation staff. The system s ability to scale for future expansions, its ability to support high availability scenarios and its support for backup and restoration following a disaster are important factors when considering a platform. Even if you re open to supporting new operating system and database platforms, it s relevant to assess how well the proposed solutions fit with your existing platform if only to understand the platforms that are supported 6
Factors you may not have thought of The ease with which information is found in the administration documentation and the support provided in the administration community are resources that indicate how easy it will be to find solutions to your problems without calling customer support. How easy the system is to administrate is a factor that plays a large role in determining how agile the IT organization can be when responding to a problem. In a large environment where settings are not replicated across servers, it can take a long time to update all the machines. The number of components in a deployment and the frequency with which those components are patched can indicate the difficulty with which the system can be managed. Numbers you don t need to include cases these softer costs can only be determined once the project has begun and are, for the most part, independent of the technology being acquired. How much risk are we assuming? Risks associated with the vendor s viability are included in the overall assessment. The weighting we normally recommend is quite low, simply because it s difficult to predict which organizations will be acquired or which products will be sunset during the lifetime of the product at your organization. Instead, the reason for assessing the risk posed by the vendor is to understand more about the vendor, their revenue sources, and their time in the business and their track record when delivering. We are repeatedly asked to consider costs such as project management and end user training. To us, these costs are significant, but are much more dependent on your organization than the technology being assessed. In many Summary We d be very happy to help you inform your technology purchase decision. If you find that, after reading this whitepaper, you would like our help understanding the technology landscape, contact our ECM team at [info@nonlinear.ca] or call us at 613.241.2067. In addition to providing the information you expect about cost and risk associated with a particular technology purchase, we ll work with you to: Understand how well each of a set of technologies meets the needs of your users Evaluate how your users will respond to the experience provided by each technology If it turns out that you d prefer to use this framework to conduct your own assessment: that makes us happy, too. We d like to see some groundswell in the ECM industry that encourages vendors to focus on providing experiences that encourage users to follow ECM best-practices rather than pouring money into acquisitions whose one-off integrations are abandoned. 7
About non-linear creations inc. non-linear creations (NLC) provides e-business consulting services to an international clientele. Since 1995, we have helped our clients leverage the power of Internet technology to achieve tangible business benefits. NLC leads seven Solutions Groups Our Business Performance Group provides services in strategic consulting, information architecture, web analytics and content governance. Our Enterprise Content Management Group has world class proficiency in the technical planning and deployment of web content management systems, document management and records management solutions. Our Gold-Certified Microsoft Solutions Group specializes in successful implementation of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Commerce Server and Microsoft Search solutions. Our Enterprise Search Group partners with search vendors such as Google, Microsoft and Endeca to ensure information is effectively stored and easy to find-both inside and outside the enterprise. Our Custom Application Development and Integration Group builds custom solutions when off-the-shelf offerings aren t sufficient for an organization s business needs. This group also specializes in legacy integration projects. Our Digital Marketing Group provides services in organic search optimization, pay-per-cl1ck search management, email management and social marketing. Our Design and Multimedia Group continues to win awards for their high impact online design projects, which achieve the goal of compelling design without sacrificing functionality and ease of navigation. Each Solutions Group leverages proven methodologies and extensive technology partnerships to deliver effective, individualized solutions that satisfy customers worldwide. Visit our website at www.nonlinear.ca to learn more about the results we ve achieved for a number of high-profile clients. Reaching non~linear creations Toronto Office info@nonlinear.ca 416.203.2997 524 Front St. West, Suite 200 Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5V 1B8 Ottawa Office info@nonlinear.ca 613.241.2067 987A Wellington St., Suite 201 Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1Y 2Y1 Calgary Office info@nonlinear.ca 1.403.444.5964 #1000, 888-3rd St SW Bankers Hall, West Tower Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2P 5C5 New York Office info@nonlinear.ca 1.866.915.2997 55 Inwood Rd. Port Washington NY USA 11050 8
References 1 The Forrester Wave. Smart Data for Smart Decisions. http://www.forrester.com/wave. 2 Pareto Principle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/pareto_principle#in_software 3 Examining the effects of information system characteristics and perceived usefulness on post adoption usage of information systems. Saeed, Khawaja, Addinnour-Helm, Sue. Information Management. Volume 45, Issue 6, September 2008. 9