C3 Associates Inc.

Our blog post “Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to be a True ECM System” was the most popular post of 2009 on AIIM President John Mancini’s Digital Landfill blog. Thanks to John and the AIIM team for all of their support this year. Thanks to them and the hard work of the Calgary ECM community, the 2009 Calgary AIIM conference was a big success and proves once again that information management is alive and well in Calgary.

I’m working on an update to my SharePoint 2010 post based on what I’ve learned since it was released in beta this fall. Look for that post early in new year. Until then, I wish all of my readers the best of the season and a fantastic 2010!

C3 Associates Princial Greg Clark and Associate Pankaj Bhawnani presented at last week’s AIIM Western Canada conference. Panjaj’s topic was “How to Build an Information Management Strategy” and Greg’s was “What Success Looks Like – The Anatomy of a Successful ECM Program”.

You can download both slide decks in the Presentations section of our site.

The alignment of business and technology is absolutely critical to the success of an ECM implementation. This isn’t a big secret and I’m certainly not the first to come up with that groundbreaking idea, but unfortunately it’s very easy to say and not so easy to do.

Recently I helped a client work through some challenges they were having in aligning an established business process with a new piece of technology. To cut a (very) long story short, the projects group in this organization had started using a document generation tool that included the ability to route documents for review and approval. The tool was slick; because it is built on top of a database, a change that applied to multiple documents could be completed in a single step. Further, the updated documents could be routed for review and approval then automatically updated in the repository. Fast, simple and very cool. It helped the projects group cut down on the time to create new operating procedures before handing them over to the operations team. What more could we ask for?

Good question.

The operations group uses a document review and approval workflow embedded in their Enterprise Content Management system to update existing operating procedures. The workflow was built some years ago and wasn’t fully automated; there is a need for a “real-world review” before routing an updated document for review and approval (ie. send a link to the document around via email to get comments) and if the same change applied to multiple documents that change would have to be made multiple times. The process was not so fast, not so simple and not exactly cool. However, everyone in the operations group knew how to use the process and critical documents were kept up to date.

The challenge came when trying to marry up these two processes. Even though the projects group was using a “cool” technology that worked for the creation of net new documents, the operations team would have to drastically change their process (not to mention train several hundred users) to adopt this tool for ongoing updates and changes to their documents.

At the end of the day the operating group decided they would keep their old process and old tool. Why? The cost and effort to deploy the latest technology outweighed the benefit for doing so. Everyone at the table agreed the new technology was fantastic and that it was something that should be on the radar but it didn’t address a pressing business need. The old process wasn’t broken so there was no point in fixing it.

It is very easy to get caught up in the wonders of a particular technology but it’s critical to remember that even if it’s the ideal technical solution, it may not be the ideal business solution.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the (possibly) outdated concept of knowledge management as I do a bit of work with a client to help define a KM strategy. The twitterverse has given me some excellent resources on the debate about whether KM is dead, none better than a video unearthed by Helen Nicol. In it, KM gurus Larry Prusak and David Snowden debate whether KM is simply another management fad or, despite the trend towards social computing, it has a future. Rather than paraphrase the summary provided by Twitter pal Chris Jones or the video itself, I suggest you check it out on here.

My opinion: the core concepts of KM apply now as much as they ever did regardless of how they are applied in the enterprise. The term KM may be going out of style but the concepts are valid.

To that end I’ve been thinking about how knowledge embedded in business processes is perhaps the best way to realize the seemingly limitless promise of KM. To me, a successful “process knowledge” scenario might look something like this:

Organization X has a resonably well defined set of engineering standards but not everyone knows about them (and therefore not everyone follows them) nor is the process for providing feedback on the standards well understood. This has led to variations in engineering design processes which have impacted how quickly the organization is able to complete engineering projects. In this economy this is obviously a situation they would like to correct.

The organization agrees to undertake a project to surface these standards through their intranet linked back to their source location in their enterprise document management repository. The goal is to ensure that everyone in the company knows where to find the standards by either browsing or searching. Once in the intranet workspace, users find clear instructions about how to provide feedback on current standards, request updates or ask questions. The business owner of the standards (or her team) may either respond to questions on a threaded discussion and/or she might blog about ongoing updates and revisions to the standards.

Anyone new to the company can find the workspace on the intranet just by poking around but if they can’t (or choose not to) their colleagues will point them there because “that’s the way we do things around here”. The owner of the standards and her team will also hold regular face to face meetings with key stakeholders to discuss change requests and to communicate best practices. Meeting schedules, agendas and outcomes would be posted to the site for all to see, comment on and possibly even update (perhaps in a wiki). This community would be related to other communities that deal with other aspects of the engineering and operations function within the organization.

To this point, none of what I’ve talked about is particularly new or radical. It is the definition of a classic Community of Practice that many, if not most, KM initiatives will implement. The extension of the CoP is that the business process for creating, maintaining and distributing standards no longer relies on the knowledge with one person (or group) to succeed. When the owner of the engineering standard moves on the process not only survives, it thrives. When new people join the company they are brought up to speed quicker. When new ideas occur or when new requirements are identified the organization is able to respond quickly. And all of this capacity is embedded in the business process, not the person.

It is important to understand that implementing such a process will be an evolutionary change and that these projects will have successes and failures along the way. The tools choosen to enable the development and propagation of process knowledge are largely irrelevant but will guide what the organization is able to do and their areas of focus. If the application isn’t “ATM simple” people simply won’t use it.

We’ve very proud to announce that Associate Pankaj Bhawnani has been recognized by the Project Management Institute – Southern Alberta Chapter (PMI-SAC) as one of Alberta’s best project managers. Pankaj won the award for Project Excellence – Individual – Business and Information Technology at the PMI-SAC awards held in Calgary on May 12, 2009. He was recognized for the work he has done on behalf of C3 on the Enbridge information management team along with other client work he’s completed over his career.

Here’s a picture from the big night. Congrats again Pankaj, we’re lucky to have such talented people on the C3 team!

Sheila Bryant, Pankaj Bhawnani and Greg Clark celebrate Pankaj's PMI-SAC award