Reinventing Electronic Content Management at Texas A&M University

Texas A&M University (TAMU) is part of one of the largest higher education systems in the United States. The TAMU System network comprises 11 universities and 7 state agencies, including a school of law and comprehensive health science center. The system's annual budget is $4.55 billion, and it educates more than 152,000 students a year; it also makes more than 22 million additional educational contacts each year through service and outreach programs. Research and development expenditures system-wide exceeded $972 million in 2016.

TAMU President Michael K. Young has set a high standard for excellence and innovation since taking the position in 2015. In addition to supporting excellence in research, he challenges all staff members to look for ways to support TAMU's mission of excellence through transformational learning, discovery, and innovation and by expanding the university's impact on its global community.

TAMU's process-automation efforts have focused on achieving innovation in both support and administrative processes to free more of the budget for teaching, research, and outreach. The university's agencies and departments have thus sought to reduce overhead expenses by reengineering paper processes to leverage the performance improvements and return on investment that streamlined, digital processes provide. At first, these electronic business processes were implemented as siloed applications. Now, implementers are looking to further enhance performance gains by integrating several platforms. With the widening use of a common framework, the university system is poised to transform its use of electronic content management (ECM).

Project Precursors

In 2005, Texas A&M AgriLife conducted an RFP evaluation for an ECM system. Upon selecting a vendor, AgriLife implemented its content management system in three phases:

• Basic installation (including file structure and imaging)
• Automation of a legacy mainframe system's document processing
• Workflow development

The AgriLife document-imaging implementation was very successful, and that success inspired other TAMU System departments and agencies to use the AgriLife implementation as a model. Because there was no university-wide recommendation, however, adopting agencies and departments chose solutions locally, sometimes with the same vendor as AgriLife chose, but often by implementing other ECM systems.

By 2009, TAMU had implemented multiple ECM systems—ranging from homegrown solutions to licensed implementations, including multiple instances of the same vendor technology. In response, the vice president of information technology at that time convened a campus committee to study document management at the university with the goal of establishing strategic recommendations for future imaging implementations.¹

The Strategic ECM Shared Service

In 2010, following months of research and vendor presentations, the Campus Document Management Committee selected Laserfiche—the solution AgriLife chose—as the preferred vendor for future ECM implementations. The committee also recommended designating a central support service to provide an enterprise implementation of that technology to avoid having adopting departments invest in duplicative hardware and software; such an implementation would also encourage business process automation using a common framework. The Division of Information Technology at TAMU was asked to assume this central support of Laserfiche. It was not centrally funded but rather was offered as a cost-recovery service.

AgriLife moved its Laserfiche implementation to the shared service to achieve operational savings and avoid upcoming hardware-upgrade costs. TAMU negotiated a new master agreement with the vendor to purchase 2,400 licenses, locking in pricing so that departments large and small could obtain licenses at a reduced bulk-pricing value point.

Promoting Adoption

As project manager, I prepared for this expanded system rollout by instituting several strategic initiatives to promote the service. One of the first initiatives was to build an identifiable brand for the new service. Working with communications and marketing staff from both the university and the vendor, we identified common colors and fonts that complied with both the university style guide and vendor marketing requirements. We also identified common terms and helpful articles to provide information about the service, and we published a website using the newly developed branding.

Next, I leveraged consistent branding and terminology while giving multiple "Discovery Session" presentations across campus to explain the new service. I also saw promise for the shared service in published research on scale, governance, and mentoring through a community of practice. So, I incorporated Cynthia Coburn's research on the multidimensional aspects of scale, including spread, or the increase in units; depth; sustainability; and shift in ownership, which Coburn linked to changes in community member assumptions, behavior, and responsibilities.² Working with my team to achieve spread, we concentrated on mechanisms to build depth, sustainability, and shift in ownership. To build depth and sustainability, we focused on training and developing a community of practice.³

Developing a reputation for transparency and open communications with stakeholders helped in all four aspects of scale. One of our first strides was to launch a steering committee to facilitate two-way communication to obtain feedback from stakeholders and potential subscribers about the service's functionality. The steering committee also fostered communication outward to the entire university system, as adopters from other campuses soon showed interest in becoming involved.

Measuring Progress

To gauge progress, I adopted Gartner's ECM maturity model [https://www.gartner.com/doc/1724618/maturity-model-enterprise-content-management], which depicts maturity progress as levels starting at initial and eventually achieving transformational. At each step, the organization's progress is measured against six facets: user experience, information governance, business focus, technology, process, and organization. While an organization may occupy different levels on various facets at any one time, the maturity model can help focus on areas of lowest maturity to progress in maturity overall.⁴

Entering the Digital Transformation Age

In the years following implementation, our shared service expanded user adoption, incorporating many departments new to Laserfiche and absorbing several independently existing Laserfiche implementations. Local departments were issued individual repositories, and local administrators were trained to manage day-to-day operations of license allocation and access management.

Customization

This ability to delegate a limited subset of administrative capabilities was not available out of the box. The TAMU Laserfiche development team worked with Laserfiche Professional Services to develop a custom interface based on the vendor's software development toolkit (SDK). Leveraging Laserfiche SDK calls, the TAMU team developed the desired functionality to update the Laserfiche License Manager to reflect local, repository-only changes. In addition, because the service was offered as a cost-recovery operation, we incorporated automation features to invoice shared service subscribers on a monthly basis. Seeing the benefit in this, Laserfiche incorporated most of the local administrator features into its redesigned Laserfiche Directory Service (LFDS) authentication interface.

Pricing Models

Another customer support mechanism initiated early in the shared service was bundled image pricing. While costs associated with licensing were included in the shared service's cost, we also had to assess ongoing costs for disk space, backups, and database support for repository metadata. Our shared services experience demonstrated that these costs vary somewhat, independent of the number of licenses an organization holds. For example, a small group of users can generate numerous documents, while a large group might generate few.

Early adopters found it difficult to estimate budgets for disk space, backup, and database usage. We therefore aggregated the costs of those services into a unitized monthly charge based on the number of images stored. This was a much more straightforward way for business units to estimate their costs. This approach had many benefits. First, a single cost covered the diverse services provided to the subscriber base, which is consistent with best practice. For example, we provided separate testing environments and offline partitions for migration support by dividing those costs among subscribers based on their image count. We used a heuristic to estimate the average size of images stored in the various repositories and handled major outliers by negotiated "true ups" to address unusually large images or database usages.

With the enticing, forward-looking pricing for individual licenses and an easy-to-calculate ongoing image-unit cost, departmental and agency adoption grew.

Adoption Challenges

When the vendor introduced an electronic forms component to automate business processes, the subscriber base embraced the functionality's transformative aspect and planned to build processes that could be rolled out to entire departments. Examples of these automated processes include employee onboarding, change management approval, event registration management, billing account transaction verification, and contract management.

Around that time, however, the shared service encountered a plateau in adoption. Early adopters primarily wanted a full-access license, which provided repository access rights and automation publication privileges limited only by local repository needs and managed by the local administrator. However, as the implementations matured, many of the departmental processes being initiated did not need such wide-ranging functionality. With adoption of electronic forms publication in particular, much more limited access was sufficient—that is, authenticated access to the forms system and limited (if any) access to the repository.

New Licensing and Pricing Models

It became apparent to both TAMU and the vendor that a new licensing model was needed to match the growing demand for forms participation and read-only repository access, coupled with a price point that would facilitate rollout to numerous stakeholders across the TAMU System. To meet the demand, the vendor developed an authenticated forms participant license, or community license, intended for less-frequent users.

In 2016, TAMU entered into an extended contract with the vendor that included 500,000 community licenses and 20,000 full-access licenses. Existing independent implementations agreed to support a central subscription billing approach to obtain the shared service's expanded feature set at a reduced price point. While the original 2009 committee recommendations had been for the university, the new licensing allowed for a hybrid approach for existing independent implementations to share the university's licensing benefits while maintaining local autonomy. The approach was so popular that several additional campuses in the university system adopted it.

ECM Reinvented: Creating a Content Services Platform

At this juncture, the shared service had accomplished our vision of providing a true ECM framework, reducing duplication where reasonable and providing economies of scale coupled with a common framework for process automation. We then began looking for ways to demonstrate to subscribers how they could leverage the framework's functionality not only to automate processes but also to use web services to couple the framework with multiple software systems. The goal? To eliminate duplication of effort and facilitate communication between software systems without requiring human interaction.

A New Vision

A stated focus of ECM platforms is to automate processes and thus eliminate repetitive, routine tasks for knowledge workers.⁵ To date, this automation has been offered via links to siloed forms processes, often in portals, and generally requires users to assimilate data to feed into the online process.

However, as Gartner points out,⁶ the term enterprise content management is not aligned with the priorities of the emerging digital business. To quote Gartner, "going forward, the practice of managing content will be enabled as a set of services that coordinate content usage by all parties; users, systems and applications."⁷ Further, Gartner advocates that IT leaders concentrate more on leveraging institutional data's distributed nature and less on trying to eliminate it.⁸

Enabling Just-In-Time Decision-Making

A key challenge in leveraging distributed content is figuring out how to coordinate it. Most organizations have been accumulating data for a long time. Only recently has the focus been on delivering the data to knowledge workers in a timely fashion to drive data-based, just-in-time business decision-making. Stated a different way, an emerging driving force for automation is to liberate knowledge workers from repetitive tasks to facilitate human-required decision-making using institutional data.⁹

This may not be achievable within a single framework; technology leaders therefore must identify the services needed to achieve that digital workplace and to provide "consolidated views… across multiple sources."¹⁰ According to Gartner, this new digital workplace will be built up from traditional content management functionality but will be driven by user productivity needs in a top-down fashion.¹¹ This is exactly the paradigm shift TAMU is experiencing.

Example Transformation

Our first step was for the shared services team to replace a review board process that was heavily reliant on human effort. The paramount goal was to deliver just-in-time decision data via web service calls that managed machine-to-machine data communication. The resulting system tied together the Laserfiche shared service, TAMU's ServiceNow implementation, a legacy directory service application, and a review board interface. That integration gave board members remote access to the review board so they could collaborate on board decisions without being collocated. To inform those decisions, they were automatically given timely organizational data, which they previously received from a human.

The new integrated service automatically communicates nonconfidential details to the service desk for customer support. It also gives reviewers prefilled but customizable response templates based on previous institutional knowledge to reduce repetitive work for human support staff. All system-to-system interfaces were accomplished through web services and API calls, letting review board members make just-in-time decisions based on current institutional data; feedback indicates that board members' efficiency and satisfaction with the process have both improved.

In keeping with Gartner's analysis, the new system gives employees different institutional data consistent with the "context of their roles and tasks with an emphasis on the high-impact that people carry out."¹²

Lessons Learned

As Gartner points out, this type of a transformation is an evolution, and our review board example is merely a first step toward a more consolidated digital user workplace. Our team has been looking for ways to further federate existing frameworks to provide similar gains.

Among our lessons learned are that initial integrations can sometimes be less time-consuming than keeping the custom code working while various underlying frameworks are upgraded. While this is always the case in IT, the more complex the base, the more factors that may need attention to keep integrations operating.

Other lessons learned emerged in relation to service pricing. Although the bundled image rate was popular with our customers, it was recently abolished in favor of specific line-item charges to subscribers. This administrative decision was promoted as a more equitable approach for billing; however, subscriber feedback has indicated a preference for fewer charges that are more encompassing.

The best approach might be to find a balance between the two pricing approaches that can be tailored to the subscriber base. Although the division will, over time, make this line-item approach work at TAMU, the initial change has created some issues as the billing practices are being realigned. One of our lessons learned here is that changing an existing pricing policy should undergo the same thought process as the change management for a technology project.

Success and the Shared Service

Several factors support this evolving project's success:

• By instituting a community of practice, our members participate in coach-practitioner¹³ roles—that is, practitioners coach each other by sharing their successes, while also requesting and receiving guidance from their fellow community members.
• We emphasize cost-effective, easily obtained education about the framework so that practitioners can grow in their digital space.
• We are transparent with service subscribers. IT doesn't always run perfectly, and your customers should expect you to be forthright when problems occur.
• We encourage a spirit of collaboration among our service subscribers. As a result, they give us feedback on what they need for their business processes.

Managing a shared service is like managing a small business.¹⁴ The relationships we develop with subscribers continue to be critical to our ability to successfully navigate changes in platform services. As in the service's early years, increasing spread for the service while fostering depth, sustainability, and shift in ownership continue to be crucial to scaling the service in the reinvented service platform.

Notes

1. Judith Lewis and Robert Hensz, "Scaling a Higher Education Enterprise Electronic Content Management System at Texas A&M University," EDUCAUSE Review, June 3, 2013. ↩
2. Cynthia E. Coburn, "Rethinking Scale: Moving Beyond Numbers to Deep and Lasting Change," Educational Researcher, Vol. 32, No. 6, 2003: 3–12. ↩
3. Ettiene Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, Identity, Cambridge University Press, 1998. ↩
4. Gavin Tay and Kenneth Chin, Maturity Model for Enterprise Content Management," Research Note G00213197, Gartner, Inc., July 31, 2012. ↩
5. Melissa Henley, "The Beginner's Guide to Document Software," Laserfiche. ↩
6. Karen M. Shedga, Karen A. Hobert, Michael Woodbridge, and Monica Basso, "Reinventing ECM: Introducing Content Services Platforms and Applications, Research Note G00319354, Gartner, Inc., December 5, 2016. ↩
7. Ibid. ↩
8. Karen M. Shedga, Karen A. Hobert, and Hanns Koehler-Kruener, Content Management for the Digital Era: Rethinking Strategies Beyond 2016, Research Note G00302851, Gartner, Inc., September 16, 2016. ↩
9. Shedga et al., Reinventing ECM, 2016. ↩
10. Ibid. ↩
11. Ibid. ↩
12. Ibid. ↩
13. Judith H. Lewis, A Delphi Study Assessing Effective Peer Faculty E-Mentoring to Support Scaling Distance Education Programs, doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University, 2014. ↩
14. Bryan Bergeron, Essentials of Shared Services, John Wiley & Sons, October 2002. ↩

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Judith H. Lewis is Associate Vice President for Enterprise Services in the Division of Information Technology at Sam Houston State University; until May 2018, she was Senior IT Manager in the Division of Information Technology at Texas A&M University.