Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

We have completed the initial testing of our new extension of InfoCapture e-forms onto PDAs and Mobile phones.

Previously, although you could enter data to start an automated Process Manager workflow from your phone, you were basically using a browser and had to have an internet connection.

We now have a downloadable application solution for both the  mobile windows and Symbian platforms, to enable users to enter data into forms that start the workflow process.

The user no longer needs to be connected to the internet – they can keep collecting data and as soon as a connection is available the data is entered, the issues reported to the server and the workflows take over.

Process manager data entry

This is a significant enhancement to the Claromentis process manager solution.

Corporate News, Products, intranet applications e-forms, process manager

As we continue to work on the definition of what will become Claromentis 6.0 I feel that it is important that we ensure ideas can migrate without effort between applications. For example they mature from initial idea shouts on collaboration walls to collaborative exchanges and onwards to execution as a Project.

collaboration

As an intranet software supplier we are always driven to ensure each application is intuitive and fully functional -  but in the post 2.0 world an important aspect within an integrated framework like Claromentis is to make sure that the transition between applications is effortless, and does not require regeneration of information already captured and exchanged.

In some areas we are strong, but in general I feel we need to have more  awareness of the living evolution of a single idea into something that can be executed by an identified team. We are strong for example at making sure a Project in Project Manager has integrated forums, document management and resources – but not so strong in enabling with a single click the creation from a forum or blog an actual project, as an idea moves from collaboration to execution - with no loss of information.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Products, intranet applications intranet applications, intranet ideas

As 2008 draws to a close it is interesting to reflect on the challenges companies of all sizes now face as they try to embrace permissioned information management as a way to foster creativity, improve collaboration on all fronts -  internally, with the supply chain and with customers -  and to become more efficient.

Information management is a fast moving world, and one that has always been a victim of confusing terminology and liable to disconnect between IT and the business. Just a few short years ago intranet platforms were nothing more than permissioned HTML resources with some forum and people based functionality. They were weak, but understandable – with clear boundaries.

Now intranet software vendors like Claromentis offer an enormous range of functionality across the business, and embrace every format of data into a single, managed information layer.

Not only that but they offer process management to automate inefficient processes by applying form based work flows, and even project management tools that simply were outside the lines of this space an internet heartbeat ago.

As a personal view, based on years of implementing intranet and extranet projects around the world for every conceivable type of company, I have the following a my top challenges that the client should really pay attention to at the end of 2008:

• Dedicated resource
• The offer of grass roots involvement for all departments within scope
• A well presented but flexible road map for the project with proper phasing of business goals
• Clarity
• A solution that can leverage open source developers – that is the irresistible tide for the coming years
• Commercial support
• An intranet vendor with great design skills
• Single sign on
• Ability to turn off old information stores
• A vision that lasts beyond short term excitements

Nice to haves :

• A project name
• Top level sponsorship
• Unified branding with all other brand experiences
• Lightning fast infrastructure
• Proper staging environments

I welcome comments on what you see as important intranet success factors!

As we have mentioned on many other blogs, given all of this power and the huge amount of information and procedures even SME companies have – I truly believe that once you have selected a good vendor to meet your own individual company needs, the single most important intranet success factor is making a dedicated resource available. It you cannot do that, then make a senior resource available on a 50% basis, and allocate budget to get a lot of service assistance from your vendor!

A successful project really does need time and effort.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Services intranet roadmap, intranet software discussions

I want to make the relatively simple point that on many occasions the concept of context for a particular question, request for a solution or recommendation can, if we are not careful – remain uncertain – when often it is the most important aspect of any such debate.

What do I mean?

Lets consider a relatively simple example. As part of a large scale implementation of an intranet solution for a very large company we might be asked ‘what would it cost to implement a procedure for submitting purchase order requests?’

The context should include analysis of the following : “Who is asking, and what authority do you have to change an existing project?” “Do you know if your request might conflict with come other stakeholder in the business?” – “What expert knowledge do you have for the correct procedure for submitting PO requests across the business?” “Do you know the scope of the intranet project?” “Do you know what departments are included or excluded as authorized participants for the intranet project?” “If some departments or stakeholders are excluded do you know what the cost would be is we allow two systems to control such a fundamental process?” “Do you know what the cost is of potential errors if we allow multiple systems to coexist?”

Possibly most importantly : “Should I include the cost of establishing if this is a valid request within the context of the established road map for this intranet project?”

These are just a few very trivial examples of what can go unanswered if the context of the question is not established.

One of the Claromentis core values is Clarity, and that means we must make sure when any client asks a question our staff are very aware of any possible misunderstandings due to the context of that question not being clear.

We have a valued reputation as a consultative intranet solution provider. That means we absolutely must be responsible for thinking about context – as the client will very often not be sensitive to this, and expect a short term answer that is valid, but from our point of view too simplistic – and therefore dangerous.

Providing we are sensitive to context all such questions are welcome, interesting and often lead to hitherto undiscovered return on investment for our client. Without Claromentis staff taking full responsibility for establishing context we might inadvertently mislead a client, which is understandable but unforgivable!

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues

Recently a lot has been written about project based collaboration, ranging from thought provoking articles about their position in open/closed vs. flat/hierarchical analysis to simply promoting one tool over another. Vendors have really struggled to meet the varied requirements of different projects, while preserving all the advantages of a single information layer and a truly integrated application stack.

With Claromentis Project Manager the company has leveraged everything in the framework to really bring a user selectable range of deeply functional applications to bear on any project, all through the flexible and powerful permission system.

Project Manager Portal

It will be fascinating to watch developments here – as the company now has two flagship products that have extraordinary potential – InfoCapture and Project Manager. Both are related – indeed InfoCapture projects can be integrated in any Project within Project Manager, to report anything within a project and control resolution through any workflow.

With plans to make InfoCapture an integrated complex workflow engine for any Claromentis objects, and Project Manager providing such a deep range of project based functionality, it is a tough call as to which will become the flagship product for 2009.

Workflow illustration

Maybe they both will.

General Intranet Posts, Products, intranet applications collaboration, e-forms, project management

The title of this blog could have been a question, but I prefer it to be a heading.

We had a corridor conversation a few days ago, Mike and I, and I mentioned  that I wanted him to think about how we might extend InfoCapture so that we can report Process Manager issues on a PDA, those processes to upload to the Claromentis server as soon as it is connected. A great many processes in certain industries start with PDA input of initial data, and then complex work flows need to take over. For example office surveys, certain types of audits.

Within the context of my chat, I was expecting some kind of possibly in 6 months, what version of Claromentis – series of discussions. The normal priority setting of what should make a Claromentis release, and what should miss out.

It is now a few days later and he has the application installed on his Nokia  phone, with the developer now coding the mobile windows version.

We have never met the developer – Mike just put out the work on an open source developers recruitment platform, and it’s done. No fuss, no headache – minor investments and great functionality.

What an amazing leap in our software, from talented people unconstrained by any limitations.

The heading of this Blog could not have been a question – because it doesn’t have an answer.

Corporate News, General Intranet Posts, Open Source Intranets, intranet applications

The recent development plans for the Project management application are extremely thought provoking.

We are now delivering a true collaboration hub, where individuals defining a new project can very easily select powerful collaboration tools that are appropriate for their requirements. These elements form the collaboration hub.

They may select from a Gantt Chart based approach because task management is critical, or version controlled document management, news channels, forums and form based work flows for any conceivable set of requirements. The Claromentis framework provides all of the permissioned access required to ensure users have exactly the access they need, without becoming cluttered and overloaded and that clients can engage with staff, suppliers and partners as required.

This is truly exciting – we are delivering collaboration hubs within a programme managed framework. Every project has an overview area, and each user can specify their preferences for receiving information by email when information changes in the project. Because the Claromentis framework is so comprehensive we can assemble for anyone involved in collaboration exactly what they need, with a very deep functionality set that extends across all areas of customised information management.

Corporate News, Products, intranet applications online collaboration, project management

I had a thought provoking meeting yesterday with an extremely competent publicly funded but private industry facing organisation with whom we have been in discussion with for a year or so.

The discussion ranged over the challenges for a ‘normal’ UK company to fully embrace technology with all of the productivity benefits that might bring – and how naturally consultative technology vendors like ourselves might be given resources or encouragement to encourage that consultative, process orientated engagement with UK companies.

I found all of the discussion extremely interesting. Some fundamental questions for Claromentis for us all to consider were :

1.    To what extent does it fit our business model to really become consultants, rather than naturally  trusted advisors, in the collaboration space?

2.    Can we preserve the essence of our collaborative relationships with our clients if we specifically charge for such a consultative relationship?

3.    Much or our expertise comes from practical experience with a cross section of global companies – how would they react to Claromentis sharing those experiences to refine our engagement models with other companies, some of whom might be their competitors?

4.    To what extent does our relationship depend on the engagement team – our key staff – having many years of experience with Claromentis, and the unusual experience of our customers having a direct line to the people that control the direction of our platform? If we build up a BPM team – for the first year they would lack that confidence that comes from the experience of helping many other companies meet and exceed their goals from deploying Claromentis.

But these, on reflection, turned out to be exciting and interesting open ended questions.

I am sure that by having access to BPM toolkits and expertise, we can simply engage those customers that might benefit from our increased resources and skills to provide a more formal approach to our current free, pragmatic advice that would increase the quality of that early engagement.

We can partner up BPM staff with our existing engagement teams.

We can then absolutely leave it to the customer to chose if they would find a more formal Business Process partnership with ourselves to be useful as they deploy processes – or alternatively we just deploy what they themselves understand that need.

Encouragingly every customer we talk about e-forms and business processes ( almost all of them ) seem very, very open to advice on what they are trying to achieve, putting it into context – and making sure they are not having us deploy a process into the platform that actually was broken, even in its paper equivalent.

So I do believe the core values of Claromentis, the overarching nature of our framework and the highly configurable nature of our e-forms solution (indeed all of our products) means we certainly have a configurable code base to listen, understand and make a difference.

The  current confusing space for a typical UK company trying to work out what software company might actually  listen to what they have to say, understand their business, and then implement software and training that really impacts the way they perform what are to us very understandable tasks all leads Claromentis to give this more formalized approach to our consultancy a priority for 2009. With the current emphasis on e-forms in our development road map there is a certain sense that the timing is relevant.

Fundamentally – we right now have a sensible, listening approach to working out how we can help every company we engage with. If formalizing and extending this relationship to more a more structured analysis of our customers processes – looking for wider business context for improvements before we configure any software at all – is of value to any company then of course we should offer this service of Business Process Management.

After all, our clients can always just say ‘no’ – that is their choice and that that is great – our client relationships are fun and that is how it should be and must remain.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Services BPM, consultancy, e-forms, eforms, intranet consultancy

I have detected a theme in some of our recent Blogs – which is related to collaboration, our core business as a technology vendor in this space, but to some extent addresses the silent partner of collaborative interactions. I refer of course to ‘listening’.

I noticed for example that Hilda in one of her recent posts on Oracle Expert referred to the vocabulary gap between the business users and the IT funded change agents – who often seem to users as from another planet. Informed interaction just doesn’t reach the goal required – in this case relevant and accurate product specifications. The two sides basically cannot listen effectively to each other.

Personally I recently discussed the importance of clarity, as perhaps the most important core value at Claromentis. Clarity comes from observing and listening to your audience – often so diverse - and making sure that communication is founded on understandable concepts that everyone has the vocabulary to absorb at their required level for project success.

Out there in the very much larger world Maureen Chiquet Global CEO of Chanel, recently wrote a short personal article in the Harvard Business Review (November this year) which I found enjoyable and insightful, where she admitted that the emotionally charged and heated advice she received in her early years at Chanel “you’ve gotta learn to listen!” turned out to be one of the most valuable things she ever learned, and that a listening focus now forms a foundation for her success as the CEO.

I was reflecting on the fact that in so many collaboration projects, and with so many client teams, we discuss the importance of user take up, which we tend to default to quantifying as participative content creation. We look at the audit logs to measure how many posts, documents, news items, blogs and just about anything else were created or edited this month as opposed to last.

I am wondering if we are missing something fundamental here.

Ever been to a party and met someone really interesting - then at the end of the evening realized you didn’t learn anything at all about them - they were just great and encouraging listeners? I am sure you have - it is an old analogy.

My point is that there might be a significant user base that is quietly listening and learning from the collaboration hubs, the posting, documents, blogging and general content creation that some types of users are either confident enough – or for whatever reason motivated enough - to participate in.

The fact that they don’t directly participate back to the discussion might not be important for certain types of users – they are absolutely engaged because they are listening.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues listening, online collaboration

The purchase this month of Claromentis Document manager by SCOMI, a public engineering company in Malaysia is particularly important as on a group basis they are employers of over 4,800 employees at 65 locations in 36 countries.

They worked with Michael Christian and Alexander Polyanskih from Claromentis to specify a document submission wizard, which working with our name pattern records management functionality will ensure that all new engineering documents are automatically given an appropriate reference number on addition to the document management system.

Engineering Document Management

We look forward to working with the staff of SCOMI to provide a robust document management system for this significant Malaysian public company.

Claromentis around the world, Corporate News, Intranets by Industry Sector or Job Role document management