Previously posted on GTEC blog by guest blogger Cheryl McKinnon.

Last week, AIIM, the non-profit association dedicated to nurturing, growing and supporting the ECM (Enterprise Content Management) community published its state of the market survey findings. The 30 page PDF can be downloaded here: Link to AIIM.org download (free - registration required).

Of the nearly 800 survey respondents to the May 2009 survey, 19% were from public sector - the largest single industry vertical. National governments as well as provincial, state and local were included here. 67% of the participants were from North America (no breakout of Canada vs. USA). The IT sector, finance and insurance were the next 2 largest responding, at 15% and 12% respectively (Survey Demographics on page 20).

The points that that caught my attention:

What a difference a year makes:

In 2008, over 40% of the survey participants had "no clear understanding" of Enterprise 2.0, or what it could do. In 2009, only 17% chose that response. And in 2008, 44% considered Enterprise 2.0 to be important/very important to their business goals, rising to 54% in 2009.

Age matters - sometimes...

Not a big surprise that the 18-30 demographic is more willing to open up their personal details to an mixed business and leisure social network, 32%, in fact. Less open are the over 45 crowd, where only 12% see a mixed network of value.

But - Not a big difference across the generations when asked "I can do a much better job at work making use of professional networking on the web". And everyone has the worry that "there is so much out there I could read, I get 'information overload'".

2.0 content is our looming ATIP/FOI/e-Discovery nightmare

This is the part that scares me: the 'newer' online tools were the least likely it is to be covered by usage policies or records management retention rules. Here is a wake up call to government and regulated private sector to look carefully at this next generation content explosion. While 50% of companies have email records management rules, less than 10% have figured out what to do with wikis, forums, text messaging, chat rooms, social network groups or Twitter. RM 101 = the format shouldn't matter... the content purpose should.

Still lots of room for education and awareness

2.0 technologies and social media aren't new anymore, but real adoption for business purpose is still in early adoption phases. Organizations need to pay attention to where and how their content is being created and shared, and ensure we're not ramping up for nasty surprises in the future.

The time to develop safe social media practices is now. Encourage innovation, better collaboration, fuel the social workplace... but not at the expense of good information management fundamentals.

The rise of Web 2.0 and social media has upped the stakes for business websites. Your customers and partners are surfing across sites like Facebook, Twitter and iGoogle in unprecedented numbers. What they are finding is a highly personalized, intuitive and vibrant environment, complete with all types of rich media and interactivity.

If what those customers find when they visit your organization's website is a decidedly Web 1.0 experience, chances are good they won't be staying for long. In the Web development world, if you aren't moving forward, you are falling behind.

And it's not just the user experience. Business managers want to use the Web to help support organizational goals such as closing sales more cost effectively, or providing more responsive customer support. This means that the external website needs to integrate with corporate databases and systems in a way that is completely seamless to the end consumer. What's more, with the cost of creating video dropping dramatically, companies need a way of managing, storing and retrieving all that content.

These are some of the factors driving the development effort behind Open Text Web Solutions Version 10, the 2009 major release of Open Text Web Solutions announced today.

Jens Rabe, Vice President of Web Solutions at Open Text, sums up the capabilities of the latest release: "With Web Solutions 10, we are bringing the full Web 2.0 user interface to both the people editing content within the company and to the consumers of this content. The many enhancements and deep ECM and digital asset management integrations in this release will help customers save costs and produce more compelling and effective websites."

If you are involved with building your company's website, take a few minutes to learn about all the new features in Web Solutions 10. In this space, if you fall behind, no one will be waiting for you.for you.

Each year Microsoft holds a conference for their partners from around the world. This year's conference was held in New Orleans, LA and was attended by approximately 6,000 partners and hundreds of Microsoft staff. Open Text had a number of staff in attendance and was extremely well represented throughout the show.

Allison Watson, Corporate Vice President launched the conference with her keynote speech along with those of Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division and Bill Veghte, Senior Vice President of Microsoft Business Division. Open Text was featured in a video on Office 2010 which was filmed during our participation in the Office Technology Adoption Program (TAP) training recently in Seattle. Microsoft provided demonstrations of the coming Office 2010 and Windows 7 releases. The second day began with keynote presentations from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Bob Muglia, President Server and Tools business. Open Text was featured in discussion and a keynote video on our early adoption of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.

Open Text was also named as a finalist in two award categories. There are a number of awards given out each year at WPC. Each category receives thousands of applications and they are judged by a variety of Microsoft staff around the world. Open Text was one of the two finalists in two categories. The first is Global ISV Line of Business Partner of the Year. In 2006 Open Text received the Global ISV of the Year award, and achieving finalist designation in 2009 is a strong recognition of all the work that Open Text and Microsoft are doing together. The second award was the Information Worker Solutions, Enterprise Content Management and Forms Development Partner of the Year where Open Text received finalist designation for our Open Text Legal Information Management for SharePoint solution. This application brings together the strengths of Open Text Content Lifecycle Management with the collaborative and end-user abilities of Microsoft's SharePoint 2007 to provide a complete application for use in Law Firms and Corporate Legal Departments.

During the conference we met with many Microsoft executives and teams from both Microsoft Corporate and Regional organizations. We met with several current and future partners for Open Text. There was a tremendous amount of information shared, knowledge gained and relationships formed and strengthened throughout the conference.

Aside from the formal presentations, we filmed some publicly posted video clips. Look for Open Text speaking on the 2010 Office wave, and Windows Azure on Microsoft's Presspass site: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/wwpc/videoGallery.aspx.

We talked to Hugh Ritchie, Industry Manager for Energy and Manufacturing at Open Text recently about the energy sector and what organizations are doing to manage their content. Read part one of the interview today. We'll post part two later this week.

Hugh Ritchie: Power plant operators run highly complex plants and plant systems. The complexity is due to having to meet higher efficiency levels, environmental constraints, safety standards, cost savings and now, even high flexibility. This is true for power plants and utility companies in regulated and deregulated markets.

Open Text: What effect does all the complex business requirements this have on ECM systems?

Hugh Ritchie: Advanced technology works best with ECM software. Due to the increased complexity, advanced software is necessary to manage all the information and to meet all the requirements. ECM software enables power plant operators to decisively improve their knowledge management, optimize processes and lower documentation costs, increase knowledge around fixed assets, and drive business costs down. In terms of information management, power plant operators are faced with a number of challenges such as lost knowledge and know-how, process efficiency, efficiencies in managing change, and version control.

Open Text: What opportunities and risks are hidden in these challenges?

Hugh Ritchie: On the process efficiency front, processes that are complex, unstructured, interdisciplinary and time-intensive now have to be optimized, in particular, to improve cooperation between departments, locations, partners and suppliers. To this end, the way a company handles its information and documents has to be adapted to today's business processes. For example, more and more frequently, employees based at different locations have to work together. While the knowledge applied in plant construction, operation and maintenance has taken a century to gather is even harder to find when the key knowledge holders walk out the door. The lost know-how, experienced engineers, technicians, administrators and decision-makers organize their documents individually or leave the company and take their knowledge with them. Important information for making decisions is then no longer available. On the other hand in Capital Projects many specialists and specialized companies work together on complex projects with time pressures that often mean a deeper division of labor that if not captured needs to be recreated often at a great expense to the company.

So, it is a question of managing unstructured information and documents that simply sit in personal inboxes, file shares, public folders, SharePoint sites, departmental archives and paper archives and making the information available to the right people at the right time.

To further compound the problem with the new ways employees communicate -- digitally, by phone, on paper, with multiple versions in duplicate with unclear responsibilities, tasks and due dates the problems get larger.

Open Text: Your third point, ensuring version control, is that really such a major issue for the industry?

Hugh Ritchie: Documentation costs do in fact represent a major problem. In the last few years, the energy industry in North American and Europe has adjusted itself to the mandate for documentation from several laws and directives, including market regulation, environmental constraints and safety provisions. These documentation requirements result in huge costs, slow down processes and reduce flexibility. The networks and plants are even frequently documented five times in five different systems (construction, operation, maintenance, accounting, malfunction repair). In the case of malfunctions, the operator must demonstrate that the plant has been routinely maintained, the right checks performed, and that the training of its personnel was up to date.

Look for part two on Wednesday.

On Monday we posted part one of an interview with Hugh Ritchie, Industry Manager for Energy and Manufacturing at Open Text. Read part two below.

Hugh Ritchie: Today, conditions in the power plants are continually and almost always automatically recorded and documented through automated reporting and SCADA systems. These are structured data that operators and managers have under broad control nowadays. But to be able to interpret this flow of data and to make the right decisions, you need the knowledge of experienced technicians and engineers requires planning, forethought on what if scenarios that need to be accessible. There are, for example, critical components that often have to be replaced before their conventional service life has expired. For such decisions, technicians and engineers need a fast, current and comprehensive overview of all available information. What they don't need is important information from the supplier in the inbox of a colleague who is on vacation.

One of the main tasks of an ECM system is to document knowledge and the state of the company's knowledge. For example, it provides a virtual storage area or project space in which analyses, reports, logs and correspondence are filed that can be accessed simultaneously by external parties. The storage of documents, mails, scans, etc. is so user-friendly now -- thanks to integration in the PC environment -- that it is no longer necessary to store information in personal inboxes, on the hard drive or in a file share. In this way, even a few structured decisions or development processes are documented in which, for example, approvals are issued per e-mail.

Open Text: How exactly do you envision cooperation with the support of ECM?

Hugh Ritchie: Its workflow, task, version and schedule management tools enable the ECM system to best document cooperation with regard to change activities and projects. With the use of process templates, compliance with standards, quality and completeness can be guaranteed and documented. Furthermore, roles, rights and tasks can be assigned per project.

All this accelerates the technical change processes in the plants while, at the same time, meeting high quality and safety standards. At the same time, you get an overview of the schedule, quality and budget status of projects, which is almost impossible today due to the multitude of projects going on simultaneously. Because not only change projects are subject to documentation for a power plant operator, but also requests for proposals in purchasing, system rollout in IT, planning energy acquisition or researching incidents.

Open Text: So many operators are battling mountains of paper?

Hugh Ritchie: Yes, that's right. There are documents that pile up for maintenance, service and change activities that are part of the required documentation. Ideally, they are managed in an ECM system. A central repository for data and documents provides comprehensive lifecycle management for all sort of important information. This can include:
• Technical drawings, documentation, manuals, procedural instructions, safety data sheets or maintenance schedules that hang on the plant machinery and equipment
• Photos, notes and checklists included with a report
• Acceptance reports, test reports, surveys, repair report that are included with maintenance orders
For storing these "process documents" that collect in large volumes, ECM systems offer very efficient scanning procedures and batch import processes.

Open Text: Which advantages does an SAP connection offer in this case?

Hugh Ritchie: The integration in SAP PM and MDM is significant if the equipment hierarchy and documents is displayed there. Ideally, integration is so deep that an administrator who operates primarily in SAP does not have to leave the SAP GUI if he or she is looking for documents on technical specifications, equipment, messages or a PM order. All documents are linked to the SAP objects, but can be researched in file structures that offer the essential ECM functions in the SAP GUI.

A similar integration would also be required for a different ERP system, but also for PLM, GIS or other leading systems. Basically, the introduction of an ECM system is always an integration project.