An Evolution: Document to Enterprise Content Management

For the past five years, the document management (DM) industry has undergone several significant changes in search of the one strategy that will finally yield the forecasted revenues that all of the industry analysts have predicted. These changes have been accelerated by the commoditization of their core functionality: managing documents or unstructured information.

The simple management of documents is being built into the next generation of operating systems and storage architectures. This has required DM vendors to add extended functionality to address the broader need to not only manage content, but to provide tools that will enable the creation, collaboration, access and retention of content that is critical to the business function. This has led to the emergence of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) vendors that are able to address the diverse needs of an organization.

For operational efficiency, compliance, business continuity and risk mitigation, organizations need integrated enterprise content management. ECM is a framework of policies and technologies that allows organizations to protect, store and access content according to business value. An ECM suite provides: higher content integrity and control; faster deployment; simplified product procurement; streamlined maintenance; and guaranteed interoperability.

To provide a comprehensive set of capabilities that meet the content management requirements of an organization, ECM systems must address the full content lifecycle. This lifecycle can be divided into two major activities: creation/collaboration and management/destruction.

Creation/Collaboration

This activity defines the functionality that is used to take content from its initial creation through to the final approval. Content can be created in an ECM system in two ways: through the capture of a physical piece of content, i.e. paper; or through the use of a content authoring tool.

Once created, content must be reviewed and approved before it can be considered final. The content review is a collaborative and iterative process that involves the interaction within a group. The approval process is typically accomplished via a workflow function that defines a set of rules that must be followed in the approval of content and ultimately its promotion to the management repository where it can be accessed by a larger audience.

Management/Destruction

This activity manages the content from the time it is approved to the time it is destroyed. Approved content is stored in a managed repository that provides access and security to the information. Once content is approved it can now be used to deliver value as part of an organization’s business process.

Content can be published to many different media to enable the business worker to have access to the information—an Intranet site, a portal, a CD or other types of distribution media. These electronic distribution methods provide the worker with powerful tools that enable them to access specific information they need to do their job function.While content stored in the repository provides initial value to the worker or end-user, the time that the content provides value can be finite. As new content is added to the repository that either replaces or updates the content stored in the repository, it becomes necessary to move the content to a new state: archived. Archived content can be stored in the repository or be moved to an off-line storage medium. It may be necessary to keep this content in order to meet a compliance requirement or other business requirements. Archived content is available for retrieval, though it generally takes more time to access than content that is still active.

The final state for content is destruction. Disposition of content is most often a requirement of the organization’s corporate retention plan. When content is no longer valuable to an organization, it may be destroyed. Some content may not be destroyed, but will be reused or integrated with other content, thus starting the life cycle again.Users considering Enterprise Content Management projects should be looking for vendors that can provide them with the functionality to meet all of their content management lifecycle needs. An integrated set of capabilities is required to effectively implement a content management strategy that will address the requirements of the enterprise. An organization may be able to address the needs of an individual department with a document management system, but it will take the extended capabilities of an ECM system to meet all the needs of an enterprise.

European Court Human Rights Opens Up to the World

Serving 44 member states with a total population of 800 million, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg processes thousands of documents every week and receives 800 letters and 500 phone calls every day. Because of this, the organization needed to find a way not only to streamline internal processes but also to improve accessibility and dissemination of its case-law and related human rights documents to the outside world.

Operating under the auspices of the Council of Europe, the European Court of Human Rights is a judicial body that gives judgment on cases brought against a member state by individuals or organizations claiming to be victims of violation of the European Convention of Human Rights. The appointment of John Hunter to the new role of Head of IT Division in 1996 was the catalyst for several innovative IT projects and working practices, part of a long-term program of modernization within the Court. Before 1997 the Court did not have a Web site and responded to requests for information and documents such as Court judgments by mail and telephone. With the rising demand for information, a Web-based knowledge management solution was required to assist stakeholders in accessing key information hosted by the European Court of Human Rights.

After evaluating all major vendors, the Court chose Hummingbird Enterprise™ for its knowledge and document management technologies to drive its “HUDOC” Web-based solution.

Early Return on Investment

The first version of HUDOC went live towards the end of 1998. Users could search across the Court’s collection of content along with related document navigation. After eight months, project costs were fully recovered and the savings made on Council of Europe mailing costs alone are estimated to be U.S. $1 million a year. In 2002, the site had 27 million hits.

John Hunter and his team also created CMIS (Court Management Information System) in 2001, representing another innovative phase in the IT strategy.

“CMIS was a natural progression following HUDOC,” explained Hunter. “The Court needed an integrated case-file and DMS (document management system) to handle the operations of the Court more efficiently and combat the increasing number of applications to the Court. In 1997, we had 14,000 applications and the total for 2002 will be around 35,000.” As Paul Mahoney, Registrar of the Court stresses, “We could not survive without IT—it would just not be possible to process this volume of cases quickly.”

CMIS manages the internal processes of the Court and all the applications that have to be registered and tracked whether they are deemed inadmissible—about 85% are rejected—or come before the Court. It features integration to the Court’s DM system, event management, automation of tasks on case files, search screens, model letters, timetable generation and a reporting module. CMIS currently holds all case-file documentation since 1953 and has more than 400 users within the Court that will eventually increase to 600.

“Training on CMIS takes two hours maximum and HUDOC requires a fraction of this. That’s the beauty of the Hummingbird interfaces. If you can use Microsoft Word, you can us