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The Unseen Side of IT Projects

February 2nd, 2012 by Allison Cotney

In the IT project world, conversations are technically based.  In the business world, focus is on applications and business needs. This can (and often does) lead to the true personal value of these systems being overlooked.

Armedia had been awarded a contract with FederalConference.com (FedCon) who was in need of a system to aid them in event management after a sudden increase in their workload. This increase came after FedCon was selected for the Army Strong Bonds program, which orchestrates 3,000 events every year. This increase to FedCon’s events meant that they needed a system that must:

  • Drive increased efficiencies throughout the Event Management Process
  • Enhance Office Automation
  • Provide real-time 24/7 access
  • Standardize records keeping and centralization of event files

These requirements were all met by Armedia’s distinguished staff of professionals who implemented Armedia Case Management (ACM) as a solution to increase efficiency across the board.

So far, this project was sounding a lot like the others the team had completed since I had come on board.

Army Strong Bonds is a unit-based, chaplain-led program which assists commanders in building individual resiliency by strengthening the Army Family.

The core mission of the Strong Bonds program is to increase individual Soldier and Family member readiness through relationship education and skills training. These training sessions are held in an offsite location in order to maximize the training effect. These retreats are orchestrated through FederalConference.com and aim to build the strength of families who have to endure the stresses of military life.

The true value of this project became clear to me the more I learned about Army Strong Bonds that not only are our systems improving business processes, but also helping improve the quality of life of our Armed Forces and their families through better organization of these events.

This project illustrates that there is more than “improving efficiency and increase office automation.” It shows how valuable these systems can really be in the context of improving the way we work, but also in the way we live.

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Posted in Information Sharing, Project Management, Services, Solution Integration, Solutions, User Experience | No Comments »

Is Your EMR Holding You Hostage?

January 31st, 2012 by dbock

Let’s take a look at “Nirvana Health System,” a hypothetical 1000 bed system in the City of Nirvana. The system has 7000 employees, 7 hospitals, more than 200 doctors on staff, with another 800 or so who independently perform services in the area.

Historically they and have done what all hospitals do, that is, they have purchased “commercial off the shelf systems” (also known as COTS) to run their business, manage patient care, and even market their services on-line. This approach largely met their needs for years, but now after a series of acquisitions, recent and looming changes to their reimbursement model, and myriad technology challenges that result from the shift from “hospital” to “Health System” they are now at a crossroads.  These systems may have performed fairly well independently, but they were never designed or intended to function as one. Meanwhile, the vendors who originally supplied the systems have run out of answers, and Nirvana is suffering the consequences.

Nirvana has successfully standardized on Epic, one of the tier one vendors, as the primary electronic medical records (EMR) vendor at the main hospital, but what they desire is a single view across the entire patient experience. Patients in Nirvana receive services without consideration for Nirvana Health’s desire for a comprehensive patient record. Most will likely receive some health services beyond the reach of EPIC, often simply by receiving care at a nearby doctor’s office which is a different medical records platform.

So why doesn’t Nirvana just demand that EPIC integrate with other EMR systems? No doubt Nirvana and countless others have. But for EPIC to do so would in essence counter act their own commercial interest. To do so effectively makes the patient record portable, and by extension the EMR system as well. Machiavellian principles of self-interest have proven themselves in healthcare information technology (HIT). The only way out for today’s Health Care Systems is to for them to wean themselves from reliance on any one software vendor for any critically required systems.

One way we recommend that Nirvana and others who face similar challenges introduce effective portability and reduce vendor lock-in is through adoption of standards across an array of disciplines, one specific recommendation would likely be for them to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA).  Still, SOA is largely a foreign concept to them, not to mention the notion of web services (WS) and enterprise services buses (ESB). It is important to note that SOA is not a product, but a philosophy. As described in OASIS SOA Reference Model’s definition, SOA is a model for “organizing and utilizing distributed capabilities”, and especially “capabilities that may be under the control of different ownership domains”. Nirvana will likely never fully control all the patient access points, certainly not soon enough to reach their stated timelines, and the SOA approach places a layer between the applications they rely on and the user experience they desire.

Success with a SOA initiative will require strong support by executive leaders at Nirvana, but will put in place the foundation upon which Nirvana and others like them will be able to address the requirements of today and the unforeseen challenges of tomorrow.  When Nirvana and others like them realize the cure they seek does not come from a pill they can buy, but rather from a new approach that removes their reliance on any vendor, they will prevail.

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Posted in Electronic Health Records, Records Management, Solution Integration | No Comments »

The Spaces Between

January 26th, 2012 by dbock

As system integrators, our greatest value comes from understanding the ins and outs of “the spaces between” our clients existing systems, but we expect stares as blank as a freshly cleaned whiteboard when offering such an explanation. Our challenge then becomes “How then do we describe our craft?”

Engagements generally start with an implied question from our prospects, such as “How can you possibly help us when we know so much more about our business and systems than you?” Telling a new client who has spent years (or even decades) grappling with their very specialized workflows and unique data that, “data is data to us”, comes off as either ignorant, insulting, or both. How many times have you ended a conversation with a client and thought to yourself, “they simply don’t know what they don’t know.” More importantly, how many times do you think they were thinking the same thing about you?

It is much easier to explain [and bill for] boxes, cylinders, screens, circles, and even clouds, than it is the lines and arrows that connect, or at least should connect them. It is within theses “shapes” that our clients live and work, but in the spaces between that they need us most. In their eyes lines depict connections, but therein also reside workflows, dependencies, and logic, or more often than not, the lack thereof. It is also often in these spaces that the most important, and often unstated and hidden customer requirements lurk. We win customers when we see, understand, and have solutions we can articulate for these hidden problems.

This brings to mind recent interactions with a few new Armedia prospective clients. What they share is one-of-a-kind technology ecosystems that evolved over many years but that have become increasingly dysfunctional, while at the same time their user experience expectations have risen dramatically. Consider these examples:

  • A Health Sciences company developed systems to manage a speakers’ bureau, and solutions to help pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers manage clinical trials. In the process, they also created a software maintenance nightmare
  • An international program that manages independent educators, and uses systems that require no fewer than 13 separate user names and passwords to access. They maintain several web based systems, each built “in a vacuum” by different providers, and each created without coordination under a common architecture .
  • A Health System that provides care for a patient population of nearly one million people, they are suffering under authentication, interoperability, duplication, and maintenance issues that together manifest in cascading user experience shortcomings for patients, practitioners, and staff alike.

We will never fully appreciate the history, evolution or the politics that contributed to their current state, and we will never know these businesses like they do, but with the right approach we should be able to gain their trust and help them as they strive to answer the increasing loud chorus from their constituents, “please make your systems work together, now!”

We as integrators are confident we can help them, but how do we gain their confidence? The buying pattern they are comfortable with is to purchase software directly from independent software vendors (ISV’s) and then attempt to hold them accountable. The challenge is that one cannot “buy” the interoperability they need from an ISV. What they seek is “not available in pill form”. One must adopt an approach that fosters interoperability and then must build a system to support it, and for that, integrators like us are the only way. If the answers resided internally or via ISV’s, then the issues would already have been addressed.

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Posted in Solutions | No Comments »

Armedia Case Management – Content.gov Presentation

January 24th, 2012 by Allison Cotney

Did you miss Alfresco’s Content.gov event today in Washington, DC? Dont worry!! Here are the slides from Armedia’s presentation.

 

Armedia nci content gov_alfresco_20120124_v1.0

 

For more information about Armedia Case Management, CLICK HERE

Posted in Alfresco Development, Case Management, Conference Presentations, ECM Industry, Government Solutions | 1 Comment »

Armedia Government Solutions: HUD and FOIA Compliance

January 17th, 2012 by Allison Cotney

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) is the law which requires federal agencies to provide access to documents and information that is controlled by the United States government. The resulting monumental amount of paper documents has had an effect on the efficiency in which federal agencies can respond to their FOIA requests. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) faced this exact problem.

This mass of paper was taking up much needed physical space in HUD as well as proving to be extremely difficult and time consuming when it came to locating specific documents. To add to the constraints, HUD and its separate divisions did not have an easy way to share and collaborate on documents with each other or various other federal agencies under the existing system.

It became clear that HUD needed to digitize paper documents and implement a document management system for managing, storing and collaborating on documents. However, as a federal agency, HUD needed the system to be able to meet its specific needs to aid it in more efficiently handling FOIA requests. On this aspect, Armedia had three specific focus points for the new system:

 

  1.      Provide a central location for managing case files
  2.      Enable rich text based (i.e. full-text) and metadata (i.e. attribute) searching.
  3.      Ability to share and collaborate on documents from any location on any device including tablets like iPad

 

Providing a Central Location

Providing a central location in which organizations manage documents and case files is a task that is at the core of Armedia’s strengths in terms of capabilities. However, one aspect was particularly important for this specific project. After scanning millions of paper documents and storing them in a database, Armedia faced the task of migrating those files to the cloud based Alfresco Enterprise Content Management system while automatically building a taxonomy based on the indexed information captured during the scanning process.

Using Armedia Caliente, a content migration product, Armedia was able to move HUD’s digitized documents and the indexed information captured in comma separated value (CSV) files into Alfresco while retaining the metadata tags (see picture below). The document’s metadata information was going to be vital to the success of the system later as this allows users at HUD to search for requested information under commonly listed categories such as name, date and location.

This centralized document management system provided HUD employees with the ability to search for documents across all case files without having to search within the different divisions. By providing the transfer of the original metadata, users can also search for documents using the same criteria they would have before.

 

Ability to Collaborate

The ability to collaborate and share documents with other federal agencies brought up a crucial factor in any situation dealing with government records: information security. Specifically, HUD needed to have the ability to protect individuals when documents were shared across agencies. To handle this task, Armedia integrated Daeja ViewONE Pro to allow users the ability to redact personally identifiable information before sharing across agencies or with the public. Once the redaction was burned into the document, it could be saved as a version in the Alfresco repository to keep the history of the case document.

HUD now has an extremely scalable and centralized case management system to manage its cases and the documents within them. Over three million pages of documents have been digitized and migrated into the new system. HUD Employees are able to share documents with other agencies and respond significantly faster to FOIA requests as a result of having the information at the tip of their fingers.

Click on the link for a full look at our U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Case Study

 

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Posted in Alfresco Development, Content Management System, Enterprise Content Management, Government Solutions | No Comments »

Modifying SharePoint Document Content Types and Libraries Using the Client Model

September 22nd, 2011 by Tim Lisko

In a current eRoom to SharePoint migration project I wanted to preserve the “Date Created”, “Date Modified”, “Edited By”, and “Created By” fields in the eRoom documents. To do this I created a custom content type (in SharePoint 2010) based on the standard “Document” content type with four new fields to accept the migrated information. I also created a library template that uses this content type as well as the standard “Document” content type. I’ll explain why later in this article.

Once the documents are migrated I need to update the migrated list/library items. What I don’t want is to keep one set of “preserved” fields and another set of SharePoint fields. The SharePoint fields, as you probably guessed, set the author and editor as the individual doing the migration (or impersonated member) and the created and modified dates being the date of migration.

Updating list items is a pretty easy thing to do in SharePoint’s Client Object Model. The following code accomplishes this task.

foreach (SP.ListItem item in lstItems)
{
//skip items not assigned to the migratedDoc document type
if (item.ContentType.ToString() == migType.ToString())
{
row = listItems_dtbl.NewRow();
row["List"] = list.Title;
title = (!Convert.IsDBNull(item["Title"]) ? item["Title"].ToString() : "");
if (title == "" && item["FileLeafRef"].ToString() != "")
{   //set title if one does not exist
title = item["FileLeafRef"].ToString();
title = title.Replace(item["File_x0020_Type"].ToString(), "");
}

sEditor = (!Convert.IsDBNull(item["eEditor"]) ? item["eEditor"].ToString() : "");
sAuthor = (!Convert.IsDBNull(item["eAuthor"]) ? item["eAuthor"].ToString() : "");

try
{
editor = ctx.Web.EnsureUser(sEditor);
ctx.ExecuteQuery();
}
catch
{
editor = ctx.Web.EnsureUser("tlisko");
}
try
{
author = ctx.Web.EnsureUser(sAuthor);
ctx.ExecuteQuery();
}
catch
{
author = ctx.Web.EnsureUser("tlisko");
}
item["Editor"] = editor;
item["Author"] = author;
item["Modified"] = item["eModified"];
item["Created"] = item["eCreated"];

//remove values
item["eEditor"] = null;
item["eAuthor"] = null;
item["eCreated"] = null;
item["eModified"] = null;

item["ContentTypeId"] = docType.Id;
item.Update();
}
}
try
{
ctx.ExecuteQuery();
}

“ctx” is my ClientContext, though that is probably self-evident. You may also note that I only process items whose content type is my custom content type “migratedDoc” which is instantiated as “migType.” Only the migrated documents will have this content type.

eRoom documents do not have Titles, so I set a title based on the file name. You can leave Title blank – it isn’t a required field. Continuing through the code you will notice that I check that the names of the editor and author exist in the LDAP (ctx.Web.EnsureUser(sAuthor)). The update of the list/library item will fail if you try to use an editor or author that doesn’t exist.

I don’t really want to have a custom document library – the SharePoint default document library is just fine. So to get the result I want I need to reassign all the migrated items to the standard “Document” type. List items content types have a Name property. Unfortunately you can’t change it – it is read only. What you can change is the ContentTypeId and changing that value changes the content type of the list item. In the code above “docType” is local instance of the “Document” content type.

I said at the beginning of this article that I would explain why I wanted to keep the “Document” content type in addition to the creating a custom content type. The reason is that you can’t assign a list item to a content type if that content type isn’t in the list. That’s also why you can’t move a document from one SharePoint library to another unless its content type is in the target library as well.

Next I want to remove my custom content type from the list altogether. But to do that, I have to make sure that all those extra fields that are in the custom content type are set to null – which I do before changing the content type. The order of resetting these fields and reassigning the content type doesn’t matter. What does matter is that if these extra fields are not set to null, you will be unable to remove the content type from the list.

After processing all the list items I can now remove the custom content type from the list. Easy, two lines of code:

migType.DeleteObject();
ctx.ExecuteQuery();

But that still doesn’t remove the custom fields from the list. More code is needed.  Incorporating the delete of the custom content type you have this.

migType.DeleteObject();
list.Fields.GetByTitle("eCreated").DeleteObject();
list.Fields.GetByTitle("eModified").DeleteObject();
list.Fields.GetByTitle("eAuthor").DeleteObject();
list.Fields.GetByTitle("eEditor").DeleteObject();
ctx.ExecuteQuery();

And that’s it! The library looks like the default document library with only the “Document” content type as desired.

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Posted in Data Migration, eRoom, SharePoint, Software Development, Visual Studio 2010 - C# | No Comments »

Implementing Multiple Filters in LINQ Query from Visual Studio

September 22nd, 2011 by Tim Lisko

A best practice in any application making data calls is to push processing to the server and limit the amount of data that has to come back to the application.

I recently worked on a windows application that uses the Microsoft SharePoint Client Object Model to manipulate lists and their elements. I needed to filter the lists for processing in the application to just the document libraries that were not hidden, contained at least one item, and were not the “Site Assets” or “Style Library.”

Cleary a situation where filtering is desired. I found it easy to find examples for generating a list with one filter. For example:

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var web = clientContext.Web;
SP.ListCollection listcoll = web.Lists;

ctx.Load(listcoll,
lists => lists.Include(list => list.Title)
.Where(list => list.BaseTemplate == 101));
ctx.ExecuteQuery();

However, examples on implementing multiple filters such as I needed proved much more challenging. I finally found an example where the implementation used many “.Where” clauses which led to the following attempt.

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...
ctx.Load(listcoll,
lists => lists.Include(list => list.Title)
.Where(list => list.BaseTemplate == 101)
.Where(list => list.ItemCount > 0)
.Where(list => list.Title != "Site Assets")
.Where(list => list.Title != "Style Library")
.Where(list => list.Hidden == false));

Unfortunately this would not even compile in Visual Studio 2010.

I decided to try implementing a more common syntax used in ‘if’ statements – using ‘&&’ to combine multiple conditions but within one .Where.

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...
ctx.Load(listcoll,
lists => lists.Include(list => list.Title, list => list.ItemCount)
.Where(list => list.BaseTemplate == 101 &&
list.ItemCount > 0 &&
list.Title != "Site Assets" &&
list.Title != "Style Library" &&
list.Hidden == false));

YES – Success! Finally, listcoll finally had the libraries I needed.

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Posted in SharePoint, Software Development, Visual Studio 2010 - C# | No Comments »

Content Security: The Forgotten Project Feature

September 2nd, 2011 by khusain

Throughout my many years of experience in the system and software development area, I have noticed one major thing that always seems to be at the top of requirements but becomes relegated to somewhere lower in priority as the project proceeds, only to come back to the forefront as testing and implementation time approach.  This is security.   Even in today’s time, with CISSP and CSSLP professionals everywhere, security seem to still take a back seat in the development process.

Most projects include building security, network security, and various other types of security policies which are generally inherited from the environment where the task is occurring and are fairly defined and stable.  Controlling access to the building, access to the network, access to files and folders, and general access to computing resources are all well established.  However, when we sit down and try to implement some form of security into the software we develop, it gets left out or deferred and needs to be added in at the last moment.  Why is it deferred? Well, how many requirements are really created around security?

Let’s throw a few examples out there:

  • The system will only permit access to authorized users
  • The authorized users will only be allowed to perform tasks they have been granted
  • The authorized users will only be able to see the data they are allowed to work on
  • The system will provide role and group based access controls
  • The system will log all unauthorized access to data (is this security or logging –you decide)
  • The system will log access to all data (Again, security or logging? Well, both)

These are very similar from project to project and pretty high level and very few, usually a dozen or so, but, without them in place, the system is essentially, non-functional.  Well, with the other functional requirements, what the user wants to see and do, which usually number in the hundreds, it’s easy to see why the security component gets little attention.  Except for the initial log-in, the users don’t really experience what is happening in the background, except for an odd warning about doing something they aren’t allowed to do.  A correctly implemented security model won’t even let the user know that features exist beyond what they are permitted to see.  What prevents them from seeing hidden features by glancing over their co-workers shoulder – well, that’s another issue.

So what happens when one of the most critical components of an application is not designed in from the onset? Besides chaos, a lot of redevelopment which is required to implement the missing feature, which leads to missing project deadlines and at worst not meeting implementation times. This is especially true for Fixed Firm Price (FFP) contracts where this can be disastrous to the bottom line, not to mention project failure – after all who will accept a system that cannot meet their basic requirements. Things are changing for the better, as I have seen projects now that have distinct security implementation team which interacts with the other development teams rather than being a side-attraction.

Naturally, for small scale web projects which are usually secured with 2-factor authentication (userid and password), the implementation is fairly simple and can be supported by the OS or a very simple database table.   If, however, you also need to control what the user can do (functionally) once authenticated, it starts becoming complex as you now have to maintain Access Control information for the user as well.  If you now further need to control what data they user can see, use, or modify, the security implementation gets even more complex.   Finally, if you need to implement CAC card integration, IP based authentication, CPU based authentication, or N-factor authentication (more than just a User ID and PWD, such as secure tokens, bio-metric, key-card …) , then additional complexities arise which need to be implemented in code or at the enterprise IT level.  Even now, we still haven’t addressed any encryption and data security requirements that could exist (ie. The system shall encrypt all personal data – does that just mean when it’s stored or also when transmitted??).  It is for this reason that security requirements must get high priority in any project where application, data, and system security are paramount, with the design engaged from the onset of the project.

The actual size of the security team will vary depending on the size of a project, but at least a single resource, with knowledge on all aspects of security (yes all, not just software), should be assigned as the single point of contact.  This person/team, throughout the project, must be involved intimately at the architectural level and will have the final say in any security testing scenarios.  By being involved at the architectural level, no design will be allowed to move forward until the security implementation has been vetted and approved.  Regardless of the security implementation, the primary goal is to confirm that all teams are compliant, which in essence translates to a compliant and secure application.  Whatever tests are needed to validate compliance should be defined during the design process as there is no better way to validate a system then to penetrate it by knowing its internals.  If you know how the security model is implemented and are still unable to compromise it, and then be default, the system is secure.  Open source systems fall into this category since all their code is accessible; everyone knows how to try to gain access, however, due to a well-implemented security model, they cannot.

At this point, we can keep going on about how imperative it is to make security design a high priority in any application design, or for that matter, any system design.  How would you like it if the car you bought didn’t have a lock or key to get it going?  Instead, I’ll just finish up with stressing that security is not a feature that can be put on the back-burner.  Everyone talks about it – you hear about cyber-security everywhere these days, but when it comes to the actual implementation, it gets compromised and inadequately implemented.  Considering that the raw power of computers is such that most systems can be compromised by simple attacks (such as brute force attacks), effort must be put into not just installing measures at the front gate, but beyond that as well to control losses if a breach were to occur.  It is also essential that management personnel understand this when planning a project to account for the level of effort it entails and to ensure that it is effectively budgeted for the entire project duration.

Now that we have addressed the issue of security in software system (and other systems), where do we go from there?  The best security is achieved by informing and teaching the user base, from the users up through the developers and managers.  I have covered a lot of items in this quick prelude to discussing security in information systems, but each should be followed with further details and training.

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Posted in Content Security, ECM Industry, Enterprise Content Management, Uncategorized | No Comments »

An Insider's Perspective: The CPSC Project

August 30th, 2011 by mseth

It was in the fall of 2010 when I got a call that began my engagement on one of the most interesting projects that I have worked on in recent times.

The situation, the project was with one of the leading product safety regulators in the world.  The international arm of the organization was leading an initiative to create a global information pool for product safety recall information in an effort to make product safety efforts across the world more coordinated and effective.  This would be a one stop, one shop view to “any recall – any where – any time” product safety recall information.

Armedia was asked to perform an initial assessment of what it would take a build a global recall information pool, build a roadmap for the process and structure the approach for the global consortium.  This was a pure play Information Technology (IT) strategy project where the focus was on creating an IT approach to meet a complex business situation.

What I loved about the project was the challenge of a highly unstructured business situation where the project sponsors understood the pain and knew the desirable outcome, but they had little understanding of what needed to be done.

Building an approach for an IT system in the area of product safety was a challenge, as I soon discovered.   Several factors contributed to the challenge, they included,  (a) plethora of legacy IT deployments, (b) changing data structures and data definitions over time, (c) different data structures and definitions across countries, and (d) project execution headwinds (Note: Our team ran into a situation of competing for attention amongst different priorities both within the organization and with 3rd parties outside, in this case the consortium of product safety organizations from other countries).

Sound familiar?

So we walk into the situation not knowing all the pieces of the puzzle and the Armedia team immediately began an assessment of the situation.  Quickly the team structured the analysis into the following topical areas:

  1. Strategic
  2. Governance and Oversight
  3. Functional Scope Definition
  4. Usability, Data Search, and Discovery
  5. Architecture
  6. Deployment and Execution
  7. Operations

Next came a deep dive into each area to develop specific recommendations and a roadmap at a granular level. Data categorizations, normalization and data definitions were all important areas of focus given the complexity of handling these items across different jurisdictions. I believe that our team’s recommendations around this area were excellent and well received by the international community, especially because our approach required minimal impact to current product safety operations, which was a key requirement by the sponsors.

We brought value in terms of providing structure and simplification for execution to what seemed at the outset to be a complex problem.  The Armedia report on “Considerations for Pursuing Global IT Interoperability for Publicly Available Product Recalls ” was published by the OECD (Organization of Economic Development) and has been accepted as the strategic guidance document by the international product safety working party set-up for the purpose of creating the global recall pool. The execution work on report recommendations has started and is currently underway.

This complex business issue was in need of a technology execution plan that was intentionally kept simple, and yet met the unique requirements of the customer. My team and myself guided our efforts in order to meet these criteria, and in the end the Armedia team successfully developed recommendations that provided both strategic and efficient solutions to this international IT challenge.

 

 

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Posted in ECM Industry, Enterprise Content Management, Records Management, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Minding the Engineering and Maintenance Information Gap

August 8th, 2011 by jschivera

Phillip Crosby, notable business man and management theory author, asserted, “If anything is certain, it is that change is certain. The world we are planning for today will not exist in this form tomorrow.” When applied to managing a company’s enterprise asset base, truer words were never spoken .  Change is pervasive and anyone who has ever worked in this environment is aware of the challenges of translating an engineering modification package into actual changes to the physical assets and the maintenance supporting infrastructure.

Closing this information gap is the idea behind the CONNtext solution, bridging the gap between IBM’s Maximo Asset Management and IBM’s FileNet Content Management

Different Lenses and Languages

Engineering and maintenance staff view the their asset worlds through different lenses and languages. When engineers are assigned responsibility for a modification, they are envisioning a future or even abstract state. Typically they think of the change in terms of a system or at a functional level. They need to know the design requirements for the facility, applicable rules and regulations or industry codes , standards and requirements such as licensing basis analyses, specifications and calculations.On the other hand, the maintenance staff view the assets as they exist today, at the discrete component level and beyond.

Engineering conceives the change and is responsible for sending the requirements and instructions for implementing the change in the form of output documents such as installation drawings, specifications and procedures. With a different view of the facility that is function and design driven, engineering is likely not providing the change information with the level of detail that enables the maintenance staff to readily implement and maintain on a component level. In their world, every minute detail about a device is important and must be accounted for in order to properly perform maintenance.

Different Tools

With physical assets and information assets constantly in change and each having their own distinct lifecycles phases, managed in different systems, managed by different sets of people with different lenses, and changed at different times change coordination is a challenge . Engineering typically works within an enterprise content management (ECM) system that captures and stores such documents as design drawings, specifications, calculations, analyses, load studies and other controlled documents.  Within the ECM system the index, search and retrieval function is based on an information classification system derived by the engineering community in terms of how they think and work. What you might not always know is “all” the relationships that exist and are required in order to enact a given change. This knowledge is reliant to some extent on the engineer’s individual knowledge of how things operate on the component level within the plant: the minutiae of the maintenance world.

The maintenance community on the other hand typically uses a physical asset management system that is more focused on work order management. The strength of this type of system is the ability to handle ad hoc processes that span multiple departments. This kind of system assists in long- and short-term planning, preventive, reactive, and condition-based maintenance, schedule management, resource optimization and key performance monitoring. Within this system, maintenance information has been classified by terminology that resonates within their daily operational world.

Framework To Bridge The Gap

Our CONNtext solution was designed to help bridge the gap between different views of the engineering and maintenance and the use of different information management systems by connecting IBM Maximo with IBM FileNet Content Management.

CONNtext operates within the existing user interfaces of Maximo and FileNet, meaning there is minimal user “retraining”. CONNtext employs a document classification filtering scheme that identifies the organizational documents pertinent to maintenance. Once identified, CONNtext is designed to help an organization further group those documents by maintenance terms to create views that enable automating the engineering to maintenance logic into a manageable process.

As a result, the Armedia CONNtext solution bridges the two worlds and users can now:

  • Access engineering drawings and documents within IBM Maximo without having to learn a new system.
  • Receive prompts to ensure that they are working with the most current version of the documents.
  • Have searchable access to unstructured documents within IBM Maximo such as video, pictures, and documentation .
  • Provide regulators with a complete work history of changes on the configuration of assets and their components.
  • Identify loopholes in previously captured document relationships.
  • Gain visibility into other changes and projects in process that are affecting the document that they are currently planning to change.

Armedia’s CONNtext solution has been validated by IBM under the Information Management, Industry Frameworks  and Ready for Tivoli programs.

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