What surprised me was that ERP is predicted to be one of the worst hit. From customer’s perspective, I have always seen ERP listed as more critical than ECM (or many other softwares for that matter), so why it is at the bottom? I think this has more to do with project lifecycle than with criticality of software. You ask any customer who has gone through or is going through a ERP implementation and they can tell you horror stories on missed deadlines or extremely long project timelines. For many customers, to plan for such long projects may not be a priority and they would rather patch up what they have then spend lot of money on a new software in this environment. This means there is still a decent opportunity for ERP project work.

From ECM perspective, I am not that surprised. ECM products/projects do well when economy is booming, as many customers still view that as secondary to their most critical softwares. They know they have something in place and they can live with it, so they can let new software purchase wait in turbulent times. Another aspect is user interface, most of the ECM products allow you to modify user interface for end-users, so a customer could spend little bit money and do a face lift for end-users, and could live with back-end shortcomings. A customer who has difficulty making the changes to their front end, would be the one who could be spending the money on ECM.

This could be a sign of sales boost for imaging products in ECM market. When ECM companies would start announcing their quaterly results, I would like to see if their Imaging products are producing more revenue than before, as that would confirm what this article is discussing.

I have met many people from companies/offices who has gone paperless route, they always exclaim how they did what they did before with so much paper, now they can’t live without their imaging solution. I think with these real implementation stories and what main stream media is saying, finally Imaging products could tip the balance against using paper.

Microsites are quite effective as information outlet and its use is rising. You could give content authors wide range of freedom on how to create Microsite and what structure they can use. They could use any HTML editor of choice and copy the entire output folder to their Microsite folder on web-server (files including, but limited to images, JS, CSS etc). You point a URL to that folder and you are live! Content authors love this freedom of choosing their own structure, even if they have to comply with certain UI templates, they can still tinker with those templates quite fast.

On one hand this option promotes creativity, on other hand it can lead to stale content/template/message on internet longer than you want. You choose WCM and/or Portal products to help you manage the content life-cycle, so one naturally expect managing Microsites within these products. What happens when you try to manage Microsite using these products, can you still provide same level of freedom to content authors on creating Microsites?

Most of the WCM/Portal products would expect you to create templates and use those templates to deliver the content. If you want to create a new template or change existing ones, it would take time (Product companies may claim otherwise, and even if it is as easy to make template changes in few clicks, how about your governance process and testing the impact of template changes on existing content?). In short, it is not easy to change templates easily and give content authors same level of freedom in creating Microsites. This could create discontentment in content authors towards WCM/Portal tool, as it restricts them to certain existing templates for creating Microsites or makes them wait for the template creation process before they can publish their Microsite.

I have seen many of my clients struggling with this situation, where they have departments who want to rapidly create Microsites for promotions/campaigns and thay don’t want to live within the structure of existing templates. The discussion always boils down to this, IT team would ask how many templates you need and we would provide you the library, and the response would be, we don’t know what all we need, we need to be able to create the Microsites with new templates as we go.

I don’t think there is a perfect solution for this problem, but you can arrive at one which could accommodate majority of creativity requests upfront, but still leave room for one-off situations where you have no option but to allow content to be created on free-form HTML and dropped in web-server. Both sides would have to resist the temptation to follow one or the other route (WCM/Portal Vs. Free Form HTML) for all the Microsites. You would have to create governance process to keep an eye on those sites and regularly review them for their content and message.

This made me think about how content authors may feel when they see their content being re-purposed in myriad ways, sometime totally unpredictable. Would they feel proud or frustrated? What about me? I think I will be proud most of the time, probably except when the primary context itself is unrecognizable or spun-around. I create the content with a base context and if you remove that context, its meaning is lost.

Portlet standard were written keeping Servlet standards in mind, with the notion of Portal Containers providing services similar to what Servlet Containers did. Many servlet container services were standardized (and others are on the way to become standards), making servlets (and JSP) so popular. With portlets, you can create a self-contained application and now with JSR-286, you can interact with other JSR-286 portlets, but what about interaction with Portal itself? Other than running the life-cycle of these portlets, Portals cannot expose their services to these portlets without breaking the spec.

Take an example, I have a shopping cart portlet and I want to display a link to help from my shopping cart. This help page is hosted by portal and the only way I can access it is by hard-coding the URL. I cannot access Portal navigation services to get me the link. It becomes worse when you add the personalization and security on these navigation items. Suppose you want to show different help pages to different customers (based on their profile, spending status etc), now you would need a jump page URL on your portal that this portlet would link to, and that page can figure out which help page is the correct one for this customer. Portals can have multiple pages exposes to different users based on authorization settings, but as these settings are not exposed to portlet, you would have to find a work-around to get your application working.

It may sounds like I am beating up the specification, that is not the case as specifications evolve over the time. When customers run into issues where they have a choice to break the spec or find an alternative way to solve the problem, they are open for alternative ways, as they don’t want to live with all the constraints of spec and add some extra features, they would rather go with fully open alternatives, even if it means their code may not be portable to other Portal servers.

To solve these kind of problems, we would have to start providing more services to these portlets and that would make this standard more attractive. I am positive that there are more releases of this spec in future for us!

Most organizations today have multiple enterprise applications such as ERP/CRM/WMS/SCM/ECM etc.  This applications landscape may or maynot be integrated.  Irrespective of integration issues, the people who use these systems are the ones who can drive the value offered by these applications. Sadly, these very users are often the weakest link in the value stream and most often due to no fault of theirs. Poor management practices lead to silos in organizations which runs contrary to the philosophy of having an integrated IT applications backbone. Lack of proper training and the absence of a forum to participate in process discussions compunds the problem. A market slowdown allows for the time which is often not available to be spent on learning projects.

Re-engineering processes is starkly different from continuous improvement programs. Even though they are all the rage, continuous improvement can fall into a rut of trying to continuously tinker with a process that has no potential for innovation. Try to use the free time to foster process innovation. Imagine that the group is starting with a blank slate and open up the forum to as wide a group as possible. See what ideas bubble up. You may as well end up with a radically different process that copes with future growth opportunities in a much better way.

Identify the growth plan that your company/department needs to support and build the solutions to support that. Often software enhancements are not well thought out and the final users hardly get to provide any inputs. This may be the time to take another look at the current and future solutions with a critical eye. Ensure that your business apps (ERP/ECM etc) enable these new processes and facilitate in contolling/managing the processes. Use this review to also create or supplement the documentation. If job-aids and tutorials are not available, take the time to put them in place. Setup online training processes and institue a continuous learning program. Ensure the learning program is relevant to your company’s business.

The organizations that take the time to shape up with overhauled process to meet market imperatives will be the ones that outperform their competitors. Growth is the product of innovation powered by market insight, combined with good processes. The lines of communication opened up by the above efforts will drive the innovation.

If you have some thoughts on the subject, feel free to share your opinion via a comment. We routinely help organizations with their Re-engineering efforts. If you would like to discuss this directly with us, please use the “contact us” link for our site.

When you talk about securing content in WCM world, it could fall under two main categories, content security and content personalization. It could be surprising to see personalization being talked under the security, but some people still blur the difference between two. Here is my definition to differentiate the two; security, when you should not have access to content if it is not meant for your consumption, personalization, when you don’t see the content on your landing pages, but you can access it through some other means.

Any WCM/Portal application designed to provide this feature has to deal with performance of application, as each user is accessing the pages with different combination of security (groups , roles or profile attributes) resulting in different queries to generate the page Vs. each user accessing the same page generated through one query. If the combination of security attributes is small, overall number of queries for all pages would remain in vicinity of non-secured content pages. But, when you talk about thousands (or millions) of end-users hitting the site resulting in millions of page-views, you would have to think about how much hardware you are ready to use for your site that deliver content security and/or personalization. More combinations you use, chances are high you would end-up using more hardware.

Most WCM/Portal solutions have some kind of caching mechanism to reduce the impact on back-end, but they work efficiently when overall cache-hit is high (cache-hit: same page is accessed by multiple users, so only first user hit would create an impact on back-end, rest access would result in serving the content from the cache). In case of content security and/or personalization, these cache hits are reduced, creating an impact on your back-end systems.

In the end, it boils to down to balancing the two, how much functionality you would provide to end user for content security/personalization Vs. how much you would like to spend for delivering that content through your infrastructure. It is not an easy decision, as we move towards more personalized web, every consumer of your site is expecting this feature, at the same time, the relentless cycle of extracting more out of less puts high pressure on delivering this functionality with limited infrastructure.

If you are in a similar position, you could try to limit the scope of personalization/security to certain pages (you would have to analyze overall use-cases to come up with recommendations) or use an intelligent caching solution (either part of WCM/Portal, or built on top of it). This functionality will make more impact on your infrastructure than non-personalized content, although you can limit the impact through judicious business requirements and/or technical design.

The answer to that question will depend on the industry you are in. However, in most cases, it is simply to continue improving your return on invested capital (ROIC) and gear for organic growth so that your are ready when the demand picks up again. There are several steps companies can take to improve their performance.

1) Get cash wise : Cash is king and the companies with strong cash flows and decent cash reserves will be in a very strong position to weather the downturn. This period can bring lucrative M&A options when a competing or supplementary business may be in need of a bailout. Focusing on cash flow will also identify all the major cash-drains in the company. Assess all major projects that are underway or in the pipeline for approval for their value in contributing to organic growth. Shorten the cash-to-cash cycle by working with your customers and suppliers.

2) Innovation : In the frenzy to conserve cash, do not stifle innovation. Make sure your R&D dollars are spent on programs to develop or extend products or services that your customers will appreciate. Support the effort to innovate because that is the most important factor for organic growth. Facilitate innovation by providing a organizational culture that eschews silos and promotes organization wide collaboration.

3) Supply Chain optimization : Ensure that your material and information flow is smooth and snag free. Having demand for you product is no good if you are not able to fulfill that demand. Keep a close eye on cost because that will ultimately make a difference in your cash flow.

4 ) Customer relationships : Know your customer. Be it your website, price structure or delivery performance, customers reward companies that are consistent and easy to transact with. As your customers evolve with their operating environment, so should your product offerings. This especially true in a downturn. Understanding what can help your customers in the current business environment can be the differentiator that enables a successful business to surge ahead of its competition.

5) Stock up on talent : People are the greatest asset for any business. Having the right people is key to the success of a business. Unfortunately the best people often move on if a company does not offer enough of a challenge or appreciation. A downturn is a ideal time to scout for talented people because a fair number of them loose their jobs due to market pressures. Take the time to evaluate your staff and supplement the team with the right people in order to support your growth.

All of points discussed above are things that most companies should be doing in their normal course of business. They simply take on added significance in a downturn.

I was reading about Enterprise 2.0 conference and came across their definition of Enterprise 2.0, it seems pretty good, but I felt one of the main statement of this definition can cause confusion on what Enterprise 2.0 stands for, this is the part of definition that could be confusing “Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email.”

At first, I didn’t understood why email is a bad productivity tool? I am a Blackberry junkie and my work life depends on email, so how come it is bad? As I thought about it, I understood this is trying to explain (among other things) that legacy way to communicate information in a top/down manner is Enterprise 1.0 and now your email consumers would like to see this communication in a way that your consumers have choice of reading or participating in conversation, not just with you but people like them are reading it. This also brings them to your web-site and keeps them engaged, where you can tell/sell them more!

This does not take the email away, it is still useful for communication with one person or a small group, but as your group size gets bigger and communication is/was more formal, Enterprise 2.0 has tools for you to make this communication effective (hint - it is called Blog in Web 2.0).

I notice that small and mid-sized companies that have bought any one of the JBOPS (JDEdw/Baan/Oracle/Peoplesoft/SAP) software often struggle the most utilizing their ERPs. That is mainly because they implemented ERP in a hurry and never took the time to explain the workings of the software to their users. Saving consulting costs play a major role in this but that is not the only reason. The pace of business and the workload per employee does not offer too much free time to explore and learn in small-mid sized companies. Users are generally not motivated to learn a software in their free time unless they plan to use it on their resume. Additionally, IT departments get (strapped with) the honor of having to manage a system that seriously impacts the business. This become a serious problem when the IT group and its management has only a fuzzy idea of how the business actually works. It is no use having an “business liaison”, unless this person has the executive backing to be a change agent (I am assuming the person understands both ERP and business processes). The organizational silos in such companies stifles communication even further where business units often fail to learn from each other despite having so-called “collaboration” tools.

So what is the solution for improving the utilization of the Enterprise Application Suite? While it is true that certain applications are stronger than others and they may have strengths in different functions, all of them are basically capable of supporting 80% of the business needs. Some customization will be needed to get a better fit. If you notice the problems really revolve around people, company culture and management. These things are difficult to fix unless there is communication across departments and championed by non-IT executive leadership. Selecting a competent set of people from the various departments and getting them trained in the theory of ERP helps. Once they have the basics, reinforce it with ongoing application training. This is a relatively small effort compared to what is gained. Rotate people in these groups till a majority of the users are now on board with the program. The improved awareness will lead to process improvements. Some staff may need to be replaced but you will end up as a markedly efficient and a better aligned business than before.

There are a lot of solutions to this problem. If you have faced this problem, feel free share your opinion on the subject via a comment. If you would like to discuss this directly with us for the sake of confidentiality, use the “contact us” link for our site.