The CEO Blog

Leading brands make it their priority to create a customer experience that delights – whether it is customers buying a product online, end users working with a specific application, or partners participating in the supply chain – the goal is to deliver a brand experience that exceeds expectation.

Today’s customer experience is digital in a realization of Marshall McLuhan’s enduring vision as the experience itself can no longer be separated from the technology (or channel or device) that enables it. The medium is the message in creating brand experiences that win and marketers rely on Web Experience Management (WEM) solutions to deliver a seamless experience for customers.

The right technologies are required to deliver brand experiences in an efficient, pleasing, and consistent manner to the consumer at every touch point. For experiences to be satisfying (and build brand equity in your products and services), they should be rich, consistent, and personalized. Today’s consumer expects highly tailored, adaptable, and even predictable digital experiences. Web Experience Management (WEM) facilitates the management and optimization of experience across a variety of channels and platforms to create compelling customer experiences, promote consistent omni-channel brand experiences, and improve engagement with responsive design.

According to Aberdeen Group research, leading organizations focus on delivering consistent and relevant messages across multiple touch points. This approach achieves superior results in return on marketing investments, customer satisfaction, and company revenue. To help our customers realize these benefits through providing targeted and more interactive online customer experiences, OpenText has released a next-generation, responsive, and intuitive Web Experience Management solution. Read the press release.

I discuss the latest trends and technologies in optimizing customer experience in my CEO White Paper Series: Customer Experience Management.

What is the role of today’s CIO? What is their charge in the enterprise? Is the CIO just a purchasing center and infrastructure provider?

In actual fact, the CIO is much more. Above and beyond effectively delivering the services and applications that keep an organization running, today’s CIO is the digital guardian of the enterprise.

There are many possible ways to compromise an organization’s security and deny service, from extracting sales information or tracking a company’s activities to any number of malicious actions. CIOs are required to perform a variety of functions that range from securing the company’s network and ensuring applications are up-to-date and fault tolerant to protecting the organization from internal and external threats.

Security in the traditional sense refers to infrastructure and environmental components, but this perspective is no longer sufficient. Today’s CIO needs to think about security as a layered defense with enterprise information at the core. This is challenging because data is not location-centric. It is dynamic; moving, shifting and changing over time. Enterprise information moves from system to system into and through repositories, process engines, and outside the company through external communications services like fax, EDI, email, file sharing, websites, and others.

To explain the vectors by which an information security attack can happen and the locations at which the CIO must mount a company’s defense, we can use a pyramid.


 
A CIO can work to secure the end points and intrusion vectors on their network through firewall configuration, threat detection appliances, and good password and security policies. It is, however, extremely difficult to protect the amorphous data that composes the lifeblood of your organization.

A robust Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy and layered, strategic security practices will help to protect your organization and its data. Effective EIM is designed to secure information in a process and data-centric way by protecting information where it is used, in the application itself.

Sound EIM approaches and mechanisms work to secure dynamic content. For more detailed information on these mechanisms and how they can be applied, I invite you to read the latest installment in my white paper series. This paper examines the layers of security according to the pyramid diagram above, outlining what you can do to mitigate the risk and cost associated with security breaches that are costing organizations like yours millions of dollars today.

Read the white paper.

According to the results of a recent IDG Research survey of CIOs and IT executives, the top two concerns and areas of budget spend for the business are:

1. Ensuring information security across both internal and external processes and participants
2. Making sure that the systems that capture, manage, and exchange business information are available at all times.

Controlling, securing, and integrating all of the systems that capture and manage enterprise information has become a colossal undertaking. This new reality is forcing CIOs to explore new horizons of cost-efficiencies and elimination of stale, expensive approaches to information exchange in favor of a holistic approach. Progressive organizations are executing on strategies that treat all Information Exchange systems under one umbrella as opposed to the point-by-point, application-specific mentality.

Effective Information Exchange facilitates the efficient, secure, and compliant flow of information, inside and outside of the enterprise. Unlike ECM, it doesn’t manage data objects that behave as a document or an email would; it handles transient, communicative exchanges of information in different formats across processes and people, both inside and outside the firewall. It manages the conversations of an organization that take place internally among its employees and externally with its customers and partners (and all along the supply chain).

An information exchange can be described a payload of data, moved between one or more parties for the purpose of communication, sharing, or conducting business. Examples include file transfers, emails, faxes, cloud-based file sharing, and so on. These services generate truly massive amounts of data.

Information Exchange solutions like cloud-based file transfer and messaging combine enterprise-level security with collaborative features and the flexibility of the cloud. Organizations can use it to exchange information with customers, partners, and employees easily from any device and any location, overcoming many of the issues around transferring large files. The result is a communications stream that is as easy to use as email, yet meets the security and audit trail requirements of today’s enterprise for compliance and governance.

From extending governance policies and best practices across channels to ensure compliance to removing barriers by accelerating information sharing through mobile devices, Information Exchange is redefining enterprise conversations. Within the next decade, we’ll see a closer alignment of Information Exchange capabilities with ECM, Discovery and content analytics technologies, business process and case management applications, and mobile solutions.

The latest white paper in the CEO White Paper Series explores Information Exchange solutions, with a focus on the areas where significant business value can be realized through the implementation of a comprehensive, global, and cloud-based approach. Read the white paper.

Creating the Social Enterprise is not a feature in a product; it is the future of communication and collaboration.

The Social Enterprise is the next-generation enterprise platform for interactions and communications and will dramatically increase productivity and insight for enterprises. It’s also about connecting employee to employee, customer to customer, and ultimately, employee to customer through an open online network. In fact, McKinsey estimates there is $1 Trillion USD of "enterprise value" that can be unlocked through social technologies. 

Top Business Objectives for Social Media
Source: Marketingcharts.com

A Social Enterprise celebrates the individual.  You are in control of what your persona is, what information you want to share or consume or simply observe, and at what level you choose to participate. The value of the network is proportional to its collective usage and content.

Today, there are 1.5 billion social networking users globally, 80% of online users interact with a social network and 28 hours a week is spent by knowledge workers writing emails, searching for information, and collaborating inside a firewall (according to a recent McKinsey study).

Social technologies will change the way millions of people work and live and connect people (and ideas) who would otherwise never meet in person. Software companies, for example, are by design a network, not a hierarchy. Consider engineers collaborating with support, presales communicating and sharing across countries, industry communities of interests forming, customer needs flowing more quickly, product management re-invented. 

OpenText EIM brings consumer experiences and expectations to the enterprise to unlock the value of “social” – safely and securely. Coupling your social platform with a Customer Experience Management (CEM) infrastructure to include Web Content Management (WCM), Portal and other capabilities means that a seamless, integrated experience can be provided from the first time a customer hits your website to the time an engineer is designing the next generation product.

Every step from conception to fruition and support can be managed on your Enterprise Social Platform, and every department can be engaged in the conversation. Marketing can begin their work and interact directly with product teams as new offerings are brought to market. Sales can watch, listen and learn from the customers and what they discuss. There are no limitations.

The Social Enterprise represents true value for organizations that are ready to embrace it. For more information on the value of transforming your organization into a Social Enterprise, read my white paper.

The following organizations are unleashing the power of their information, for greater business insight and distinct competitive advantage:

• The Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) system is mining volumes of information to count and track instances of potential global threats – for quicker response to help save lives.
• The Globe and Mail is improving search results and increasing search engine optimization (SEO) to make their site more “sticky” and generate more revenue.
• Cyberpresse combines historical and new content to create highly relevant topic pages and a more satisfying end-user experience.
• The Mosaic Company is managing its operations in a transparent and efficient manner by ensuring that all content is safe, searchable, and readily accessible.
• Halliburton is complying with company policy and reducing litigation expenses in eDiscovery, while decreasing the cost of email storage.

What sets these companies apart is their ability to make sound decisions and execute quickly. Like most organizations, they rely on fast access to quality information to make good business decisions. But accurate information isn’t always easy to come by, especially considering the large volumes of information currently housed in organizations. Many organizations are struggling with the size and complexity of their data. In fact, when Forrester surveyed 176 organizations across industries and the globe, the majority identified the volume of information as a key challenge.
 
 

New technologies are producing more data and organizations are looking for better ways to obtain value from this information. Increasingly different data types need to be integrated with enterprise applications for reporting and analysis. This is validated on a deeper dive of the same survey results, as business decision makers identify the variety of information as the second largest challenge, while IT decision makers are more concerned with the velocity of data analysis (see below).

As a result, requirements for new types of analytic applications, integration, and transparency are emerging. These needs are pushing the limits of today’s technology infrastructures to use content in ways that it hasn’t been used before.

To harness information’s true business potential, organizations need to extract meaning and context from vast amounts of content. Often, silos are created as information is created and managed across different departments, repositories, and processes. Analyzing different forms of information across these silos drives deeper insight and more business opportunities.

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) delivers a unified infrastructure that lays the foundation for better organizational insight. It links transactional data with unstructured information in a shared enterprise system, and provides the analytical capabilities needed to more effectively align processes and enable more effective decision-making. 

The Discovery facet of EIM helps organizations organize, combine, visualize, and act on enterprise information in new ways to identify relationships, risks, and new opportunities for growth.

From scenarios and business applications to best practices on implementing Discovery solutions, the latest installment in the CEO White Paper Series examines the role that Discovery plays in enabling effective governance, delving into Big Data, reducing the risk of litigation and the cost of eDiscovery, monetizing content to generate more revenue, and unleashing the power of enterprise information.

Read the white paper.

This is an exciting day for us as we announce the acquisition of Resonate Knowledge Technology (KT), a long-time partner of OpenText. For many years now, Resonate KT has focussed exclusively on developing innovative, easy to use extensions for the OpenText Content Server and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) offerings.

As part of our commitment to enriching our customers’ experience with information, the addition of these products will give organizations improved, visual access to accurate information, tailored to suit end-user requirements and a development platform they can use to create custom applications.

Resonate KT delivers proven solutions that combine data with business content to increase efficiency and enable better decision-making, based on presenting the most complete data sets available. Over 500 customers in 20 countries currently use Resonate KT extensions to create customized dashboards, views, reports, and workflows to match their unique business needs. This acquisition expands the availability of the Resonate KT offerings, making them available as an integrated part of the ECM product portfolio in regions throughout the world. 

Components of the technology will be built into our core ECM offerings to enhance user experience through powerful, visual, and extensible tools. Users will be delighted by easy-to-use, business-focused views and the flexibility to access content from their desktop, mobile device, or web browser. Developers will appreciate working in a development environment that offers tight integration and accelerates custom deployment and creation of applications.

Expect further innovations and contributions from the Resonate KT development team as we continue to work together to support our customers and fuel future growth in the EIM market.

For more information, read the press release.

An Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy should be a top priority for CIOs and IT business executives according to a survey of almost 140 technology leaders.

The survey, captured in a recent article in CIO Magazine, concludes that if organizations want to improve performance and differentiate themselves from their competition, a sound EIM strategy is in order.

CIOs are responsible for volumes of enterprise information and the systems that house this data, which offer a number of challenges and an unlimited range of opportunities. Mismanaged information has cost the enterprise millions of dollars in costs associated with litigation, regulatory compliance, and eDiscovery. In addition to risk, there is unrealized potential – including solutions for improving efficiency, innovation, quality, customer satisfaction, and profit.

Survey findings include :

• 80% of the enterprise information in any organization resides in documents, emails, social media, slide presentations, videos, and other unstructured data formats
• Over 70% of survey respondents state that the top three trends mobility, big data, and a proliferation of devices are increasing the need for an EIM strategy (see graph below)

• 31% of survey respondents say it is “critical” for their companies to have a comprehensive EIM strategy, while another 49% regard it as “very important”
• 55% recognize the importance of EIM in solving existing business problems, and just  5% say information management is of low importance
• 76% indicate that IT plays a key role in ensuring that organizational objectives are met, including driving overall information strategy
• 38% report their organization has a consistent information management strategy already in place

This article provides statistical evidence. We are seeing the rise of a new generation of CIOs that will transform their organizations through the use of Information. I, CIO. Information, Chief INFORMATION Officer.

Read the full article.

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The results are tangible and substantial …

• 60% cost reduction for printing at a major automobile manufacturer 
• 50% less time spent searching on documents for an oil and gas company
• As much as 20% savings on file processing in the legal department at a large manufacturing company
• Improved records retrieval time by 50% at a hospital
• User adoption increases by 20% for a major European bank
• Reduced legal fees for e-discovery by 50% per year at a global telecommunications company

These are all business performance improvements experienced by organizations that have implemented an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution. And these improvements can translate into hundreds of thousands—even millions—of dollars saved.

ECM is the technology used for managing information throughout its lifecycle to improve business productivity, while mitigating the risk and controlling the costs of growing volumes of content.

Information is a critical enterprise asset. The effective management of enterprise information has become a key differentiator in today’s competitive market. Unmanaged business information can be risky and drive up costs. Well-governed information, on the other hand, provides a path to success by reducing risk and uncovering opportunities to drive business value.

Complete Content Lifecycle Management – from Creation to Expiry

Many organizations struggle to manage large amounts of content across business systems, from sources both inside and outside the enterprise. These assets range from office and PDF documents, CAD diagrams and models, and team meeting presentations to the 170 million+ emails sent globally every minute. ECM describes a collection of interrelated and integrated software products that manages the entire lifecycle of this information—from creation and management to storage, distribution, archiving, and, ultimately, disposition—while ensuring that security policies are respected and regulatory compliance mandates are adhered to.

Organizations that have an ECM solution in place can more effectively take advantage of their data and use it to compete in the market, instead of allowing it to remain idle and at risk. The value of an ECM solution can be measured in terms of increased revenue, mitigated risk, reduced expenses, business continuity, and business transformation.

To illustrate the benefits of ECM, let's look at one of the world’s largest energy companies. This organization was spending a great deal of time and money managing critical content throughout its lifecycle, and as a result, incurred tremendous costs related to the outsourcing of legal discovery. The expense and legal risk of penalties and fines due to the lack of an efficient and defensible process of information governance was overwhelming. After employing a well-structured ECM strategy to govern content and deliver early case assessment for the legal department, the company saved time and money, improved efficiency, and strengthened their compliance program. Reliance on third-party legal teams during the discovery process has all but been eliminated; users spend less time applying retention policies and other information management tasks, freeing them up to work on completing projects faster; and overall storage and management costs of business content have been dramatically reduced.

Embracing an ECM solution as part of an overall EIM strategy delivers true end-to-end management of information across people and processes. It results in fast and seamless access from multiple environments—web, desktop, and mobile, within business processes and the business applications that drive them. 

Organizations like those included in this post are unleashing the power of their information to align processes, provide deeper insight into information, and meet information governance and security needs with ECM. I invite you to read more about ECM in my most recent white paper: Enterprise Content Management: Governing the Power of Information. This white paper describes a holistic view of ECM in the context of EIM; evaluating the strategies, methods, and tools used in the effective preservation and management of content.

In the spirit of Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great, good companies accept that there is a proportional mix of happy, satisfied, and unsatisfied customers using their products or services. But great companies set a higher bar; they understand that moving from meeting customer needs to exceeding their expectations will likely result in a purchase, create a repeat customer, and this customer will be much more inclined to share their positive experience with friends.

While there are multiple definitions for Customer Experience Management (CEM), they converge on this very idea: exceeding customer expectations will improve business results. CEM maintains a focus on revenue achieved by obtaining a 360° view of the customer. It offers up new ways to listen, learn, and proactively respond to customer needs.

Your audience wants to feel known to you, regardless of how they enter into a relationship with you, whether it’s by phone call, walk-in, website visit, or partner referral. They have an attitude of “if the news is important, it will find me” and this requires a shift in thinking about the communication channel employed to connect: for example, mobile apps can aid in knowledge sharing, YouTube videos replace TV ads, and Twitter is used as a strategic PR and customer support tool.

CEM empowers people inside your company to create relevant experiences both inside and outside the firewall, across each stage of customer interaction. A great information exchange lets you to tell your story to an audience and encourages your customers to tell theirs. It brings you both together to form a conversation. Take, for example, a prospect who watches a video posted to YouTube and follows it to a website for more information, purchases a product featured there, receives a personalized thank you receipt, and goes on to connect via a customer self-service portal for help or maintenance information. Each of these experiences was orchestrated to maximize engagement, capture preferences, and facilitate a seamless buying experience.

Experience Across the Customer Lifecycle

CEM helps you reach your markets and customers by creating a rich and consistent digital presence across the channels required to remain relevant, engaged, and helpful to partners, customers, constituents, and employees. It does so without sacrificing your organization’s requirements for security, governance, and process transparency. In the larger context of an Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solution and the ability to manage, process, exchange, and discover information, CEM can immediately expose, personalize, and socialize information that is relevant to suit audience needs.

A comprehensive information strategy influenced by audience experience helps CIOs and CMOs transform unstructured data sources into levers of competitive advantage and profitability. Using CEM, your organization will gain better business insight into both individuals and markets. With proper measurement and analysis, you can offer optimal products or services to your potential customer and even refine the experience on their next visit.

My most recent white paper, “Customer Experience Management: Experiencing the Power of Information” describes the many facets of adopting CEM practices, including how audience interaction has shifted (the impact of social, mobile, web and context-rich communications), how business priorities are changing, and how CEM works to deliver optimized, personalized, and contextual experiences to all stakeholders for real business results. Read the white paper.

OpenText Business Process Management (BPM) is one of the five core technologies of Enterprise Information Management (EIM). BPM technologies empower employees, customers, and partners with the processes and information they need to produce signature experiences and significant business results. On top of core transactional capabilities, our BPM solutions enable organizations to optimize both structured and unstructured processes to make quicker, better, more informed decisions.

Implementing sound BPM practices enables you to understand, monitor, and account for how your business is conducted. Where are your bottlenecks? Where are your biggest resource expenditures? How do you ensure repeatable, structured customer service or case management?

These practices are driven by business process and case management solutions, which are used by global organizations to replace manual, paper-intensive processes and breathe new life into rigid line-of-business systems. Along with the effective management of processes, these solutions also deliver a mechanism for assembling the context of your enterprise’s decisions for greater visibility into mission critical activities.

Practitioners and customers of BPM technologies are familiar with the real-world need to integrate business processes with multiple enterprise systems. At the same time, there are also requirements to incorporate data from systems of record, provide mobile user experiences, and enable customer self-service within the context of a BPM solution.

EIM delivers the unique opportunity to incorporate business processes and case management applications into a larger, more comprehensive solution. Integrating BPM with the other EIM core technologies like Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Information Exchange, and Customer Experience Management (CEM) delivers significant business value from the vast amounts of unstructured information generated daily by organizations the world over.

Integrated Processes, Information, Discovery, and Customer Experience

Across the enterprise, information, people, and processes are all connected. Only OpenText offers the breadth and depth of offerings to support structured and unstructured processes, and we remain committed to our investment in BPM. We will continue to innovate in this area according to our long term BPM roadmap. Look for developments in our Case 360 , MBPM and Process360 products over the next year.

Read about how integral BPM is to a unified vision of EIM in my most recent white paper: “Business Process Management: Accelerating the Power of Information.”