corp_logo.gif (4229 bytes)         Roundarch Building Blocks Newsletter Issue 3, January 2002   Contents Who We Are  CRM Talk Back  Did You Know?  In This Issue: Content Management and its importance to your Portal Strategy    What is Content Management?   5 Challenges to Content Management Implementation   10 Problems in Existing Enterprises that Content Management Applications Can Resolve   5 Things to Ask Vendors When Selecting a Content Management Product   Critical Steps to Developing Your Content Management Solution   The Bottom Line: Content Management Value Propositions   Problem Solved: Content Management in Enterprise Portal Case Studies   Roundarch Website Polling Stats  Homework: Books and Links of Interest  What's Going On: Events and Conferences   Roundarch Contact Information      Who We Are Roundarch helps organizations realize superior financial results by designing, building, and supporting profitable customer relationships. As the world's first Customer Relationship Architects, Roundarch combines strategy, marketing, and technology professionals with formalized assets that truly jump-start and accelerate the solution development process. Roundarch's unique StartAhead? approach reduces the time and risk of implementing a customer relationship solution by pre-selecting and pre-integrating market leading ideas, technologies and specialists. Founded by marketing and systems integration leaders WPP Group (NASDAQ: WPPGY), Deloitte Consulting, and BroadVision (NASDAQ: BVSN), Roundarch is equipped with best of breed consulting skills, agency expertise, and technology know-how.    CRM Talk Back Lessons Learned - Holiday Shopping on the Net 2001  This year I decided to purchase all of my Holiday gifts on the Internet - even down to the wrapping paper and tape.  By using sites that offered free shipping or deep discounts I was able to save over $100 dollars by not paying sales tax and I got to avoid the malls.  The following represents my Top Ten Observations:  Be prepared to turn your home into a warehouse! I ordered over 20 items from Amazon that resulted in 12 large boxes.  Why does Barbie need her own box that could easily hold a DVD player?   Consolidating orders could work for me, even if it meant a slight delay in arrival. Pet peeve number 1 - After many hours of "browsing" items and comparing prices, I settled on an item.   Three days later I received an email saying that the item was out of stock.   This reminded me of retail bait and switch tactics.  If you don't have the product, take it off your site! Pet peeve number 2 - Customer service representatives who don't have information about your online order.   If you are going to sell online you need to service your online customers.   The days of being able to say - "I will research this and get back to you" are over.  Companies need to empower their front line personnel with data.   It's too easy for me just to place my next order with the competition. Pet peeve number 3 - Let me track my package.  Those sites that do not allow tracking of orders cost company more money.  It means you had to place numerous calls to their service department to check on delivery status. Pet peeve number 4 - Shopping carts that "lock up".  When this happens I not only abandon my order, I abandon doing business with the company. Great stuff number 1 - After placing an order some companies sent me an email with a discount gift certificate to use on my next order.  This "25%" sent me rushing back to the site, which built customer loyalty. Great stuff number 2 - Payal.  When buying on eBay, this service allows you to email funds directly to the seller.  No money order, no checks, and the funds can come right out of your checking or saving accounts.  It's a great way to do business and it's free. Great stuff number 3 - There are a few things that really stand out on some sites.  Here they are:   Allowing the customer to "search" the site - seems so simple - but not everyone has the capability.  Pre-filled forms.  When I go back to a site to place another order it's great when my shipping and billing information is already there.   It saves me time and also increases my loyalty. Great stuff number 4 - Comparison-shopping for price.  Sites like mysimon.com and cnet.com allowed me to find the best deals.  The price and shipping rates differ in such a big way from company to company - a great tool especially for electronics. Internet shopping has come a long way.  Those companies that make it easy to do business with them have a great advantage.  However, that advantage is quickly lost when the user experience comes up short in the service area.  Companies that respond to emails, and can answer customer questions over the phone help to bridge the gap between the expectations of the customer and the experience the customer has.  As companies strive to create their brand and the need to "arm" their sites and customer service organization with best of breed technology becomes critical.  I will gladly spend my money with the company but they have to give me a reason to not spend it with their  competitor.  What was the last Internet customer service experience you had?  Did the company go out of its way to satisfy you? Or was it just the opposite? We want to hear from you.  Please emaileuffer@roundarch.com  with your story.   Did You Know?  [IMAGE]  In This Issue: Content Management and Its Importance to your Portal Strategy  What is Content Management?   Content Management is defined as the people, processes and the systems that organizations use to create, store, update and distribute its key information and intellectual assets.   Although this definition may vary, the key concepts do not change across organizations.  It has become very apparent in the marketplace that with the proliferation of portal and web sites the content management challenge is becoming an increasing focus in large organizations.  Clients are more and more driving technology decisions based on content management requirements as opposed to portal needs.   Forrester defines Enterprise Content Management as "an integrated approach to managing documents, Web content and digital assets".  This is the broadest sense of content management.  One way to gain a clear picture of the term "content management" is to consider the various segments of the content life cycle.  The most pertinent segments to content management are:  Content Creation - Includes creation/revision, collaboration, review and approval.  The review and approval process can utilize workflow built into content management applications.  Content Maintenance - Includes content storage, access control and version control.  Content that has been created and approved is stored in a repository or database.  This content can then be combined with other approved content items to create rich sets of information.  Additionally, previous versions of content items are maintained and can be accessed at any time to bring back a previous state of information without introducing rework.  Content Delivery/Distribution - Includes the deployment of approved content from repository to an information channel.  Stored content can be aggregated and deployed to any number of channels (web, print, call center, wireless device etc.) utilizing specifically defined formats.  This is called channelization and is one of the major benefits to content management.  Content Management streamlines the process of creating, managing and delivering content, and puts processes in place to manage and control information as it is moved across the enterprise and to customers through the various information channels.  Historically, content management systems have not addressed all segments but rather focused  specifically on one or two.  Some systems may focus more on content creation, format and delivery (Web Content Management) whereas others may be more focused on storage and maintenance of documents and other forms of unstructured content (Document Management Systems).   Fortunately, content management solutions are maturing and  these two worlds are starting to converge to better serve the entire enterprise.  Not everyone is there but the future is bright and therefore, consideration to the type of content that is to be managed is important input into making a decision on the system that will best serve an organization's needs.  As content management matures and addresses the enterprise in a more holistic manner, organizations must consider the change to the enterprise that must take place to realize the benefits of such systems.   Content creation is no longer limited to a few but can be distributed among many with little or no technical skills.  Content approval and distribution can be handled programmatically in addition to manually and will require careful consideration to future roles and processes.  With so much change it is important to leadership to embrace the idea of content management by recognizing the importance of managing that will most certainly take place.  This may include  conducting a change readiness assessment and a change management plan.  Additionally, it is also important for leadership to have clear buy-in so that the organization understands the importance of the many steps that will be required to take on the road to content management.  5 Challenges to Content Management Implementation  Enterprises have complex workflows to move information across departments, but limited control or collaboration on how that information is edited, managed, published or retired - resulting in inconsistencies across the enterprise and customers. Conversion is a major undertaking of any Content Management implementation and requires a solid understanding of existing content and how to best organize it to improve efficiencies.   This requires an assessment of structured vs. unstructured content to understand how content will be organized and if more structure is required. Globalization increases the complexity of the entire content lifecycle, as multiple versions of content assets must be managed in addition to translation.  Additionally, support of multiple languages requires applications that can handle the required character sets and becomes important when selecting software packages. Defining the appropriate content attributes (meta tags).  Attributes define the meaning of content and are integral to good organization and appropriate personalization. Integration with Enterprise Applications can present challenges to the development effort.  This is especially true if the Content Management does not have a pre-built interface.  10 Problems in Existing Enterprises that Content Management Applications Can Resolve  As content assets increase in number, it becomes more and more difficult for content authors and administrators to find a single piece of content they are looking for, compounding confusion and efficiency. Increasing number of authors can quickly cause version control and communication issues.  As an enterprise expands nationally or even globally, this issue can quickly be  compounded by access limitations. Abandoned protocol (manual approval processes being ignored). Authors with no technical skills depend on technical resources to get content published to the appropriate locations.  This can create a bottleneck at the development team and cause significant delays to getting current information out to customers. Changes to web content may be required daily, hourly or even every minute.  This can quickly become and impossible task for a web master or group of content managers who are manually making changes and deploying content to various media. Management of multiple types of content assets (texts, graphics, multimedia etc.) is almost impossible to organize and deploy efficiently without the programmatic organization of content management application. Where different media (print, web, wireless, etc.) are supported separately, it is often difficult to maintain consistency of content due to development time a resource availability. Departmental ownership of content. Client participation.   Ongoing ownership and support requires the client to be involved from beginning to end. Maintaining control of project scope is always challenging, especially when dealing with relatively new technology such as content management systems.  This is quickly compounded as applications to integrate with are added to the plan.  Scope control can be maintained and expectations can be managed with a thorough definition of the project up front.   5 Things To Ask Vendors When Selecting a Content Management Product  What enterprise applications do you integrate with/have partnerships with? What unique capabilities does your product provide over your competitor's? How customizable is your product? Does your product support standards based programming (Java, XML)? How long has this product been out and how many customers have implemented it to date?  Critical Steps to Developing Your Content Management Solution:  Conduct a 3-4 week project to confirm the content management and conversion requirements, assess the current capability, develop client specific value proposition and develop a project roadmap for a rollout of content management solution.  The activities in this discovery effort include:  Content inventory - content type, frequency of updates, formats, source Content management workflow - number of people/departments authoring content, business processes and roles for authoring, editing, approval and publishing content Content conversion requirements - amount of legacy content, types of formats, structured or unstructured content, technical approach (e.g. bulk conversion programs, manual conversion, etc.) Repurposing of content - publish to multiple media formats (e.g. web, wireless, pdf, paper) Integration to the portal - identify prototype data model and build estimate for integration to portal engine Develop client specific value proposition for the content management solution and identify tangible benefits   The Bottom Line: Content Management Value Propositions  Closes the gap to the goal of the 'extended enterprise', where organizations work closely together  Provides a single content repository to store content that can be repurposed, thus eliminating the duplication of effort for creating the same content for multiple channels (Websites, Portal, Extranets/Intranets, Wireless, Print)  Provides business user the power to manage content  Enables efficient communications across the enterprise  Presents dynamic and relevant content to the constituent user  Provides corporations with the ability to reach global audience with a localized message  An embedded workflow facilitates content creation and editorial process, which increases the business unit's commitment to quality and accountability  Provides content assurance - share proprietary content with partners and suppliers  Provides capabilities for authors in different geographies to create, update, and publish content  Separates the content from the application logic  Rapid development to keep pace with information updates on various mediums  Problem Solved: Content Management in Enterprise Portal Case Studies  The State of California needed a content management system that would allow its communications department to rapidly deploy new content and features without the intervention of technical staff, yet maintain control over the content creation and deployment processes through workflow.  Roundarch implemented and integrated a content management solution that answered this need, and put in place an infrastructure that empowered the State to quickly disseminate information to constituents on the My California portal.  For information, contact Paula Itagaki pitagaki@roundarch.com  or Dan Loos dloos@roundarch.com  or go to www.ca.gov .  A Blue Cross Blue Shield Company wanted a content management solution that demonstrated seamless integration with its portal solution, strong tagging capabilities to target public and secure content to specific constituents, and a simple content entry interface that put the power of content in the hands of business users.  Roundarch developed a single content management solution that provided centralized content creation and publishing processes to deliver personalized content for providers, members, and employers.  For more information, contact Paula Itagaki  pitagaki@roundarch.com  or Manish Bharadwaj  mbharadwaj@roundarch.com .  This company is a leading global supplier of cement, aggregate, and concrete.  Roundarch developed the global content management solution and commerce site that uses six languages, three currencies, and integrates to different ERP systems.  Business users rather than the IT department maintain site content.  With the new streamlined content management workflow established all the content is reviewed and approved before it is published. For more information, contact Ray Paty rpaty@roundarch.com .    Roundarch Website Polling Stats  During the periodof November 29 - December 9th, 2001, visitors to the Roundarch website were asked:     "Have you ever switched service companies due to poor customer service? i.e. banks, transportation, telecommunications, insurance, financial services?"  Never  3%   Once  9%   A few times  52%   Many times  36%   During the period of December 10th- 31st, 2001, visitors to the Roundarch website were asked:     "When you contact a call center, which scenario aggravates you most?  Not being able to solve your problem or answer your question  24%   Being put on hold  12%   No way to reach operator  27%   Being told to call another number  37%   To participate in the current CRM question of the week, go to the Roundarch website.     Homework  Books of Interest:  Content Management Bible -- Bob Boiko  Web Content Management: A Collaborative Approach -- Russell Nakano  .NET Content Management Systems Development (With CD-ROM) -- Stephen Fraser   Links of Interest:   CRM Guru.com  Delphi Group  RealMarket  Tech Republic  Strategy+Business     What's Going On: Events and Conferences  Call Center & CRM Solutions - Las Vegas 2002 February 11-13, 2002 Las Vegas Convention Center Las Vegas, Nevada  Roundarch  will be participating in Avanstar's Call Center and CRM Solutions Las  Vagas 2002 Conference and Expo where we will be showcasing our Enabling  Technology Platform solution and discussing related case studies.   For more information or to register, call (800) 854-3112 or go to www.cc-crmvegas.com .  Roundarch Contact Information:   Roundarch Corporate Headquarters 350 North LaSalle, 12th Floor  Chicago, IL 60610 Phone: 312 529-2400 Fax: 312 529-3400 http://www.roundarch.com/    To subscribe/unsubscribe, please visit the newsletter section  of the Roundarch website.   Copyright Roundarch, 2002