ECM Best Practices – Green Support

Enterprise Content Management Solutions
– Remote and Mobile Employees

Many of today’s business discussions revolve around the fact that providing select employees with the ability to work from home, in a mobile environment, or otherwise more independently, is a positive factor towards fostering conservation and a “GREEN” initiative.  Considering the integrated component benefits of a well conceived and implemented Enterprise Content Management System (ECM), with the right employees selected for a remote work environment, this green initiative can also promote a highly efficient and productive business environment.

Employees that successfully work from home or on the road as much as they do in the office are likely characterized by desirable core competencies.  This is nothing new and these strong employee qualities have always been required of the person working independently from constant co-worker and management relationships and support. 

Successful remote employees are oriented towards achieving results, and as such, as a group they can be described as being self-motivated, self-disciplined, and as self-sufficient as their supporting infrastructure will allow them to be.   “Remote” employees very often maintain a strong client focus and spend a lot of time working at client sites, communicating with clients, and seeking new clients. 

In order to give the successful remote employee the best opportunity to be as productive as they can be, and promote an organization’s green initiative,  that organization can develop the information management and communications infrastructure that fosters collaboration and information self service.  This also prepares an organization to address the current business trend towards more remote employees.  This developed business structure can also support instances where employees are able to work, but have to do that work away from the office due to illness, convalescence, family emergency, transportation problems, etc.

In addition to the infrastructure, it is important to implement a training program so that these resources are known to the remote employees and they are well trained in making the most of them.

The following are among those driving guidelines that support effective mobile and remote employees:

• Digital information and content are increasingly pervasive and require well developed broadband technologies and services.  Remote employees must be provided with required independent information access and research needed for commercial, client, and business awareness.  ECM Benefits contributing towards a green initiative and remote employee support include:
  • ECM – Customer and business information access through web based document and image management
  • ECM – Research and document re-purposing through web based document management
  • ECM – Work and transaction processing continuation through web based workflow processing
• Group and teamwork oriented communications channels are instrumental to effective and collaboration between the remote employee, clients, co-workers, and management, and to providing effective remote presentation resources.  Integration of Collaboration Management and web based meeting services with compatible ECM systems provides a productive team environment contributing to a focused energy and natural resource conservation effort.
• Businesses (and individuals) must effectively communicate on the move and be supported by personal mobile communication technology and web services.  Personal mobile devices now provide a technology that not only communicates between people, but also communicates information to people using compatible web based Enterprise Content Management systems.
• Data submission and resolution tool resources allowing for information communication and independent problem solving must be provided to the remote employee dependent upon business type and objectives.  Digital Forms Processing and Management systems, a major component of many ECM systems, can provide effective solutions.

Neil W. Lindsey
Project Manager / Senior Business Analyst
ImageSource, Inc.

Attend the following GREEN oriented sessions at
NEXUS 2009, November 2nd, 3rd, 2009, Bellevue,
Washington

Finding the PR Value in your Green ECM Technology
Reducing Your Organization’s Cost and Carbon
Footprint Through Inter-Office Scanning
Economical & Environmental Benefits of eForms

“Economize” Your ECM Investment by Making Your Datacenter “Green”

In today’s economy, Information Technology departments for both private and public entities are looking at ways to reduce costs. Many companies, cities, states and other local governments also have environmental concerns about their data centers and have “green” initiatives underway to make their data centers more environmentally and economically friendly. Both can be achieved through system/server virtualization.

Many companies are reducing their energy consumption and costs by as much as 80% through virtualization. Through the use of virtualization, maintenance costs and server sprawl are also being reduced. A typical virtualized server saves about 7000kWh of electricity annually which equates to about a $700 savings in energy costs alone. Individual Servers sit idle 85-95% of the time. Virtualization can improve server utilization from the typical 5-15% to 60-85%.  Many of today’s data centers have either run out or are running out of space and available power. You can run fewer, more highly utilized servers, freeing up data center space and reducing power requirements. It is reported that 4 tons of CO2 are eliminated for every virtualized server. This is the equivalent of taking 1.5 cars off the highways.

Not only do you get the cost and environmental benefits from a virtualized environment you also gain:

• Centrallized Management
• Performance Monitoring
• Clustering and pooling of physical server resources
• Rapid Server Provisioning
• Automated Disaster Management

The product support stance by many of the Enterprise Content Management companies and their products is this (taken from statements by some of the larger vendors):

We (ECM Vendor) have  not certified any of our products on VMware or MS Virtual Server virtualized environments. Product Support will assist customers running products on virtualized environments in the following manner: 

We (ECM Vendor) will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware.

VMware and Microsoft Virtual Server can be assumed to be supported unless specifically noted otherwise. Product Support will provide a “best-effort” support and conduct normal troubleshooting procedures as if the product was installed and operating on a standard computer. If Product Support identifies the problem is related to the virtual environment, you will be advised to contact the manufacturer of the virtual software for assistance.

Many companies and government agencies have succesfully implemented Enterprise Content Management solutions in a virtualized environment. This includes production environments.

Only about five percent of all physical servers have been virtualized to date. Virtualization is one of the main topics when speaking with today’s Information Technology managers and  staff members. Many of these IT departments have virtualization of their environments as one of the key initiatives to address in the near term. If we are looking for a ”stimulus” to improve the economy we should be looking at these technologies that not only reduce costs for the companies and government agencies but also help to preserve our resources and environment.

Now is the time to start benefiting from these technologies.

If you plan to attend Nexus ’09  ECM Solution Conference you can learn more about “economizing your business”.

Al Senzamici, PMP
Program Manager
ImageSource Inc.