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.

A long time ago I posted this blog.  I had not realized it was over a year ago, but I will continue on with more information around the Export.  I chose to use VB6 as it was the easiest way to start working against eRoom’s API’s.  John and I discussed whether we should attempt to migrate against the eRoom database tables or use its API’s.  It was decided to go down the path of using the API’s which should provide more flexibility going forward.  Though I do still like the idea of migrating from the database directly.

The design of the export piece is fairly simplistic.  Start at the top of the eRoom structure and walk each branch outputting all associated metadata into a well formed XML document.  The goal was to have as much data as required to recreate it all again in another eRoom instance.  [Note, we have not actually written a Load module for going into eRoom.]

For the most part, in the code, every object can be treated as an IERUItem.  This helps with creating helper functions as we can simply pass this object type about.  The next important step is to determine the properties that are part of IERUItem by which you can further derive information.  By doing this you open up a host of new goodies to delve into.

For example is this item a container.  To find out check the property isContainer (which is missing from API help document).  A container is a way of grouping other objects together.  Kind of like a folder.  If a room is being exported, first the groups and members are put into the XML, followed by properties relating immediately to the room, then a container element is identified.  The Exporter takes a depth first approach, so a list of all items in the container are identified and the process continues.

One thing to note, a visual debugger is your friend.  The API documentation is good up to a point.  Then you realize that some object properties were left out of the documentation or property values may not be quite what you expected them to be, like properties may not be instantiated if they are not relevant to the object.  Once the gaps are filled in it becomes quite intuitive working through eRoom structures.

Currently, the user can export all of the communities or facilities, or selected rooms.  The design thought running behind this was to be in the position of exporting rooms to the repository of choice.  In other words, if marketing and legal have all their content within the same facility but would like them to be in separate repositories, this can be accommodated.  Actually it can be accommodated in a couple of  ways.  At the export setup, you can export specific rooms to be designated for specific repositories.  All of the necessary metedata will still be exported (i.e. users, groups, etc.) with each room.  The result is multiple export.xml files.  Then at ingestion time, the user would ingest each export.xml and associate it with the appropriate repository.  The other method would be to export all rooms and handle the repository association at ingestion time.

Some thoughts around improving the Exporter Tool is around further investigation into the eRoom XML Query interface.  This opens up more options for different programming languages and different thoughts around the overall export.  Of course, it could open up more gotcha’s as well  The next exciting installment around eRoom migration will be around the transformation tool.  Now that we have all this wonderful XML, what do we do with it?  This is were things really start to get interesting as what will the eRoom XML output be transformed into?

So who else has been looking at their eRoom environment wondering when and how they are going to migrate away from their legacy system?

So, back to “the question”. Supreme Court Justice Stewart’s famous phrase “I know it when I see it” applies in this case. It’s hard to define content management but most people know what it is when they see it, or use it. My answer always starts at the lowest level in defining content management; the application of structured data content to index and manage unstructured content. From that level it is easy to build out the various elements of content management as it applies to the target audience. Why do I prefer this definition? It explicitly calls out what I believe is an overlooked area of content management: the element of structured data.

Without structured data unstructured content is virtually useless to an organization; lost in place. Data allows the content to participate in business process decision making. Data allows the content to be located, searched and utilized, secured and protected, retained, archived or destroyed. Without the proper structured data providing the unstructured content in the proper context a content management system runs the risk of being rejected. Users will brand the system as untrustworthy, out of date or just too hard to use.

Understanding the structured data is just one part of implementing a content management system. Why is it overlooked? It’s not sexy or flashy. It’s dirty hard work requiring lots of research, interviews, analysis and, unfortunately, creating new data standards out of thin air. I call this work, “data archaeology “. The language of the business must be mastered and learned, then managed and standardized. And as with most dirty work, the work gets avoided. Where to start?
First determine the scope of content information to be included in the system. Having clearly defined expectations from the executive sponsor will help set boundaries and minimize scope creep. Next roll up your sleeves and collect as much information for the data analysis and aggregation work. There is no exhaustive or complete listing of information sources to consider. It is important to not overlook information in the gathering stage. The information set left out is invariably the one that causes redo work later on in the project. Figure One (below) illustrates this process.

The output of this effort is the metadata required to manage and process the organization’s content. The data must help classify the content in a structured manner to ensure it is consistently and uniformly classified and described. This is an important goal, if you don’t know what the content is how can you trust it and process it.

Simply stated structured data or metadata has only two reasons to exist in a content management system: 1) it is required to support a business process or 2) it is required to support search and filtering. A little more expansive list is put forth by David Haynes in his book “Metadata for Information Management and Retrieval” which lists five reasons for metadata:
1) resource description
2) information retrieval
3) management of information
4) ownership and authentication
5) interoperability.

Either list is fine, mine is just a little more bottom line. But when developing the inventory of structured data the following rules should be applied:
1) each attribute should have defined data owners
2) an established process to populate the data
3) when possible the attribute should be required
4) when possible the entered data be validated

Doing the hard work in mastering the user’s business language and applying these metadata rules will go a long way to helping ensure user acceptance and a successfully content management project.

But how so? Read on…

Part 1 – The challenge

NIEM is an important cog in a government case management solution. At some point in a case’s lifecycle, you may need to share the case-related information with other agencies or individuals, perhaps to get assistance in completing the case or maybe to give more information to another agency for a similar case that they’re working on. Whatever the reason, this information must be easily passed from one system to the next without being ‘lost in translation’.

NIEM (National Information Exchange Model) is a framework for sharing enterprise-wide information across all levels of government. It has a core set of elements that are standard across all the agencies and has more specific ones for the various entities and stakeholders. Agencies can now speak a common language, allowing one agency to publish data from its case management system to the XML standard, which can then be picked up and parsed by another agency that requires this information.

Now all you need is a case management system that lets you export data into the NIEM standard and then a parser to put it back in.

Pretty neat and simple, n’est-ce pas?

Almost. (Let’s face it, if it really were that simple, I’d have nothing to write about and I’d just put up some comics to keep you entertained.)

There are a few problems to watch out for:

• Before importing or exporting, the system must check the data’s security classification. A document requiring a classification level of Top Secret cannot be sent to an agency (or individual) with only Confidential level access. Perhaps only certain parts of the document are deemed to be Top  Secret, in which case, the publishing tool should be able to extract only those parts that are at the required access level.

• Large amounts of data may need to be continuously exported to, or imported from, an external system. Every time an update is made to case data, it may be necessary to push this information out to other agencies. So it may be better to export/import only the changed data and update the existing data. This reduces the time and cost of transfer and would help to reduce duplicated data.

• Data may be imported that already exists in the case management system. Checks need to be in place to handle matching data during import. When duplicate data is found, is it better to replace the data or create a new version of the existing data?

Armedia Case Management comes with a tool specifically to import from and export to NIEM that tackles these problems. Stay tuned for Part Two… The Solution, which discusses how ACM implements the NIEM publishing process.

Until then, here’s a comic strip to keep you entertained (don’t we all just love Dilbert)…

EMC eRoom is going away.  It has been marked as End of Life (EOL) so what next?  EMC Documentum have 2 options: EMC Documentum Collaboration Services; EMC Documentum Centerstage.  Armedia’s immediate goal is to support Collaboration Services, then Centerstage but why stop there?  Why limit a client’s choice.

Armedia’s eRoom migration story is in 3 acts (and yes, I have been listening to some test pieces that I used to play in my brass banding days – check out Year of the Dragon by Philip Sparke).

Act I – The Export

Getting the content out of eRoom into an understandable format.  Of course, its not just the content, there is  a large quantity of metadata in eRoom as well.  Act I – The Export deals solely with interrogating eRoom and generating a document detailing everything about eRoom.  From communities to Files.  From eRoom Setup to databases – we mean everything.  The result: a well-formed XML document

Act II – The Transformation

As with any classic performance, after the captivating opening, Act II deals with getting to know the characters.  In this case, the transformation gets to know the XML document and gains a deep understanding of the objects held within.  The transformation is responsible for also generating a secondary XML document. This is formed to support the ingestion to a new Content Management System (CMS) and / or Collaboration System.  Currently the supported transformation is for EMC Documentum Collaboration Services.  This can easily be extended due to the flexible architecture of this utility and is simply a case of transforming XML.

Act III – The Load

The closing act is the build up to the dramatic climax which leaves the audience going “WOW!”.  eRoom Migration aims to achieve the same “WOW!”.  Now that the XML has been transformed you can sit back and let the load run automatically.  That’s it.  By using the ingestion engine of Caliente! loading all the content and metadata is simple.  Just let eRoom Migration take care of everything for you.  The only thing it does not do is say “WOW!” – we leave that to you.

Over the next few weeks I plan to talk in more detail about the approach taken and dig deeper into the 3 different pieces of the migration effort.  For those eRoom users, what do you see yourselves using in the near future?

As my colleague has clearly stated in his blog, My name is NIEM, NIEM is not a silver bullet.  There are many issues to resolve:

1. Security of information once export from system.
2. Sharing of information between civilian and intelligence agencies – What if it contains data about US citizen?  How do we share with our international partners?
3. What if one system does not support all data elements and during the import data is lost?  Agency could be making decisions based on limited information.
4. When does the imported data become stale?  What if the case is active and new information contradicts the export data that has been shared?
5. Given the limited budgets of local and state law enforcements, how do they participate in collaborating to combat crime?
6. How do we combat data overload once data is being shared throughout the community?

These issues/concerns must and will be addressed because the alternative is not acceptable.  Our enemy wins when we allow distractions to take our eyes off accomplishing this goal of information sharing amongst the community.  As I review current and future procurements, I am glad to see the FBI, DHS and others make this a core element of their system.

NIEM which stands for the, inevitably, not so sexy sounding National Information Exchange Model is a formal information exchange schema developed by the US government (specifically DOJ and DHS) to further information sharing across Federal, and in time, State and Local government agencies and their business constituents. NIEM builds on from the much more bulky Global Justice XML Data Model (GJXDM) model; an off-shoot of post 9/11 information sharing initiatives. The idea of NIEM (currently in version 2.1) is to provide a consistent, non-redundant, open standards based XML schema that has some well defined entities and activities for improved inter-agency communication and information sharing.

All good…but what’s new, eh? Well, I think what is new is the fact that NIEM seems to be much more than just another academic exercise. Since its infancy in 2005, there have been multiple live and pilot projects (particularly around criminal investigation related content) at many Federal and State agencies, a set of open source tools have been developed and continue to grow, and the government (including Fed CIO, Vivek Kundra) seem more than ever to be pushing the standard and making it a part of the overall US government strategy for information sharing–see data.gov.

So, how does this apply to content management? Well, as with 21CFR11, 5015 2&4, SOX and most your other garden variety compliance oriented standards, there is an opportunity. An opportunity to become compliant (read: running afoul of the government is not a good thing if you want to work with them). And, an opportunity to be productive (read: information transparency and efficient content sharing can lead to some bottom line savings and possibly…and this is where you need to put your salesforce.com hat on…new revenue development channels).

As far as ECM goes, it seems to me that minimally NIEM would have an obvious play along the lines of Case Management (particularly for investigative records) and, in a larger context, Records Management. Empirically though it’s not there yet. Case Management is still quite immature as an offering. Though there are, of course, many solutions out there, most are heavily bespoke or still based on legacy structured data and structured data management systems. In a world of exploding DOC, PPT, PDF, MP3, FLV, et al content sources the days of pure structured content solutions are numbered. As for Records Management, despite hype to the contrary, it seems we are still very much focused on eDiscovery related records management–hail Email Archival!! I think there is change afoot though, with greater investment than ever–at least by the government–in Case Management, Records Management and information sharing initiatives.

NIEM, of course, is not nor will ever be a silver bullet. Ultimately, it’s a suggested structure for content storage and exchange. However, as with the neighbor’s grass, you could always bemoan the greener pastures…only to realize in time that with a little spade work your own grass aint half bad. NIEM can be that spade…