Web Governance

As noted in a previous post  by Nic Archer it is anticipated that a third of organizations will in time employ a MOSS migration strategy and migrate to the new SharePoint 2010 platform. However in order to maximize organizational efficiency it is essential that all data is prepared prior to the SharePoint 2010 deployment to ensure a smooth content migration strategy.

By defining efficient content taxonomy structures prior to deployment, organizations are able to more easily move content into their new SharePoint environment resulting in improved site architecture and navigation within the new site. This task in itself can involve a significant amount of work before data is ready to be migrated.  If this stage is not meticulously carried out, the value of the content in the new store will be significantly depleted.

The suite of MetaVis tools for SharePoint, now allows SharePoint administrators to reclassify content by assigning new metadata values and new content types during a migration, allowing organizations to migrate more efficiently. Even post migration, MetaVis allows administrators to bulk update metadata, should this be required, further enhancing the findability of data for the user.

With MetaVis, SharePoint administrators can utilize the new Term Store, to graphically re-design and re-architect their content, significantly improving search and discovery of local documents for organizations that are located globally.
By utilizing the capabilities of the new SharePoint environment through MetaVis, administrators will be able transform the web experience, lower the cost of ownership of content management and deliver error free automated migrations, while creating effective content structures in SharePoint 2010 – the ultimate goal for all SharePoint administrators.

To learn more about the suite of MetaVis tools download the MetaVis Architect Suite Buisness Results Sheet.

Understanding where and what content exists is becoming vastly important within organizations. In today’s digital world, as volumes of content increase exponentially, employees are often overloaded with an insurmountable mass of content, resulting in, inefficient internal and external communications within organizations. This was a problem recently encountered by the Vamosa Expert Services  team when working with Statoil.

Statoil had outgrown its Content Management System (CMS), and was unable to manage the existing and insurmountable volume of content. As a result they chose to work with Vamosa to provide a fast, effective and accurate way of analyzing their content.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer, a full content audit of 150,000 pages of web content was performed in just three weeks. Statoil were able to identify problem areas within the corporate estate and automatically remove duplicate, redundant and obsolete content.

Although the analysis allowed Statoil to bring order to the chaos of their digital content, it was essential that measurements were put in place to ensure content quality was maintained on an ongoing basis.  By implementing an Enterprise Content Governance strategy, which defines who can make what decisions, who is accountable for which efforts, and how everyone works together to operate a website and web management process effectively Statoil were able to achieve control over their previously unstructured content.

To help you identify where you experience challenges managing the life of your content, we’ve created an Enterprise Content Governance Framework showing you where Vamosa tools can be used to automate tasks at each stage.

As unstructured content grows exponentially, businesses need to capture, store, manage, integrate and deliver all forms of content across their enterprise. Knowledge workers  need the right information at the right time to make the right decisions.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. Controlling this ‘digital landfill’- as AIIM would have it – requires organizations to discover what content they have and understand what condition it is in. Through our extensive experience in enterprise content migration projects Vamosa is only too aware of how frequently organizations are faced with these challenges – for example when we recently worked with IBM.

IBM was required to migrate from their legacy system to Lotus Web Content Management (LWCM) in order to gain control of their digital content. A full understanding of their current content inventory was therefore required to ensure that only the necessary content was migrated.

Using Vamosa Content Analyzer IBM conducted a full content audit; which involved crawling all content and nullifying any obsolete or redundant content, ensuring there were no broken links and identifying any outdated pages. Once the appropriate content had been identified, it was enhanced, allowing IBM to remove duplicates and manage version control through automated classification and tagging.

Vamosa Content Migrator was then used to simply, automatically and quickly migrate the required content into Lotus WCM within the project’s timescales. Vamosa solutions allowed the project to be completed up to four times faster than alternative approaches, at a quarter of the price and with no impact on day to day operations.

To learn more about the key implementation steps required in order to achieve a successful migration into IBM LWCM, download the 7 Steps to IBM LWCM Migration white paper.

Stephen Elop, President of the Microsoft Business Division, announced the launch of Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 on May 12, 2010 at 8 a.m PST or 11 a.m. EST last week. As a result, there is sure to be a wave of organizations migrating from SharePoint 2007 to 2010 as there was when 2007 was released; but what issues should be considered before undertaking a SharePoint migration?

Gartner have urged enterprises to avoid the use of customizations as much as possible, since this was a real pain point during the 2003 to 2007 SharePoint migration surge. They also suggest that organizations should consider using one of the many content migration tools available; these tools will not nullify the labour costs involved when undertaking a content migration – they can however significantly reduce them, by ensuring that only the required content is migrated.

By undertaking a full content analysis of your content prior to migration, you ensure that content that is no longer required for the business is not unnecessarily migrated to your new repository. It is essential to prioritize content, authorize and make decisions as to deleting old, redundant files or creating new ones. This will ensure that all content meets both corporate and technical standards, while guaranteeing that content is not weighing down the data structures and back up abilities of your new SharePoint environment.

You may also want to consider companies with experience of SharePoint if you’re considering an enterprise-scale data migration.

The boardroom is a busy place with every department competing for resource and time from the decision makers. But often, content is not discussed or not a priority for the board. However increasingly, these decision makers are on the hook for the content stored within their company, or that appears on their Web properties; whether or not anyone in the company created it or even knew about it.

The need for businesses to protect costs and competitive edge has never been greater. That’s why now is the time for organizations to control and structure their content properly across the enterprise and for the board to recognize the benefits for the business and its agenda.

Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) is central to businesses optimizing their existing investment in enterprise content management systems, while reducing costs, improving corporate efficiency, ensuring compliance and reducing their carbon footprint. More specifically, ECoG addresses the following board-level issues:

• eDiscovery - Effective ECoG lowers the risk of being unprepared, and ensures that access to electronic content doesn’t end up being extremely costly.

• Brand Governance – Brand compliance is hugely important for today’s globalized organizations to ensure their competitive messages are consistently communicated to key (and often geographically distributed) communities of interest.

• Reduced Storage – Burgeoning content and the constraints of compliance are inevitably going to have an impact on storage. And while the unit cost of storage is starting to decrease and technologies such as virtualization are coming to maturity, more work can be done to reduce the amount of storage a business uses. In the process of migrating over 100 organizations from one Content Management System to another, Vamosa has found that as much as 50% of an organization’s content is typically redundant. Remove this content, and 50% of a company’s server farm can be freed up, offering a huge saving on operating costs.

• Corporate efficiency – And there are more significant, farther-reaching benefits to be had from effective ECoG. ‘Collaborative working’ and ‘knowledge management’ may be industry buzzwords, but the concepts they represent should be taken seriously by every organization. The ability for a company to capture, share, organize, find and use its knowledge efficiently has a direct impact on its ability to be productive, competitive and ultimately, profitable – yet not all organizations are properly equipped to do this.

To be able to control and structure content properly across the organization – i.e., to achieve effective Enterprise Content Governance – organizations need to improve their content quality. The board needs to understand this importance and put proper resource into achieving effective ECoG. To learn about the five significant steps in the process, download the whitepaper here.

Over the last 15 years, the Web has fundamentally changed the way organizations conduct their business. From its simple beginnings, the use of the Web now extends from public-facing Internet sites to knowledge-sharing Intranets, limited-access Extranets, and the ever expanding world of social media. As the Web function continues to broaden, it requires the same management accountability mechanisms and controls that support and govern other aspects of business.

The notion of corporate governance is not new. Many organizations have formal governance controlling core functions such as IT and finance. However at Vamosa we have found that over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical compliance for web content.

Some view web governance as a barrier to freeform, organic Web development that has helped the Web move from a curiosity to a mission-critical business tool. However, there is now a mass of uncontrolled data available on the Web and this unstructured growth and lack of governance standards creates risk as the Web presence degrades amidst a cacophony of un-orchestrated development practices.

We agree with Lisa Welchman that the Web is simply too mission-critical to operate in an ad hoc or informal manner. In order to effectively align the Web with strategic objectives, Lisa is a proponent of formal Web Governance must be established and mechanisms implemented to enforce standards must be incorporated into day-to-day web operations management.

At Vamosa we believe it is time for Web Governance; Now and to demonstrate its importance, we will be running a series of weekly videos on this issue.



Web Governance Part, Now! Part 1




Web Governance, Now! Part 2

Check out more on this in our white paper Web Governance and Standards Compliance.
 

At Vamosa, we’ve recently commissioned research to look into enterprises’ website governance policy. The results were not good. Over one third of enterprises have no web governance policy or inconsistent policies on legal and technical web compliance for web content. The research also showed that 4% of enterprises never check content for legal compliance. Basically, there are a lot of enterprises out there that are completely open to eDiscovery cost implications or other legal issues.

And the costs are real. The US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), eDiscovery laws, force companies in litigation to present a whole array of electronic evidence data to lawyers, from email to instant messaging chats and accounting databases. Yet companies are struggling to do this – and are paying hefty fines as a result. Failure to comply with FRCP data discovery demands in litigation cost financial services firm UBS Warburg $29 million. Pharmaceutical company Merck, meanwhile, was forced to hand over an astounding $253 million for the same reasons. In fact, a well-known international fast food company allegedly spends $100,000 dollars in fines every day because it cannot respond with the right information in time. These costs are real, and extremely damaging. Enterprises are not encouraging proper governance of content and as a result are putting themselves at risk.

Having said all this, legal compliance and the fear of litigation in case of compliance failure is driving the growth of the Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) market. This is a good thing as more enterprises need control over their web content and effective ECoG will make it a reality.  ECoG will help enterprises not only achieve, but maintain good content quality to satisfy these key business challenges that are reliant on content.









Check out more on this in our white paper ‘Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality’.

Charles Darwin came up with an interesting theory back in the early 1800s: a theory that has stood the test of time. It remains pretty contemporary, doesn’t it?

The idea that species propagate and thrive as a function of how well they are adapted to their immediate environment is maddeningly simple. Yet, it was major challenge to the thought leaders of the time.

Charles Darwin was a man of many talents. He is remembered today mostly for one achievement, and his true brilliance lay in his vision. He saw a pattern in evolution, he noticed the process of survival and came up with a concept which, latterly has been referred to as ’survival of the fittest’.

Taking a step back, what does Darwin’s theory of natural selection have to do with Enterprise Content or Information Management? Exactly what it had to do with selective retention of species! Content, Content Management Systems, Content Governance and Content Migration solutions are all subject to these laws. Given enough time, nature will play its part and the best adapted to its environment will survive.

In the recent decade, we have been through an information revolution of sorts. We have a slew of CMS vendors out there, at different levels of maturity and suitability. The rate of their evolution is a complex function of market forces and hard to predict. You may migrate from a system today to what seems most promising for your future. It is entirely possible (and not that uncommon) that you may have to go through the same process in as short a period as 2-4 years.

To take the lead from Darwin, what pray is the next, natural evolutionary step -the criteria that are not a CMS differentiator today, but are likely to be in 5 years time? I would like to suggest that it will be building metrics and features to provide a robust content governance infrastructure. After all, the quality of your message should be at the core of your desire to advertise it. This is a fast growing field, with many vendors producing applications with a smattering of the features necessary to support Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) goals. It is an exciting landscape; however there seems to be but few players with a laser focus on the ECoG objectives. So, next time you look at your content strategy, ask yourself these questions:

• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to my corporate brand guidelines?
• Do I have a way to ensure that my content is setup to best position us for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to the latest HTML standards?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content adequately protects sensitive, corporate data?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content does not use any inappropriate language?
• Do I have a way to ensure my content conforms to accessibility standards?

Most CMS vendors have their hands full with different questions, and are not able to provide satisfactory answers to these for a while to come. Good luck with stepping back and asking questions that will help define a content strategy that is stable, robust and built for survival!


In order to ensure you have a well define content strategy before migrating to a new CMS, download the 'Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success' White Paper.

At Vamosa, we define ‘Information Governance’ as the set of policies and procedures designed to govern a piece of information from its inception through to its destruction. Information governance activities include: the design and implementation of formal policies that define how information is stored and shared among employees and stakeholders; addressing preventable risks to sensitive information; better preparing for new compliance mandates; ensuring quality, compliance and protection of information; and increasing the business value of information.

The 451 Group’s article ‘The Rise of Information Governance’ (August 2009) similarly defines ‘Information Governance’ as the practices and technologies involved with proactively managing what information is retained, where it is stored and for how long, who has access to it and how it is protected.

Information Governance

Whatever the definition, ‘Information Governance’ needs to be a priority and included as part of enterprises’ wider compliance strategy i.e. regulatory compliance – national or industry-specific compliance mandates – technical compliance, for example, Web accessibility; and compliance with corporate policy, such as brand guidelines, recruitment practices and so on. One of the significant challenges is translating these ‘Information Governance’ policies into day-to-day behavior, particularly when it comes to unstructured data.

Managing unstructured data (web content, email, Blogs, user-generated content) is inherently different, and in many ways more challenging, than controlling its structured counterpart. This is why we have coined the phrase ‘Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) to focus attention on this often uncontrolled ‘digital landfill’ as AIIM would have it.’ Effective Information Governance is impossible without controlling and structuring your content and that’s exactly what ECoG does for organizations.

Enterprise Content Governance

Enterprise Content Governance is the act of ensuring your content is structured and controlled; it’s the process of not only achieving, but maintaining good content ‘quality’ in order to satisfy key business challenges. This is where our definition and the process of ‘Information Governance’ differs slightly from 451 Group. Being compliant doesn’t just mean you’ve proactively managed content, but that you’ve controlled and structured that content from its inception and then monitored and maintained it throughout its lifecycle so that you can truly stand by its quality.

To learn how to start to get a grip on the uncontrolled data in your organization and implement policies to keep it under control, download the Rise of Information Governance White Paper.

The Obama administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government with the purpose of ensuring public trust by establishing a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. This isn’t a blog to discuss the three points, rather to focus on the system of transparency.

Obama's Memorandum

Obama’s memorandum states:

Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.  Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.

The Challenge for Government

The words ‘find’ and ‘use’ presents a challenge for government. The challenge is that Web content needs structure and control to allow findability and usability – which is provided by having a proper taxonomy and supporting metadata; but over time as more and more content is published its quality deteriorates because policies are not automated, and therefore not implemented,and the less structured and controlled content becomes.

The Directive establishes guidelines for each agency to launch an open government Web site that engages the public on how federal agencies can advance a more open agenda. And that Web site must also show the status of each agency’s efforts in adhering to the directive. But this means agencies have a lot of work cut out for them within a short period of time – 120 days to be exact.

It’s unlikely that all government agencies have a grasp of all the content that lives on their Web site, let alone the quality of it, how their brand is represented, what is findable and if it is compliant with government guidelines. Before work can be undertaken to even make government content more transparent, they need to solve this problem.

Enterprise Content Governance

This is exactly where Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG) fits and why it is a necessity. ECoG is the act of ensuring content is structured and controlled and there are five significant steps each government agency must undertake to achieve Obama’s Open Government Directive and content governance.

•  Firstly, a Web content analysis must be undertaken to discover what content the agency has and where it is stored.
• Secondly, it must be enhanced to improve on the condition of the content
• Thirdly, it must be standardized to ensure content can be re-used
• Fourthly, it needs to be findable, by being located within the Information Architecture in a suitable repository
• And lastly, it needs to be monitored and maintained in real time against the organization’s quality policies to ensure the quality standards that have been established continue to be met

The Open Government Directive is definitely a step in the right direction to help improve the quality and effectiveness of Web content. But it needs to be done right, following a structured system so that agencies are fully compliant, but also for the American people to find, understand and use their government’s information.







To learn more about the steps required to implement an Enterprise Content Governance strategy download the Making Enterprise Content Governance a Reality White Paper.