By the time you read this blog post the US Presidential election should have been decided.  Whichever side of the political fence you sit on, Obama or McCain, one thing is clear; the first order of business for the new President will focus on restoring confidence in financial markets.

The President’s ability to really influence the crisis will be an interesting sidebar as it plays out.  Rupert Murdoch claims there is little they can do to help but much they can do to make the situation worse.  He fears the effects of protectionist policies on globalization but I think we also need to consider the costs of an ‘avalanche of regulation’ aimed at righting the wrongs of the current crisis.

It is clear the market has failed and where markets fail, governments have a responsibility to step in and regulate. The upside is, we don’t repeat the mistakes of yesterday. On the down, with regulation comes compliance and cost. Cost, when corporations are already struggling with a heavy compliance burden and the effects of a down economy.

Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) is a growing market segment sized by GRC Analysts, Corporate Integrity at $52.1 Billion in 2008. There is a thriving technology sector delivering solutions for GRC.

I have been having a series of discussions with analysts and players exploring the connection between Component Content Management (CCM) and GRC. There is a huge opportunity to include CCM solutions such as Author-it, in the GRC mix to fill the gap in current GRC solutions where the rubber meets the road… Policy and Procedure documentation and training materials.  It is via this documentation that a corporation educates its employees on how to be compliant and holds them accountable.

Compliance in this parlance is about people, processes and systems, all of which must be documented. And if they are to be documented, you better have a process for managing the content that goes into this documentation.  CCM concepts such as reuse, single sourcing, multi-output publishing and localization all play a role in providing an efficient, auditable and ultimately compliant result.

We are into phase two of a three phase project with a major US financial institution as we speak.  This project is all about compliance, efficiency and cost savings.  Author-it is enabling them to create policy and procedure content from business units all around the US, store this content in a central repository, update it in a controlled fashion/workflow and then deliver it via a dynamic web output to tens of thousands of employees. The solution allows for multiple variants of policies and procedures based on criteria such as geography and business unit.  These variants are resolved at publishing allowing for a dynamic, employee specific document.

It is a fabulous example of how CCM can successfully breach the GAP between GRC and the compliance coalface, your employees.
Cheers
Steve

Posted by Steve Davis, President, Author-it Software Corporation

“Web 3.0? But we’re still getting our heads around Web 2.0!”

Sure, but technology and the internet waits for no man.

Web 3.0 describes the evolutionary stage of the Web that follows Web 2.0. and was coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, referring to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that make up what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’ – such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies – which emphasize system-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience.

Nova Spivack defines Web 3.0 as the third decade of the Web (2010-2020) during which he suggests several major complementary technology trends will reach new levels of maturity simultaneously including:

• transformation of the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.
• ubiquitous connectivity, broadband adoption, mobile Internet access and mobile devices
• network computing, software-as-a-service business models, Web services interoperability, distributed computing, grid computing and cloud computing;
• open technologies, open APIs and protocols, open data formats, open-source software platforms and open data (e.g. Creative Commons, Open Data License);
• open identity, OpenID, open reputation, roaming portable identity and personal data;
• the intelligent web, Semantic Web technologies such as RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, GRDDL, semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores;
• distributed databases, the “World Wide Database” (enabled by Semantic Web technologies); and
• intelligent applications, natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents.

So, in a nutshell, what will Web 3.0 mean to the average user?
First, we simply have to assume universal adoption of broadband to enable delivery (sounds easy if you say it fast ..).  Once this is in place, my belief is that the online experience will become much more personalized when it comes to content. There is no doubt that we will see emerging technology dramatically change our interaction with the web at a base level.

For example Artificial Intelligence systems in development will soon have the capability to provide a “virtual” online assistant, providing human-machine interaction at far greater levels than ever before and the new generation of ’3D’ sites will be similarly enhancing gaming and related environments like “Second Life”.

At the moment, Web 2.0 allows for collaboration, discussion, and in most cases distribution; however the user still has to put effort into tracking down their areas of interest and has to actively pursue the content whether it be via groups, forums Feeds etc.

Web 3.0 promises a world where each user’s profile, preferences, likes, dislikes, wants and needs are so widely available via open data streams (for some, a scary thought in itself) that when surfing the ‘net, you will no longer just see “a page” created for the masses, but will receive specifically delivered content, personalized for you at a granular or component level.
Needless to say, the implications of Web 3.0 for the development of the CMS industry worldwide is huge.

Posted by Dunken Francis – Web Consultant Author-it Software Corporation (with thanks to Wikipedia for Nova Spivack references)

I attended the CIDM Best Practices conference in Santa Fe, NM in September. As a new member of the CMS community, working for Author-it, I could not help but notice the apparent need for an evolutionary advancement in the industry.

During the conference, in practically every discussion I had with potential customers, they described their current CM solution as either:
1) A mixture of various vendors’ solutions that required some effort to integrate; or
2) An incomplete solution that still needs components to automate their processes.In most cases, these people did not seem to know about (or understand/accept) the concept of a true “end-to-end solution”. Most of the conference was focused on developing best practice techniques for persuading the rest of the industry (including their own respective organizations) to embrace content management. This was, after all, the intent of the conference. However, there was very little mention of the taxing requirements of CMS integration.

Many people seem very attached to their current multi-vendor solution as they’ve invested a lot of time, money, and sweat into it. In several cases, CIDM presenters described how they began their CMS deployment with at least one restart before they found a solution that actually addressed their respective requirements.

It seems there is an inherent high level of uncertainty in the final result when launching a new CMS solution. This should not be surprising as there is a corresponding high level of integration effort required to deploy a multi-vendor solution. Yet implementation timing is a significant cost variable in any major project. A timely ROI and clear path of achieving it is key to selling the CMS concept at the executive level.

In my opinion, this market must evolve to a more complete solution-based environment before it can substantially proliferate. Much like the networking device industry today, in general, customers prefer a complete end-to-end solution for procurement, product integration, and after-market service reasons. The industry needs to vigorously emphasize technology AND integration as a means to ramp general acceptance.

Posted by Chris Simoneaux, Senior Sales Executive, Author-it Software Corporation