Additionally, equipment and plant-related problems can lead to even bigger issues: heightened risk of environmental damages, increased legal and compliance costs, greater risk to maintenance workers’ safety, and brand deterioration. A company’s only defense is to ensure higher equipment reliability and a clear record of all maintenance activities, so they can proactively take action to prevent unplanned downtime that could affect their bottom line.

Plant maintenance and equipment failure analysis stretches across departments, divisions, regions, and even different organizations. You need to include all appropriate stakeholders, both within and outside of the organization, in collaborative processes that make it easy to track any information gathered along the way.

Collecting, storing, and retrieving all this data is critical to resolving an unplanned equipment failure. For example, vibration analysis, nondestructive testing results, and digital images should all be stored with the equipment data. This way, maintenance planners can more easily analyze relevant information to determine what improvements the regularly scheduled maintenance needs and improve maintenance frequency.

• Having plant maintenance hierarchy and associated content – such as images of failed components – available from a single interface can cause the epiphany moment that makes you change the required lubrication frequency of a machine, thus extending the component’s run life
• Accessing historical vibration analysis results allows you to replace a bearing before it fails, ensuring a shorter, planned outage rather than a lengthy, unplanned repair that might also cause collateral damage

A big-data strategy that integrates all relevant content with your plant operations means you can:

• Enhance internal and external collaboration around plant maintenance
• Improve equipment reliability
• Reduce outages and costs due to a simplified process for collecting, storing, and retrieving maintenance information
• Improve failure analysis and reporting
• Increase regulatory compliance and reduce legal exposure through better records management, traceability, and auditability

If your organization is like most, you probably have between five and 20 applications that are content-related. Employees have to learn how to use multiple systems just to get one task done. IT staff has to dedicate time and resources to managing multiple systems—many of which have very similar functions—in multiple departments.

It’s a recipe for complexity, and it is just now—with the rise of composite content applications—starting to change.

Defining Composite Content Applications

Many organizations have begun implementing enterprise content management (ECM) as integrative middleware that enables content-related applications to work together to drive business processes. Composite content applications (CCA) are the physical manifestation of this strategy.

Gartner defines a composite application as “an abstraction layer on top of a service repository, which orchestrates a new business process and has its own user interface.”

My colleague Kimberly Samuelson likes to say that CCAs are cross-functional process solutions assembled from prebuilt components. For example:

• CRM + eForms + ECM + BPM = client onboarding CCA

In other words, the unified whole is greater than—and different from—the sum of its parts.

CCAs and ECM

Where an integration typically links two different software applications together to act as a coordinated whole, a CCA involves linking three or more systems in service of a specific business process, such as:

• Invoice processing
• Purchase order management
• Contract management
• Correspondence support
• HR onboarding
• Sales order and material processing
• Case management
• Claims processing
• Benefits enrollment

CCAs are generally built on top of an ECM system because they automate complex processes that previously required staff to manually sort through paper documents and other forms of content such as green screen case records, e-mail correspondence, etc.

Currently, although 27.4% of documents are used to either initiate or drive a business process, only 28% of organizations capture their documents at the beginning of the process. The earlier you capture a document, the better the ROI, so using ECM as a foundational element of a CCA is important. By doing so, you gain benefits including:

• Shorter cycle times.
• Fewer errors.
• Improved compliance and auditability.
• Better visibility into the business process.

Get More Out of What You’ve Already Got

CCAs are attractive because they allow organizations to create new and innovative solutions using existing technology investments. According to Brent Burns, Founder of Asset Dedication, LLC, “We wanted to keep our fees low enough that we’d be extremely competitive. Technology was the way to get more done with a smaller headcount.”

He explains that Asset Dedication has created a CCA to automate the account opening process while streamlining compliance procedures by integrating BondDesk’s inventory and trade management system with Asset Dedication’s portfolio management, customer relationship management (CRM) and ECM systems.

Burns says, “Once someone signs onto the system, they can do everything they need to without leaving the program they’re using. I don’t want people having to learn 20 systems—I want that single sign-on; I want it to be that fast.”

CCAs allow access to multiple data sources and foster the merging of real-time and legacy data into a single interface in order to simplify a complex business process. When you build a CCA, you are extending and evolving your existing IT assets in order to extract more value from what you already have.

A distinguishing feature of Hamburg's approach is the use of a single format to store the main content of each e-record managed by the system. This is currently the TIF format. Through the use of the Hyper.Net® PDF/A Compliance Automator, the Hyper.Net® Workload Manager and Hyper.Net Web Services, the city has been able to ensure the long-term readability of content by eliminating the use of proprietary file formats going forward. For this reason, documents in the HIM workflow are now converted after each modification into PDF renditions that are attached back into the corresponding e-record. When a workflow process has been completed, all documents associated with the workflow and the workflow's audit trail itself are date stamped and comverted into a single compound PDF/A file and transferred to the e-record storage area on the tamper-proof EMC Centera information archive.

Throughout the various Hamburg departments and agencies, the HIM workflow—implemented on the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform—support mores than 10,000 regular users and automates approximately 4,5 million workflow tasks and the conversion of over 40 million pages per year (and correspondingly more when accounting for documents that are subsequently modified).

Firstly, there is hardly any activity that individuals perform in a Business that does not require assistance from others. Let me give you an example. Let’s say someone is submitting his cash claim. Apparently, this is a one-person job but let’s dig deeper. One, someone has to approve the request. Two, there must be people supporting the hardware and software platform on which the cash claim application runs. So, it does satisfy the two-person-or-more criterion. Secondly, the cash claim process is definitely a “journey” with a definite start and an end. Thirdly, although it might look like this “journey” is benefitting the indenter only, in the larger context, it does benefit both the indenter and the approver, leave alone others who might depend upon the indenter for various reasons, from the employee motivation perspective. In other words, it is difficult to figure out what is not collaboration. What might be missing in the definition is a term that subtly differentiates cooperation and collaboration – the fact that in “collaboration” it is not only the goal that is shared but also the responsibility and the fact this needs to happen in a democratic way, irrespective of designation of the participants. In other words, all participants play the same role, irrespective of their designation or status in an organization.

The challenge above is aggravated by the fact that the space of “collaboration” is undergoing a massive and rapid transformation. And a lot of factors are contributing to it. Some of the key factors are democratization of organization culture, largely spurred by introduction of the millennial to the workforce, availability of multiple channels of collaboration, engendered by popularity of mobile phones, a shift from the proprietary to the Open Source, a reassuring faith in collective intelligence, stemming from Crowd Sourcing, pressure for low price points, resulting in alternatives to collocation and last, but not the least, usage of social media. The confluence of these factors has added to the complexity of the matter. In the interest of space, let us pry into the social area briefly.

The term “Social” has gotten introduced to the space of “collaboration” in multiple ways. For example, “Social Media”, “Social CRM”, “Social Networking”, “Social Enterprise” are some terms that can stretch the expanse of “collaboration” widely and I am not going to discuss how in this blog. However, what has been observed so far is that the link of “collaboration” to one of the four quadrants of the “Balanced Scorecard”, namely “Learning and Growth”, has been most widely accepted by all the business domains based on clear benefits derived from collaboration amongst employees (e.g. 170,000 Best Buy employees collaborating on social sites) whereas the correlation kind of peters out as we move along to the other three, namely, “Customer Perspective”, “Business Process” and the “Financials”. There are a lot of inspiring examples of how customers, especially retail and manufacturing, are getting more and more involved in creation of products – Blendtec’s use of Social Media resulting in 700% increase in sales, Ben and Jerry’s IdeaConnection, the “Dewmocracry” campaign by Mountain Dew, 10 million Starbucks fan on Facebook, CNN’s (Christiane Amanpour) Debategraph, Samsung’s Shakedown experiment, “Create your own donut” contest by Dunkin Donuts, Facebook integration for Diesel customers to take their own pictures for free, Domino’s Pizza’s 29% increase in profit because of Four Square integration are only few examples in point. The human genome project (HGP) by the US government or NASA and Microsoft’s private-public strategy towards getting images of Mars and Moon are couple of examples of “social” taking on for-the-public-and-by-the-public-intonations. However, it all boils down to the business, or rather how relevant or “contextual” is it to the current business. Speaking of governance, DELL makes sure that they do not tweet for more that 7 times a day and do not have more that 3 to 4 Facebook pages.

We need to remember that success not only breeds success but also publicity and the reverse induces reticence. Hence, while success stories abound, there are no less number of collaboration initiatives gone awry silently because of two primary reasons – one, dearth of planning and two, low alignment to business objectives. While organizations that have successfully implemented “collaboration” have always done so with high level of planning to ensure “contextual collaboration”, failures could be associated with the reverse, i.e. lack of planning and governance towards business alignment. Examples are many and hence I am refraining from citing those. There is no gainsaying that aligning collaboration to business needs, albeit in a planned manner, is the key to business success. It’s important, however, to ask how one makes it happen.

There are ways and means to measure whether collaboration is happening in a disciplined and effective manner in an Organization and to suggest ways for course correction, if necessary. In fact, introducing new roles, like Collaboration Champion or Chief Collaboration Officer, could be necessary in the fast-moving collaboration landscape. Such roles could drive cultural changes in Organizations planning to embark upon a meaningful collaboration journey, targeted towards business goals, if not sustainable innovation. This is where an Expert on Enterprise Collaboration will come in. And this, ideally, should, also be a part of the planning exercise.

HCL has, thankfully, come out with a framework to ensure proper adoption of collaboration in an enterprise. Please reach out to caf@hcl.com or tweet @CAFtheIDEA. HCL’s collaboration experts will get in touch with you within two working days.