Last week’s ITxpo Symposium in Cannes drew more than three thousand attendees, over half of which were senior level IT executives.  The conference agenda offered insights into future trends in typical Gartner fashion – high impact, broad sweeping trends combined with business imperatives.  There were three themes that were repeated many times – application retirement, a new era of enterprise application and innovation.. (more…)

At some point in time, you will come across the need to select and implement a web content management (WCM) system. There is no single best WCM system that will meet all organizations’ needs. The WCM has to be selected based on your business goals and benefits you want to achieve from the system. With this context, how do you choose from the scores of available WCM systems in the market place?

Here are the steps and some best practices that we have used in selecting WCM system for our customers (more…)

In the last post we discussed issues faced by organizations while dealing with rapidly evolving media convergence. In this post we will try to highlight some exciting solutions to tackle the issues.

• Multi-Channel Publishing and Content Reuse: This is indeed the central theme of media convergence: organizations need to reuse the existing content and deliver the same across multiple media channels after content repurposing. Traditional content management systems (CMS) lack the ability to carry out multi-channel publishing since media like mobile or social media are relatively recent phenomenon. However using proper integration touch points organizations can get a start on this. Start small and gradually incorporate more channels to your content ecosystem. There are multiple mobile publishing systems in the market these days. After careful evaluation on features and interoperability with your traditional web CMS, integrate the two using standard APIs (application programming interface). Your web CMS will be the primary repository of content and its management whereas mobile CMS will allow you to repurpose the content with proper presentation layers based on device types. You can read more on publishing on mobile channel in this post. (more…)

Note: This blog post originally appeared at BPM-Shared Experiences and Learnings

Big-bang process excellence initiatives are being undertaken in many large enterprises. Usually these are driven by Six Sigma leaders, Operations team or Strategy teams. The goal is mainly to establish a linkage in cross functional business processes and derive a value chain. These initiatives are taken as one off activities and usually have time bound intensity. Usually these initiatives cover large number of processes and the goal is around establishing a baseline and not so much about transformation.

On the other hand the business and IT teams undertake multiple initiatives which are focused on automation around certain process areas. These activities are centered around BPMS implementations and may or may not leverage the process excellence initiatives. (more…)

Now that the US mid term elections are over, it is time to get back to work.  This week is Gartner’s ITxpo in Cannes, France.  Two weeks ago, they held the sister event in Orlando, Florida.  The Florida event was heavily attended, with some veterans comparing it to 1999 or 2000.  Any conference or event that can compare its attendance to any time pre 9/11 would be considered wildly successful.  Does that performance provide insight into IT pressures in the coming months?  Are these conferences accurate predictors of business climate?  And, if they are indicators of coming trends, what should IT personnel be looking for? (more…)

Compared to English, the rules for breaking up words into their base forms and modified forms are very different for Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Precision and recall are two of the parameters that determine search engine quality. A perfect precision score means every result retrieved by a search was relevant but it does not say if all relevant documents were retrieved. A perfect recall score means all relevant documents were retrieved but it does not say how many irrelevant documents were also retrieved.

Developing a search engine for Asian languages with 100% precision and recall is extremely challenging because of various orthography variants (more…)

One of the most rapid changes that are happening in the digital content sphere in the last few years is the explosive growth of new media delivery platforms like smart phones, tablet PCs and social networks. These newer content channels along with falling prices to access content (read falling rates of mobile services and device price) and an increasingly global business community present businesses with the unique challenge of serving up right content to the right people with the right context consistently across all the channels (e.g. print, Web, television, mobile and social). Organizations that traditionally served up content through channels like print or television suddenly are grappling with the challenges of sharing the same content however after repurposing to the new age media. As part of a two-post series on the changing issue of convergence of various media channels and how to tackle it, in this post we’ll discuss the typical content management related issues faced by organizations when multiple channels are involved. In the next post, we will focus on the solutions part. (more…)