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Product category: Data, bibliographic and document management software
News Release from: McLaren Software | Subject: Enterprise Engineer
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial Team on 21 January 2005

Maturity model shows route to effective
ECM

This article provides a conceptual model that can help engineers improve the way they use enterprise content management technology, and introduces the best practices that will ensure success.

Enterprise content management (ECM) technology and content applications like the McLaren Enterprise Engineer suite, manage a wide variety of content types from general business content through to multimedia files In an engineering and plant operations environment, engineering content can include visualisations, images and web pages, but much of the day-to-day activity, around the management of this content, is concerned with the management of drawings and documents that contain SOPs, calculations, geophysical data etc Effective document management is one of the issues that ECM technology and applications address, and in the context of this white paper, document management is about people, practices and processes as well as the ECM technology

Without effective management, documents can get lost, inefficiencies and re-work occurs, the business misses deadlines, loses money, could lose clients, finds itself in litigation ("where's that missing document") and, in the worst cases, fatalities occur.

Yet, ECM technology alone will not solve a company's document management problems.

Even if the right ECM technology is provided, good document management practices may not be natural or intuitive for the people who need to apply them.

By developing working practices and embedding them into ECM technology, companies can enable their workforces to successfully manage documents and work interdependently.

To facilitate this approach, the ECM technology needs to have the right flexibility and toolset to adopt these practices and prevent turning the ECM implementation for managing documents and content into a never-ending development and support project.

This paper discusses how a company can transition through typical document management maturity stages in order to realise a higher and rapid return on investment in ECM technology.

It also discusses how companies can avoid the costly in-house reinvention of the document management wheels by using the standardised ECM technology provided by content applications like McLaren Enterprise Engineer.

The conceptual model being introduced here is called "document management maturity".

This model has been developed informally over the years by McLaren Software as a way of recognising situations we find again and again in companies all over the world.

This model has also been used by McLaren Software to identify and develop standardised technology.

Before we describe the model we must first ask, why don't people manage documents and content effectively? Perhaps they are not aware that they are doing a bad job of managing documents.

Perhaps document management is something that, in the past, was done for them and they had no idea what was actually being done.

Perhaps historically the business never required a document management protocol, but the business and the volume of documents has grown so rapidly that everyone is struggling to manage all of this information.

Perhaps they don't realise the impact their working practices have on the effectiveness of others.

Perhaps they cannot imagine what effective management of documents would be like.

Perhaps they perceive document management as an unnecessary time consuming overhead.

Perhaps they don't see the benefit of a document management strategy.

Perhaps they are afraid of sharing because it means letting someone see that you are making mistakes.

Or perhaps the technology provided is too complicated or does not fit with their view of how they should work.

Document management processes are things that evolve in a particular sequence.

The next section provides an outline of the cumulative stages of maturity that individuals and organisations go through to enable them ultimately to apply effective document management practices.

McLaren Enterprise Engineer helps organisations to skip the early stages in this model and achieve a higher of maturity more quickly.

The document management maturity s do not describe the potential offered by ECM technology, rather, they characterise the of understanding of the people who work with documents within a company.

The only people who are exempt from document management are those who don't use documents (or drawings, letters etc) or do not produce documents that are read by anyone else.

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 into an ECM system.

The characteristics of this approach are that the individuals are immediately satisfied because their files are shared.

This model is actually perfectly acceptable on an ad-hoc basis with a group of less than five people in close and continuous communication.

However, more than five people working in this way, in a real business process, results in a chaotic jumble of random folder creation, file naming, and overwritten documents.

Having a secure repository means that there is at least one copy of the documents, which are required to keep your organisation in business, safely stored.

At this of maturity, electronic document management is not embedded in the main business processes, the actual documents are still created and edited in the chaos of the shared folder.

Documents would, however, be archived at the end of the project.

Imagine the old central records office (central document registry) located on the third floor of the traditional engineering company.

At some particular point in time an engineer would deposit drawings by physically handing them to the central document registry with an accompanying form.

Other people would access these drawings by filling in a form to request a copy.

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 two organisation 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 two maturity can be seen in organisations who built business cases for implementing their first "paperless office" solutions around the "down-sizing" of the only department within the organisation who actually understood document management processes.

Although the efficiencies of ECM technology can deliver results in doing more with fewer staff, it is not a replacement for the people in an organisation that understand the document process.

In fact, with their knowledge of a business's document work process, these people are at the crux of moving to higher s of maturity where the business gets the value of ECM that comes from improved collaboration and business process automation.

The next of maturity recognises the need for consistent organisation 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 realising a return on their investment.

But take a closer look: is it a chaotic unusable mess?.

A simple example illustrates this chaos.

What will happen if 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 emailing to ask where it is?.

Will they even remember where they put it a couple of months later?.

Or what name they gave to it? And whom do they phone anyway?.

Should thousands of people be phoning and e-mailing 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 organisation 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 of maturity is realising the need for a security model.

From a technology point of view, security is about policies and permission sets.

From a business point of view we talk about a model that describes who (not a person but a business role) is allowed to do what (create, edit, delete, version, approve etc) to a particular type of document.

Typical models in engineering companies centre on things like: project team organisational structures, engineering disciplines or organisational entities like divisions or departments.

Without a business security model how can anyone apply security technology?.

Once a company has grasped organisation, classification and security, they need to grasp relevancy.

The whole company can now find the drawing, the right people can see or edit it, but what condition is it in?.

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 don't 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.

The technology part of the answer includes: audit-trails, non-linear lifecycle management, electronic signatures, watermarking, title block synchronisation, revision control, reference file management, reference file binding, rendering etc As an example, from a business point of view approving engineering documents involves: archiving information to support a decision; recording the approval event; and changing access security permission.

When approving using an "electronic signature", in accordance with the Pharmaceutical industry's regulatory standard FDA 21 CFR Part 11, you need to provide: double blind signature entry (username and password); reason for signing (as fit for procurement, as meeting H and S standards etc); and signature manifestation when the document is viewed or printed (who, why, when).

In other areas, the Nuclear Information and Records Management Association (NIRMA), is driving the US nuclear industry in the same direction as the FDA with TG11-1998, Authentication of Records and Media.

Issuing involves formally giving approved documents to named recipients for a particular reason.

Commercially, issuing is more significant than 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.

Revising (or managing document change) is something that, surprisingly, is not universally understood.

For example, a version number is a counter that denotes how many times a new iteration of a document has been created since it first appeared in the repository.

"Revision" is a real world property that stays with the document wherever it goes.

Imagine revision 5.3 of a piece of software being imported into a repository: it does not become version 1.0 just because this was the first time it was imported.

The same principle applies to documents in the real world.

Revising documents is done within a document change process where changes to issued documents are assessed, approved, implemented in a controlled manner, tracked and communicated.

How an ECM implementation tracks and resolves version and revision synchronicity with the business's real world use of these concepts is an important factor in the effectiveness of the ECM technology in meeting the business's needs.

If you are applying four then you have a culture aware of document management.

five is about managing commercial risk while improving the efficiency and quality of collaborative work between internal and external organisations.

When organisations use online collaboration they accelerate project schedules and delivery dates.

Work can be done in a day instead of sending electronic documents or paper and then waiting for a response.

It saves money by not requiring remote experts to travel for document reviews (this can be a significant cost on large international projects).

It 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.

For example, document review is one of the most complex but essential parts of all document management processes.

The person responsible for the review needs to: snapshot or baseline the required interdependent documents; deliver them to the correct reviewers inside the company and within external organisations; co-ordinate the progress of the review; manage all annotations through to a resolution in collaboration with all interested parties; and provide audit trails of the activities.

Another example, controlled transfer (often called management of correspondence, transmittals and submittals) is important within an engineering organisation 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 can't 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 organisations who do not maintain an audit record of the transfers and immutable copies of the documents are leaving themselves commercially exposed, often to multi-million dollar uninsured risks.

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.

McLaren Enterprise Engineer comes preconfigured to manage 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 five cultures realise success more quickly and move to six.

Document management is not an activity that occurs in isolation.

Real business processes cut across organisational 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.

For example, McLaren Enterprise Engineer properties dialogues 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 organisations 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 specialised applications that can generate engineering deliverables, ranging from electrical load simulators to structural analysis applications.

Some of these are implemented as stand-alone desktop applications, others as extensions to CAD applications, and some provide a data-centric model for multidisciplinary 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.

It is also common within companies to have applications for planning and managing enterprise resources (eg SAP or similarly PP/PI, maintenance, warehousing, planning applications like Primavera).

Many of the activities need to reference managed documents produced elsewhere in the organisation and produce document deliverables that themselves can be candidates for effective enterprise document management and distribution.

The ultimate maturity of a business is achieved when the organisation has efficient and effective working practices that allow it to achieve its goals and serve its clients better than their competition.

The ultimate maturity of a document management solution is one that applies the full capabilities of the ECM technology to automate business work practices and achieve these business goals quicker, with better collaboration, better coordination, improved safety, and with reduced man-hour and schedule cost.

Automated document management work practices give the organisation a health and resilience that doesn't exist in a non-automated world.

By providing "best practices" for how the business performs key work, it raises the productivity of less mature workers up to that of the far fewer top performers who understand the why and wherefore of achieving a specific business goal.

Less mature users aren't 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, the system is really performing the role of the old paper based central records department, thereby allowing the management of documents to become an invisible activity, with each worker focusing on their main job instead.

The technology functioning outside of the users' primary focus ensures that documents are effectively managed.

Today, companies often need to react to market pressures and opportunities by quickly downsising or expanding their human resources.

A down-turn can bring a loss of organisational experience.

Capturing business work practices as automated processes in an ECM system minimises the impact of this loss.

ECM also gives protection against both accidental and malicious data loss when an employee must leave the company.

Conversely, expansions and upturns have their own challenges.

The competitive edge of many of today's companies over the competition is often their productivity - how well they've adapted their business practices to the demands of their market.

Introduce into this fine-tuned, well balanced business machine a large number of new hires, or cost-effective employment of shorter-term contractors, or an acquisition of companies with their own independent working practices, and management cannot maintain the same productivity.

Maintaining productivity and company edge requires time-consuming and costly training programmes.

Automated document management business processes can drastically reduce the effort, time, and cost spent training new employees.

The business practices that are key to maintaining that competitive edge exist as ECM process templates that guide new employees down the routes the organisation needs to follow to achieve a profitable of productivity.

Training new employees to follow accepted practices is no longer a time-consuming management game of checks and balances, but a straightforward exercise in training them to use the ECM process.

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 initialise 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.

Another example would be the use of retention and disposition policy configurations to ensure that SOP's are kept up-to-date.

An enterprise engineer - business action manager policy might be defined to generate an email 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 the "valid until" date the owner's manager gets the same notification.

Managing documents reliably at an enterprise is a difficult endeavour.

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, organisations need ways to appraise their current ability to perform good document management practice.

They also need guidance to improve their process capability.

The maturity model provides a perspective on the world of document management.

It can be used to help companies to delineate the characteristics of mature, capable document 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.

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.

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 of maturity that would be realistic for your organisation.

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 organisation reach's the target before you implement subsequent solutions.

Many of the organisations with which McLaren Software engages 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 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 organisations out there, who know they have this problem, but cannot see how to change course.

McLaren Software offers the easy and low risk solution to this problem.

Built into McLaren Enterprise Engineer is a decade of experience implementing document management solutions for major engineering companies and owner-operators around the world.

McLaren's customers save themselves a lot of pain by jumping straight to four and higher solutions quickly, realising a return on their investment.

McLaren Enterprise Engineer provides out-of-the-box applications that manage engineering documents and CAD drawings, their lifecycles and associated business processes, in a secure and auditable way that is in line with industry best practice.

These applications can, for example, be rolled out to an engineering project office.

The core technology provides customers with the ability to configure comprehensive solutions without having to write a line of code, making this a unique option for customers in this situation.

Using McLaren Studio, a business analyst can configure and demonstrate fully functioning prototype applications at "workshop speed".

Rather that relying solely on written specifications to verify that the system being delivered will meet the user requirements, a significant part of the system can be configured in hours or days and tested by users.

Direct benefits can also be seen for the ongoing cost of system ownership.

For example, McLaren Software customers in regulated industries are able to make XML configuration changes and re-validate their system in days rather than months.

ECM platforms like Documentum and FileNet provide powerful functionality but it takes applications to enable an organisation to effectively benefit from them.

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 customised 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 Enterprise Engineer is a suite of applications built on ECM platforms.

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 organisation must be addressed.

By developing working practices and embedding them into ECM technology, you can allow your workforce to successfully manage documents and work interdependently.

Most of the ECM technology that supports the higher s of maturity described in this article is available off the shelf today, in some cases uniquely from McLaren Enterprise Engineer.

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 and 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, but if you have a team which 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 standardised functionality.

Why spend money repeating the mistakes that other organisations (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.

The following are some final questions to consider.

How much of your company's intellectual capital is tied up in uncontrolled documents?.

What is your current of exposure to risks resulting from document incidence? (In other words, incidence caused by the wrong document being received, sent or used?).

What would be your productivity gains if your key business processes could be automated and the people in your organisation could seamlessly collaborate and track the status of important work?.

Can you afford, or do you even want, to spend many, many months, with almost as many false starts and restarts, customising an ECM technology that then demands years of dedicated support, bug fixes and redesigns as business requirements change?.

Or would you prefer a solution that: gets ECM out into the organisation right from the start; fosters your business's growing document management maturity without custom development on your behalf; and comes with full support and is backed by years of experience.

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