Tags: Craig Le Clair, Forrester Research, The Forrester Wave: Business Process Management for Document Processes, BPM, Documentum Process Suite

Tags: Jeff North, Forrester Consulting, The Total Economic Impact of EMC Documentum, Pfizer, EMC, content management system

Brown-Forman: Rob Price, lead system engineer discusses how Brown-Forman developed a number of successful content management solutions, including an interactive brand application using EMC Documentum’s Digital Asset Manager and a transactional invoice processing application.

George Washington University: Ron Bonig, Interim, VP and CIO discusses how their Human Resources department streamlines and improves their paper process by scanning, indexing and managing paper documents by implementing EMC Documentum’s Transactional Content Management Solution.

Bechtel: Simon Woodford, Collaborative Systems User Product Manager, talks with Bryan about document management and collaboration projects within Bechtel where project information is created, managed and shared globally across teams utilizing Documentum technologies.

For more information, go to www.emc.com

Tags: Bryan House, EMC World, Documentum, EMC World, Rob Price, Ron Bonig, Simon Woodford

Tags: Whitney Tidmarsh, EMC, Content Management, Archiving, EMC World, Documentum, Momentum

Tags: EMC, Documentum, OEM

Tags: Geoffrey Bock, Bock and Company

Tags: EMC Documentum, Bryan House, ECIS

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Tags: Claire Hogikyan, Pfizer, Documentum

Transcript:
Host: Bryan House - EMC Software
Guest: Naomi Miller - EMC Software

Bryan House - EMC Software
Hello and welcome to the EMC Podcast, When Content Matters. My name is Bryan House. Today’s discussion is on transactional content management and we’ll cover our solutions and strategies that you consider to address your paper management challenges. I am joined today by my colleague, Naomi Miller. Hey! Naomi.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Hello.

Bryan House - EMC Software
So, Naomi we can start as you take a minute to introduce yourself to our audience.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. My name is Naomi Miller as Bryan mentioned. I am the Director of Product Marketing for our Transactional Content Management focus. I have been at EMC Documentum for just about six years now. Actually I have a background as a customer, where I worked at Hewlett-Packard and helped, manage and implement some of our content management strategies using Documentum. So, I have some good hands-on experience, as well as a lot of experience of Documentum.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Well, great. So, to start the discussion today, can you provide us maybe with an overview of transactional content management?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s a bit of a new terminology for those of you who followed the content management space. You could think of Transactional Content Management as kind of focused on your back office processes, those processes, which are transactional in nature and result in some sort of transaction happening in your company. These processes are often very paper heavy and are very traditionally, very manual in terms of their processes, cumbersome processes and time consuming processes. The Transactional Content Management approach that EMC Documentum takes, helps to streamline that whole process, helps to eliminate as much of the paper as possible to digitize that content, and to make that content available at the right time, in the right place, as part of that transactional process.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. So, you talk on a couple of the challenges there, maybe we should dig in a little bit more, we talk about manual processes and paper. Can we — you maybe go a little bit deeper on what some of the challenges companies face in dealing with paper in their organizations?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. Most people could probably resonate with this in terms of those processes being quite cumbersome, very inefficient and obviously they not lead to a more and more expense. The one of the challenges is that, it isn’t just paper, although that is a large part of the process, there are also electronic documents you need to deal with, sometime EDI or XML files, and the papers. So, you need a much more holistic way of how you managing that information.

Accessing the information is probably one of the biggest business challenges. So, if you are a person, as part of that process, for instance one of the processes we look at is invoice processing, very manual, cumbersome process, where accessing the right information to — and properly execute that process can be quite difficult. It causes the requirement for very a leaner process, right only one person can be working on the file at any one time that obviously elongate that process unnecessarily.

As you can imagine this can also be quite a compliance nightmare not everybody knows where the right paperwork is. You don’t always know for sure that you are looking at the right version of the supporting documentation. Perhaps one of the biggest business challenges customers face, is the ability to really respond quickly to a customer inquiry. Every company, whether you are in financial services, or in manufacturing you are looking to always improve your customer service. And when a customer calls and/or a partner, or even a supplier calls to inquire about the state of their transaction with you, to the degree and you can’t answer pretty efficiently and pretty rapidly, you are then at a disadvantage over your competition.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. So, you started such a little bit on applications or business processes where this can be applied. Can you talk a little bit more about areas within businesses that are more visible or tangible in the Transactional Content Management market?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. At a horizontal level most companies could probably recognize as I mentioned I kind of talked about these as back office processes. Your accounts payable and even your accounts receivable processes are usually very cumbersome and manual today. You could look at your legal and HR processes as well at a horizontal level. And then if you were to look into individual vertical areas, financial services probably has some of the biggest challenges in the space, you think about it essentially what financial services companies create is paper, is information, and so their processes often can be quite paper heavy, quite manual. Any individual who purchased a home could resonate with the very paper based, somewhat complex back and forth process of taking out a loan.

So, Mortgage origination, loan origination is just a prime example of where we can make that a lot of efficient. Insurance companies, we all have filed claims. Medical claims, auto-insurance claims, and so forth, the claim processing is another great target for this. Processing applications, we have examples and in government, and in education where the whole approving of an application, or the enrollment of a new student, or a new citizen in a program is also another good example.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, great. Certainly, I think we all experienced refinancing our mortgages so we all understand the paper involved in that on the end user side. So, we talked a lot about applications and some of the challenges, can you talk little about how companies can put solutions in place and what that means on the nuts and bolts side?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s important to note it may already be obvious to you that in a Transactional Content Management environment it isn’t just about the documents and the papers, it’s also about the transaction. So, one — I think really important element is the right understanding of what your transactional system is? What its requirements are? Who accesses that information? And what additional information do they need? So, there are certainly line of business, ERP, back office applications that need to be taken into consideration. There needs to be the right level of integration, so that to the degree we are managing, supporting documents as part of the transaction, when we have the right level of integration and seamlessness between those systems.

Certainly, scanning and imaging and digitizing content is not necessarily new, but typically what would happen is that would often get done at the back end of a process. So, you go through the full refinance process for instance, in a very paper rich process and then at the end when that loan is funded, organizations certainly would scan and digitize that content for archiving sake. Now, what we see is much more of a trend of moving that digitization and automation process upfront, so that you can truly see an ROI, you can really shorten the total amount of time that process takes to complete, as well as, in archive and retaining that information.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Excellent. So, can you talk about the — you just started to touch on the benefits company start to see from thinking holistically about Transactional Content Management? Can you go a little bit further into what those expected benefits might be?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. The nice thing about this area is that very often organizations can see a very tangible return on their investment. Certainly there are costs, tangible costs associated with handling paper, filing papers, storing paper, copying paper, forwarding paper and you can often add those up and there are a good deal of those costs and you can’t actually eliminate. We have got examples for instance, financial services companies with distributed locations, who can simple eliminate their FedEx cost. Often times in branch locations, you would collect the day’s paper work, put it into big red envelopes and ship it across the country or wherever you need to ship it and so definitely a cost associated with that.

The other true benefit, tangible, but maybe not as — well it is ROI associated, but can’t necessarily add up that exact cost, and that is the compliance aspect. So, you collect all the paper work, you put it into envelop, you ship it across the country, who knows what is going to happen to it, that’s a compliance risk.

So, being able to automate that information, digitize that information, retain it really starts lower your compliance rest and as we mentioned perhaps again not as added up in terms of dollar and cents, but clearly giving you competitive advantage in terms of customer responsiveness is really a very big benefit. Being able to shorten the amount of time, it takes you to make any one decision. The amount of time, you can say, in responding to your customer inquires can be priceless in terms of your competitive position on the marketplace.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great. I know one of the customer case studies that really resonates with me, I think about the spaces Cincinnati Insurance and one of the things that I really like about that story is that, is all of the things that you describing here are really behind the scenes and integrated into their SAP Claims Management System. So for the end users, utilizing this as part of their SAP environment, can you talk a little more about that case study?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Sure. It’s a really terrific one, people can find that on our website for more detail, but essentially we put a solution in place for Cincinnati Insurances. Our claim adjustors out in this field investigating large personal and casualty insurance claim. And that’s an environment, which is very content rich, adjustors have to go out and inspect damage. They take notes, they take picture, and they have supporting documentation. In the old days they would fill out by hand long forms. They would collect their notes. They would process their pictures. They would put them into FedEx packages, and to read it four weeks later, they would get a claim put into the system.

Today that’s all done very electronically. So, they have personal scanners where they are able to digitize their content via the Web. They are able to fill out their forms online, and a claim can essentially be put into the system in a matter of days, maybe even some times hours as opposed to weeks. So, not only do they have that immediate information now available to themselves, to the home office, and to the customer, they have also eliminated a lot of those shipping charges, and a lot of the paper cost.

So, it’s really been a traffic solution and then when the information comes in electronically, as you mentioned it’s automatically connected to their SAP Claims Processing Systems and once the claim is paid out that information is all archived on EMC storage devices as well. In a Archiving environment it’s got a much lower cost than high end storage. So, they really there got a very end-to-end, all the way from capture through the business process phase and through the archiving phase.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah. It’s a great story you really get to see too when you think about a transactional process how many different types of content make up a claim in this case, or any sort of business process?

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
Exactly. As I mentioned it’s not just paper, it’s really about I am including paper in with your electronic content, digital photos and everything else, so that you have everything you need to complete that transaction as quickly as possible, with the most accuracy as possible, and at the least amount of cost.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah, that’s great. Well, Naomi, I want to thank you for joining us today. This is a great discussion.

Naomi Miller - EMC Software
You are welcome. Thanks Bryan.

Bryan House - EMC Software
You are welcome and I also want to thank all our listeners for tuning into the, When Content Matters podcast series from EMC. I encourage you all to learn more about Transactional Content Management Solutions, as well as our other content management products at software.emc.com, where you can also download additional podcasts and subscribe to a number of EMC RSS podcast feed. So, I want to thank you everyone for joining us today and call better up.

Copyright ©2006 PodTech.net. All rights reserved. Privacy policy

Tags: content management

Tags: EMC, Software Developer Conference, Documentum, Enterprise Content Management

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Transcript:
Host: Bryan House - EMC Software
Guest: Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research

Bryan House - EMC Software
Hi, my name is Bryan House; you are listening to an Enterprise Content Management Podcast series, ‘When Content Matters’ from EMC. Today, I have the special luxury of having a guest, Kyle McNabb from Forrester Research joining me today. Kyle, can you take a minute to tell us a little bit about yourself and your focus at Forrester?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Sure, my name is Kyle McNabb, I’m a senior analyst with Forrester and I do cover Enterprise Content Management; more specifically, I cover discrete areas such as document management and web content management within the overall Enterprise Content Management landscape.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, so right now is a really exciting time for Enterprise Content Management and the market’s changing and growing and really evolving pretty rapidly right before our eyes. What do you think is behind some of the growing interests in ECM and what’s happening in the market?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Well, because of number of drivers. Number 01, we do live in a market now that is very much focused on risk management, risk mitigation and content is one of those assets that can put an organization at risk. So, there is a ton of interest within IT organizations to look for ways to better manage that content, manage that content that maybe putting the organization at risk to help mitigate risk, to help support compliance initiatives. I also think just in general, there is a broader recognition that content is important and if an enterprise can put their content to use, they can get more efficient, they can improve productivity, etcetera and that is really driving I think a renewed interest in a lot different areas in Enterprise Content Management.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah that’s great, I mean we hear that a lot from our customers too, that the need to — sort of the untapped potential of unstructured content. I know that you’ve led the Forrester’s Research for the EMC suites way that was published last fall, can you talk a little bit about that and some of the findings you had as result of that wave?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Sure, that wave itself was an evaluation of ten different vendors with a particular audience in mind. What we did is, we worked fairly closer with a larger number of senior IT architects to get a good understanding of how they are looking at Enterprise Content Management and for a lot of them, what they really want to do is, they recognize that content is a problem within the enterprise and within their enterprise they may have anywhere from 5, 10, 20 or even more different content systems inside the organization and what they really want to do is find a solution that they can standardize going forward to help them address future business needs, future IT needs as well and get them in a position where they can prevent some rogue spending. So, they can keep their line of business peers from buying that next content management system but eventually has to come IT’s ways to manage and support to point forward.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, you also led the research much more recently around Forrester’s content centric application waves. What’s the premise behind this view of content management and sort of what’s the — how do you draw distinction between the two wave reports you have published in the last six months or so?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Sure well, harking back to the Enterprise Content Management wave, you know with that senior IT architect view, what they often miss when dealing their line of business peers is they miss context. You know miss some of that need and information, that’s going to help them figure out how to put content to use to address maybe a transactional process need or to help address, making that intellectual worker with inside engineering, or finance a little bit more intelligent or help marketing address a broader customer experience need and put content to use to help derive a consumer to a customer. So we actually took that context in mind and evaluated the same sort of vendors and a few more to help those IT architects and to help those in IT that are aligned with a line of business. Get a better perspective of what vendors, what products, what solutions are out there that aren’t just focused on helping them address their platform needs, but help them put content to use.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, now do you see ECM as an infrastructure decision today or as a — do you see more heading in that direction around the platform.

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Well, truth we tell at ECM, it really is an infrastructure decision now. Most enterprises that we talk to they look at ECM for lack of a better way to put it as kind of the next iteration of the database, or the next generation file system. They do want to standardize on top wave an infrastructure platform, that they can build up that IT skills that are around, that they could have readily available to deploy, to go meet any type of business need or any type of IT need. So, your by and large IT infrastructure decision makers are driving evaluations of ECM but we’re also seeing quite a bit of bifurcation beginning to take place in the market, in that those aligned with the line of business in IT or even some of those more intelligent business users and business managers are looking at content. And looking for ways to — again, put it to use to help them become more efficient, so yes ECM in general is becoming an infrastructure decision but we are seeing this bifurcation take place in a new class of applications, a new class of solutions emerged, that are going to leverage that infrastructure and help those end users in the lines of business etcetera, put that content to use.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Can you give us an example of this?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Sure thing, typical one that I went across with is marketers are really focused right now, especially in the retail world if they are in, if they are retail financial services, the retail banking, typical product retail, consumer markets, you name it, they are very focused and concerned on trying to present end customers a consistent experience. Across all channels, be it wireless, be it you know what happens on the website, be it what happens with the direct field organization, be it what happens within a kiosk instead of a retail store. They are very focused on making sure that any customer that comes to them will get a consistent experience across all of those channels. Now those marketers, they are not exclusively identifying that there is a content problem, but the fact is that it is a content problem and so that’s really kind of highlighting, if you will, a disconnect between lines of business and IT whereas in this case you know the marketers, they haven’t expressed a content problem but they do a bit content problem and that often gets lost on the IT organization; end results in an unsatisfied set of needs for the marketers and addressing a customer experience need. We think that’s kind of driving the bifurcation of the market and really kind of leading a lot of IT organizations to rethink what they need to do for their content initiatives. You know IT organizations need to be a little bit more consultative when they are addressing these types of needs and need to recognize that, hey, in some areas that may be a content problem where the line of business hasn’t explicitly identified it.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Right, now in part of the content-centric applications where in the reports that you’ve wrote on — issued on this topic, you sort of defined three categories of content; transactional, business and persuasive. How should an organization prioritize their ECM strategy particularly when most companies have content that falls across every one of these categories?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Well, kind of the anecdote here is most enterprises that I talked to; they prioritize based on who’s screaming the loudest. In many cases I think that does work for some enterprises, but I really do think, the best way for enterprises to move forward is to think of ECM, yes it is infrastructure but to think of it as a strategy as well and work to identify where inside an organization you’re picking a particular process area, picking a particular business unit, picking a particular user constituency and help them understand what their information architecture is. You help them understand, how content can be put to use to help them address their needs, help them understand what content or information they need to be effective and also help them understand you know what policies and procedures need to be in place to help them manage that content.

That’s a better way to help identify what paying points need to addressed then in what many enterprises do right now is they look across the board, they recognize a content isn’t owned by any one particular senior executive inside the enterprise and so they focus on trying to find that lowest common denominator that they think can address any particular business need. You know that’s a recipe for disaster, so those that want to focus on more ECM as a strategy, do need to kind of pick their battles with a particular business unit or line of business and help them identify what that information architecture is, then go off and begin to identify the right platform or the right set of content-centric applications that can address those needs.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, great actually I want to go back to a thing you said a little bit before; you talked about that organizations are looking to start to make their ECM strategy and decisions sort of similar to the database and the way they have looked at databases before. So, what is Forrester’s vision for the platform vendors in the ECM space going forward and should organizations evaluate their platform capability requirements; things like records managements, security, classification or metadata management with the application that content-centric application requirements that you describe?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Yeah, a great question and when we opt in here from a lot of our clients, the market really is bowling down as especially about ECM has infrastructure to a enjoy a kind of a four horsemen race of IBM, EMC, Oracle, and Microsoft and I think a lot of parallels can be made between ECM and RDBMS market in particular. You know many enterprise IT organizations they didn’t make their relation or database decisions based on a particular end application requirement, they looked across the board and identified that, hey, structure data is common and it needs to support a wide range of applications and behind that you need to have a strong set of security and management applications to support all that information. I think the same thing can be said here for ECM as infrastructure but I don’t think you can just as you didn’t do it for the RDBMS world; you just focused solely on the backend you know kind of back office IT specific type of support you would find within an RDBMS and enterprises looked at as well as what applications were readily available, or what applications I could quickly build on top of that platform to go address particular line of business and process needs.

The same thing can be said for ECM. Enterprises do need to evaluate ECM as infrastructure, along the lines of what is going be available for IT to help them better manage and deploy content and content repositories to go address lines of businesses, but you can’t just stop there. I think enterprises about who are those senior IT architects to look at what types of applications are readily available to run on top of that platform so they really need to press on vendors including EMC and IBM and Microsoft and Oracle of what applications do you have now? Or what vendors, what other ISBs have built out applications? What SIs have built out solutions on top of this so that you as an IT infrastructure decision maker don’t have to worry about building everything over and over again to go address line of business needs.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah that’s a really great point and that’s the reason — one of the reasons why we built the application development portfolio program here at EMC to just address those requirements that we are hearing from our customers as well. Well Kyle, I do want to thank you for joining us today, its been a very interesting discussion on really a hot topic, I think out in the market and certainly one they were very interested in. Before we do sign off though, can you summarize the three key take ways from the Forrester wave content-centric applications report for our listeners?

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Well, sure thing, I’ll summarize it with three words or one word said three times. Context, context, context. You know as an enterprise IT decision-maker you cannot just make a decision on their own of what is that platform that I can have readily available at my disposal to go address these needs. You need to work closely with those process owners inside the line of business with those different user constituencies to understand their context so that you have a better idea of how to put content to use and doing so sets you up in a — puts you in a much better position to go identify the right platform as well as the right applications to go address your organization’s needs.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, thanks again Kyle. With that that concludes our session today; for more information as well as access to teach you these reports you can go to software.emc.com and have access to these or obviously go to forrester.com. Get that right and check this out as well, so again Kyle thank you very much.

Kyle McNabb - Forrester Research
Thank you.

Bryan House - EMC Software
And we are signing off.

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Tags: EMC, Kyle McNabb, Enterprice Content Management

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www.homedepot.com

Transcript:
Host: Bryan House - EMC Software
Guest: Lee Dallas - Home Depot

Bryan House - EMC Software
Hello and welcome, my name is Bryan House; you’re listening to the enterprise content management Podcast series ‘When Content Matters’ from EMC. I am excited today because we have a very special guest joining us; Lee Dallas, system architect from the Home Depot. To discuss their ECM deployment and why the Home Depot choose EMC’s Documentum. Hello and welcome Lee.

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
Thank you Bryan.

Bryan House - EMC Software
So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at the Home Depot?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
Well, Bryan I have been with the Home Depot since 2002 and I am responsible for strategic planning, architecture and review of all content management systems. Our deployment here includes full range of Documentum products, Web Publisher, Digital Asset Manager, WK custom applications; we also have implementation of eRoom and Captiva. There are several other legacy implementations and related technologies that evolve under our area; translation memory, search and the like. Prior to the Home Depot, I have spent ten years in image and content services for Delta Airlines, primarily working in the engineering and technical publications area.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Well as you have quite an extensive experience working in the content management space, so can you describe for our listeners the Content Management platform you’ve implemented and the business processes it addresses today?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
Here at the Home Depot we really tried to take a platform rather than a project- driven approach. We recognize that the need for content management capability is surfacing in every major initiative and many of these initiatives didn’t recognize their own need or at the very least didn’t appreciate the complexity of the content management part of their project. Many of the projects we’re pursuing different vendors and had the process continued, that would’ve resulted in a colossal duplication of effort on almost every front. We have sought to consolidate really on a common product line that would meet the largest number of needs for the greatest number of projects and at the same time be able to handle the job at Home Depot volumes. To meet these challenges, we selected EMC Documentum and then we started to deploy a set of common repositories and applications to serve the needs of the different initiatives with repositories dedicated to communications, products, web content management and the like.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Great, so it sounds that you guys have a pretty expansive vision for content management at the Home Depot. What specifically did the Home Depot and what reasons did the Home Depot use to choose EMC Documentum for their content management platform?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
Well Documentum was selected because it provided the broadest capability on a common platform. Virtually everything we could think of, that we would ever need to improve information life cycle management in general and content management specifically, is handled at some level in this package. The approach is that without its challenges, is a platform not a point solution. So, that means for each point in the enterprise whether it be web content management, collaboration, departmental, we have to build point solutions on top of that platform.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Sure, sure and it sounds like it’s certainly pretty comprehensive. Can you give us some detail maybe more specifically on the web publishing applications? Are they driving content for example on your dot-com website as a Home owner I know I spent a good deal of time at HomeDepot.com. Do you have any tips may be on how I can keep my lawn green all summer?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
As far as your lawn is considered there is a reason I’m in IT not in a garden center, so you should probably stick to the store or on to our website for advice but we realize that every unit has specific and unique needs and one of the things that we wanted to avoid was locking things down so tightly that would lose flexibility. Our goal was to reuse components not necessarily construct monolithic systems that couldn’t adjust to new channels of creation and distribution that presented themselves. We built a common deployment of web publisher configurations that we could then reuse in various different business units in the company. From this reusable foundation, we now support four Webster portal implementations, for example, the corporate component of our external site is Documentum managed content view through Webster portal. We’re also beginning to manage the static assets of HomeDepot.com as we move that platform to Webster commerce.

Bryan House - EMC Software
So, who are the content owners that published your internal and external facing websites and what types of processes have you implemented for example review and approval of content owner’s websites?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
The content owners for both internal and external sites are the business not IT and that was one of the core principles that drove the decision to take on this particular implementation to take IT out of the loop as much as possible and let the business decide what information should reside on the site. As far as our process is concerned, there is a governance body for each of the major channels of distribution and they determine what level of control is mandated according to their own policies. Web Publisher Foundation has implemented a set of generic workflows for their use but it’s entirely up to their management as to the level of approval required for a given piece of content. The application is responsible for making sure through the use of structured templates that the content doesn’t create functional problems but the decision is to whether or not a particular piece of information is appropriate for publishing is no longer really subject IT that’s in the hands of the business.

Bryan House - EMC Software
All right, that’s a great point to create those reasonable components in place to empower business to publisher content. So, I know one of the other products you mentioned was earlier was that your colleagues at Home Depot become enthusiastic users of our eRoom collaboration product. Can you tell us a little bit about the success you have seen with the eRoom, and how it’s utilized across the Home Depot?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
Well the growth and success of eRoom has really been phenomenal, since we deployed in 2004 eRoom has really become a part of nearly every departmental business interaction in our corporate environment. The largest single segment; quite frankly as I keep project management but the real return investment has been in the various business units that use the tool to share information and improve efficiently legal merchandising business development operations first thing it’s used everywhere. The vast majority of this growth has really come from word of mouth; we really haven’t done any advertising internally for it. Almost every meeting you go to seems to begin and end with a question, do you have an eRoom?

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah, that’s certainly something we hear a lot from our customers, that’s great taking advantage of that viral nature around eRoom. So, can you tell us a little bit about the key business and IT drivers behind your deployment of the content management system and how have these drivers impacted the design and deployment of your system?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
Well the key IP driver is simple, if you need to manage content in your enterprise and you will, don’t write it yourself. Use an enterprise class application to do it and by the way use the best of breed. This certainly what grows the decision to use Documentum but it also encourages the organization to form a competency around content management consolidate design and infrastructure for content management under a single group. As far as the business is concerned, the drivers from different areas depending really on the on the type of day whether it be compliance, efficiency, security, all of these are factors that contribute to the need and at any given time the level of importance that these things need to be managed on. One of the things that we learned is one size really does not fit all but one platform can. It’s this very ability that drove Home Depot to create the multi repository, multi application strategy.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah, and that’s a really great point, you know, about one size doesn’t fit all and that’s certainly something we hear a lot. So now what sort of practical knowledge can you share with our listeners that are creating their three and five-year plans for their content management platforms.

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
This is really one of the most important and beneficial things you can do for your business, content management needs are so pervasive in your business that its impractical and really unreasonable to think that you can get it all done in a year. You’ve got to make choices and some times those choices include putting on some very useful content management deployment while you deal with priorities. If you don’t have a road map though or a plan, then you won’t be able to steer the implementation choices over the long term. So my first advice is really the simplest, you have to sit down and do it, create the three-year plan even though you know its going to change by end of the month. Secondly, make sure that your plan aligns with the corporation’s overall business strategy. Your plan has really got to enhance that strategy, not detract from the goals of your company.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Absolutely, and finally what you see as critical success factors in a content management system deployment. What do you recommend our listeners pay closest attention to as they move their way down their deployment plan?

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
The second most important thing you can do is to establish ownership for your major initiatives within the business. IT-driven projects in general but really content management projects more than any other suffer immeasurably when the users of the system don’t have or feel as if they have a part in its creation and really in its mission. Content management will always fundamentally change the way people do their jobs and for your deployment to be successful, your users must see it in their tool.

Bryan House - EMC Software
Yeah that’s a great point Lee, I’m really glad you brought that up. So Lee, I want to thank you once again for joining us and sharing the insights that you gained deploying enterprise content management at the Home Depot and obviously throughout your career, you come and bring a very informed discussion to the table. I also want to thank all of our listeners for tuning into the ‘When Content Matters’ Podcast Series from EMC and I encourage you learn more about our content management products and solutions at software.emc.com where you can download additional Podcasts or subscribe to a number of EMCRSS Podcasts feeds. So Lee I want to thank you again for your time.

Lee Dallas - Home Depot
Thank you, Bryan.

Bryan House - EMC Software
You’re welcome and I’d like to thank our listeners for joining us today and with that I think we will wrap it up.

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Tags: Home Depot, EMC, Documentum, Enterprise Content Management, Lee Dallas