Tag Archives: Digital Transformation

My Favorite New Things in the Alfresco Digital Business Platform

Posted on by
Reply

alfresco-dbp

Everybody inside Alfresco has been busy getting ready for today’s launch of our new version, new branding, new web site, updated services and everything that comes along with it.  Today was a huge day for the company, with the release of Alfresco Content Services 5.2, a shiny new version of Alfresco Governance Services, our desktop sync client, the Alfresco Content Connector for Salesforce, a limited availability release of the Alfresco App Dev Framework and refreshes of other products such as our analytics solution, media management and AWS AMIs / Quickstarts.  Here are a few of my favorite bits from today’s releases (in no particular order).

The new REST API

Alfresco has always had a great web API, both the core REST API that was useful for interacting with Alfresco objects, and the open standards CMIS API for interacting with content.  Alfresco Content Services 5.2 takes this to the next level with a brand new set of APIs for working directly with nodes, versions, renditions and running search queries.  Not only is there a new API, but it is easier than ever to explore what the API has to offer via the API Explorer.  We also host a version of the API explorer so you can take a look without having to set up an Alfresco instance.  The new REST API is versioned, so you can build applications against it without worry that something will change in the future and break your code.  This new REST API was first released in the 5.2 Community version and is now available to Alfresco Enterprise customers.  The API is also a key component of the Alfresco App Development Framework, or ADF.  Like all previous releases, you can still extend the API to suit your needs via web scripts.

Alfresco Search Services

Alfresco Content Services 5.2 comes with a whole new search implementation called Alfresco Search Services.  This service is based on Solr 6, and brings a huge number of search improvements to the Alfresco platform.  Search term highlighting, indexing of multiple versions of a document, category faceting and multi-select facets and document fingerprinting are all now part of the Alfresco platform.  Sharding also gets some improvements and you can now shard your index by DBID, ACL, date, or any string property.  This is a big one for customers supporting multiple large, distinct user communities that may each have different search requirements.  Unlike previous releases of Alfresco, search is no longer bundled as a WAR file.  It is now its own standalone service.

The Alfresco App Dev Framework

Over the years there have been a number of ways to build what your users need on top of the Alfresco platform.  In the early days this was the Alfresco Explorer (now deprecated), built with JSF.  The Share UI was added to the mix later, allowing a more configurable UI with extension points based on Surf and YUI.  Both of these approaches required you to start with a UI that Alfresco created and modify it to suit your needs.  This works well for use cases that are somewhat close to what the OOTB UI was built for, or for problems that require minimal change to solve.  For example, both Explorer and Share made it pretty easy to add custom actions, forms, or to change what metadata was displayed.  However, the further you get from what Share was designed to do, the more difficult the customizations become.

What about those cases where you need something completely different?  What if you want to build your own user experience on top of Alfresco content and processes?  Many customers have done this by building our their own UI in any number of different technologies.  These customers asked us to make it easier, and we listened.  Enter the Alfresco App Dev Framework, or ADF.  The ADF is a set of Angular2 components that make it easier to build your own application on top of Alfresco services.  There’s much more to it than that, including dev tooling, test tooling and other things that accelerate your projects.  The ADF is big enough to really need its own series of articles, so may I suggest you hop over to the Alfresco Community site and take a look!  Note that the ADF is still in a limited availability release, but we have many customers that are already building incredible things with it.

Admin Improvements

A ton of people put in a tremendous amount of work to get Alfresco Content Services 5.2 out the door.  Two new features that I’ve been waiting for are included, courtesy of the Alfresco Community and Alfresco Support.  The first is the trashcan cleaner, which can automate the task of cleaning out the Alfresco deleted items collection.  This is based on the community extension that many of our customers have relied on for years.  The second is the Alfresco Support Tools component.  Support Tools gives you a whole new set of tools to help manage and troubleshoot your Alfresco deployment, including thread dumps, profiling and sampling, scheduled job and active session monitoring, and access to both viewing logs and changing log settings, all from the browser.  This is especially handy for those cases where admins might not have shell access to the box on which Alfresco is running or have JMX ports blocked.  There’s more as well, check out the 5.2 release notes for the full story.

The Name Change

Ok, so we changed the name of the product.  Big deal?  Maybe not to some people, but it is to me.  Alfresco One is now Alfresco Content Services.  Why does this matter?  For one, it more accurately reflects what we are, and what we want to be.  Alfresco has a great UI in Share, but it’s pretty narrowly focused on collaboration and records management use cases.  This represents a pretty big slice of the content management world, but it’s not what everybody needs.  Many of our largest and most successful customers use Alfresco primarily as a content services platform.  They already have their own front end applications that are tailor made for their business, either built in-house or bought from a vendor.  These customers need a powerful engine for creating, finding, transforming and managing content, and they have found it in Alfresco.  The name change also signals a shift in mindset at Alfresco.  We’re thinking bigger by thinking smaller.  This new release breaks down the platform into smaller, more manageable pieces.  Search Services, the Share UI, Content Services and Governance Services are all separate components that can be installed or not based on what you need.  This lets you build the platform you want, and lets our engineering teams iterate more quickly on each individual component.  Watch for this trend to continue.

I’m excited to be a part of such a vibrant community and company, and can’t wait to see what our customers, partners and others create with the new tools they have at their disposal.  The technology itself is cool, but what you all do with it is what really matters.

Open Source is the Surest and Shortest Path to Digital Transformation

Posted on by
Reply

Back in 2013, Mike Olson, a co-founder of Cloudera, famously stated that “No dominant platform-level software infrastructure has emerged in the last 10 years in closed-source, proprietary form.”.  He’s absolutely right about that.  John Newton underscored this theme at a recent Alfresco Day event in NYC.  He shared this slide as a part of his presentation, which I think does a great job showing how much of our modern platforms are dependent on the open source ecosystem:

open-components-slide

Platforms are more open today than they have ever been, with a few exceptions (I’m glaring annoyed at my iPhone as I write this).  Quite a few companies seem to have figured out the secret sauce of blending open platforms with proprietary value-adds to create robust, open ecosystems AND be able to pay the bills in the process.  This is very good news for you if you are pursuing a digital transformation strategy.

Why open source and open standards?

The advantages of open source are pretty well established at this point.  Open projects are more developer friendly.  They innovate faster.  They can fork and merge and rapidly change direction if the community needs that to happen (although there are good and bad forks).  Open has become the de-facto way that the digital business works today.  I’d challenge you to find any team within your organization that isn’t using at least one open source project or library.  Open has won.  That’s the first big advantage of open source in digital transformation today:  It’s ubiquitous.  You can find a platform or component to fill just about any need you have.

Open is also faster to try, and removes a lot of friction when testing out a new idea.  Effective digital transformation relies on speed and agility.  It’s a huge advantage to simply pull down a build of an open source technology you want to try out, stand it up and get to work.  That allows bad ideas to fail fast, and good ideas to flourish immediately.  Since testing ideas out is effectively free in terms of dollar cost, and cheap in terms of time and cognitive investment, I think we also tend to be more willing to throw it out and start over if we don’t get the results we want.  That’s a good thing as it ultimately leads to less time spent trying to find a bigger hammer to slam that square peg into a round hole.  If you decide to go forward with a particular technology, You’ll find commercial organizations standing behind them with support and value added components that can take an open source core to the next level.

If digital transformation relies on speed of innovation, then open technologies look even more appealing.  Why do open source projects tend to out-innovate their purely proprietary competitors?  There are probably a lot of reasons.  An open project isn’t limited to contributors from only one company.  Great ideas can come from anywhere and often do.  At their best, large open source projects function as meritocracies.  This is especially true of foundational platform technologies that may have originated at or get contributions from tech leaders.  These are the same technologies that can power your own digital transformation.

Open source projects also make the pace of innovation easier to manage since you get full transparency of what has changed version to version, and the visibility into the future direction of the project.  Looking at pending pull requests or commits between releases gives you a view into what is evolving in the project so that you can plan accordingly.  In a very real sense, pursuing a digital transformation strategy using open technologies forces you to adopt a modular, swappable, services driven approach.  Replacing a monolithic application stack every cycle is not possible, but replacing or upgrading individual service components in a larger architecture is, and open source makes that easier.

Software eats the world, and is a voracious cannibal

There is a downside to this pace of change, however.  Because open source projects innovate so quickly, and because the bar to creating one is so low, we often see exciting projects disrupted before they can really deliver on their promise.  Just when the people responsible for architecture and strategy start to fully understand how to exploit a new technology, the hype cycle begins on something that will supersede it.  Nowhere is this as bad as it is in the world of JavaScript frameworks where every week something new  and shiny and loud is vying for developers’ limited time and attention.  Big data suffers from the same problem.  A few years ago I would have lumped NoSQL (I hate that term, but it has stuck) databases into that category as well, but the sector seems to have settled down a little bit.

There is also a risk that an open source technology will lose its way, lose its user and developer base and become abandonware.  Look for those projects that have staying power.  Broad user adoption, frequent commits and active discussions are all good signs.  Projects that are part of a well established organization like the Apache Software Foundation are also usually a good bet.  Apache has a rigorous process that a project must follow to become a full blown project, and this drives a level of discipline that independent projects may lack.  A healthy company standing behind the project is another good sign, as that means there are people out there with financial interest in the project’s success.

Simply using open source projects to build your platform for transformation is no guarantee of success, but I would argue that carefully selecting the right open components does tilt the odds in your favor.

You Cannot Succeed at Digital Transformation Without Planning for Scale

Posted on by
Reply

TL;DR:  Digital transformation == scale, just by its nature.

Digital transformation affects all areas of a business, from the way leadership thinks of opportunities to the way developers build applications, and it carries challenges throughout that chain.  One of the biggest challenges for IT will come from achieving scale, often in unexpected places.

Why does digital transformation automatically mean scale?

Looking back at my last post on the journey to digital transformation, there are a few points where it should be obvious that you should be prepared to scale up.  In the digitization phase, for example, it makes sense to plan for managing a large amount of content and metadata.  Whether you are migrating from a legacy system, consolidating multiple repositories or ingesting a bunch of paper, your target repository will need to be ready to handle not only what you are bringing in today but what you plan to create and manage for the next several years.  Deploying in the cloud eases this burden significantly, freeing you from having to provision a ton of storage or DB capacity that will sit idle until it is used or deal with adding capacity to an on-premises solution.

Digitalization also drives the need to scale up.  Processes that were once done completely manually now get done via software.  Along the way a ton of useful information is captured.  Not only that information that is required to complete the process, such as attached documents, form data, assigned user, etc, but also metadata about the process itself.  How long did it take for a specific step to be completed?  Was it reassigned?  To whom and how often?  What is the current active task?  How many instances of each process are in flight?  All of this data is collected in a process management system.  The more processes move from a manual process to automated or managed processes, the bigger this pool becomes.  The net effect is an explosion in the amount of data that needs to be handled.

If digitization of content and digitalization of process lead to the need to scale, achieving digital transformation takes the problem and dials it up to 11.  Digital transformation will flip things around and turn more people that were previously consumers of information into producers, whether they realize it or not.  An employee working with a digital process may see some similarities in the types of information they are working with as they did before transformation, but behind the scenes there is a lot more data being created.

Alfresco’s platform is built for this kind of scale in both content and process.  It is built on proven, scalable and performant open source technologies, and has been deployed by thousands of customers around the globe in support of large, business critical applications.  Alfresco provides guidance in several areas to help you size your deployment, build in the cloud, and make smart decisions about how and when to scale.

What about those unexpected areas of scale?

Scaling your content and process platform as a part of a digital transformation strategy is expected from day one, and should be part of the roll out and maintenance plan built before the first application goes live.  It may start with scaling content and process technology, but it does not end there.  Let’s look at some common drivers of digital transformation.  A few days spent reading a lot of articles, literature and opinion on digital transformation yields a wealth of reasons why companies might pursue it:

  • Improve the customer experience and become more customer centric
  • Get leaner, meaner and more efficient
  • Make better business decisions
  • Responding to an increased pace of technological change
  • New competitive threats or market opportunities
  • Demand for real time information and insights

Take a look at that list.  Achieving any of these things will require more information to be captured and analyzed.  Getting more customer centric means understanding what your customers need, where they are dissatisfied with the current experiences you offer them and what you can do to improve them.  Becoming leaner and more efficient requires detailed metrics about processes so waste or delays can be identified and trimmed.  Better business decisions and real time information mean drinking from a firehose of data from across the business.

Achieving digital transformation requires you to plan for scale and not where you might expect.  It doesn’t just require you to plan for more content and more processes, but also for how to handle the data about those things that you will need to capture and analyze.

The non-technical side of scale

Ultimately digital transformation is not a technology problem, it’s a business problem.  It is unsurprising then, that we’ll be faced with challenges that we didn’t expect as we scale up that have nothing to do with technology.  Take, for example, support.  If your digital transformation rests on open APIs provided by a stack of homegrown, cloud and vendor provided services, how do you route support tickets?  If a user reports a problem, how can you narrow down the source and make sure that it gets handled by the right team?  A support team can be quickly overwhelmed if they need to sift through a dozen irrelevant error reports to find the ones that they can actually address.  The more services you rely on, the harder this problem becomes.  This is where detailed monitoring of the service layer becomes important.  Guess what that creates?  More data.  If you are using Alfresco technologies for content, process and governance, you have several options for keeping tabs on your services.

There are other non-technical areas that will be affected by scale as well.  Documentation and discovery, for example.  As the number of services rolled out in support of transformation increases, developers and business users alike need easy ways to find these services, and to understand how they work.  This in itself becomes another service.  Change management is another area that a business needs to be prepared to scale up.  Digital transformation increases the pace of change in an organization by enabling more rapid response to changing business conditions or new opportunities.  Without a solid framework in place to evaluate, decide on, execute and communicate change, digital transformation will have a hard time getting the traction it needs.

If you take away one thing from this and other articles about digital transformation, it’s this:  Achieving transformation requires scale from your systems, processes and people and not just those that deal directly with technology.  Don’t underestimate it and find yourself with a plan that cracks under the weight of change.

Digital Transformation and the Role of Content and Process

Posted on by
2

I recently had the opportunity to go to NYC and speak on architecting systems for digital transformation.  It was a terrific day with our customers and prospects, as well as the extended Alfresco crew and many of our outstanding partners.  This was the first time I’ve delivered this particular talk so I probably stumbled over my words a few times as I was watching the audience reaction as much as the speaker notes.  One of the things I always note when speaking is which slides prompt people to whip out their phones and take a picture.  That’s an obvious signal that you are hitting on something that matters to them in a way that caught their attention, so they want to capture it.  In my last talk, one of the slides that got the most attention and set the cameras snapping pictures was this one:

road-to-transformation

Digitization

Digitization of content is the whole reason ECM as a discipline exists in the first place.  In the early days of ECM a lot of use cases centered around scanning paper as images and attaching metadata so it could be easily found later.  The drivers for this are obvious.  Paper is expensive, it takes up space (also expensive), it is hard to search, deliver and copy and you can’t analyze it en masse to extract insights.  As ECM matured, we started handling more advanced digital content such as PDFs and Office documents, videos, audio and other data, and we started to manipulate them in new ways.  Transforming between formats, for example, or using form fields and field extraction.  OCR also played a role, taking those old document image files and breathing into them a new life as first class digital citizens.  We layered search and analytics on top of this digital content to make sense of it all and find what we needed as the size of repositories grew ever larger.  Digitization accelerated with the adoption of the web.  That paper form that your business relied on was replaced by a web form or app, infinitely malleable.  That legacy physical media library was transformed into a searchable, streamable platform.

What all of these things have in common is that they are centered around content.

Digitalization

Simply digitizing content confers huge advantages on an organization.  It drives down costs, makes information easier to find and allows aggregation and analysis in ways that legacy analog formats never could.  While all of those things are important, they only begin to unlock the potential of digital technologies.  Digitized content allows us to take the next step:  Digitalization.  When the cost of storing and moving content drops to near zero, processes can evolve free from many of the previous constraints.  BPM and process management systems can leverage the digitized content and allow us to build more efficient and friendlier ways to interact with our customers and colleagues.  We can surface the right content to the right people at the right time, as they do their job.  Just as importantly, content that falls out of a process can be captured with context, managed as a record if needed.  Now instead of just having digitized content, we have digitalized processes that were not possible in the past.  We can see, via our process platform, exactly what is happening across our business processes.  Processes become searchable and can be analyzed in depth.  Processes can have their state automatically affected by signals in the business, and can signal others.  Our business state is now represented in a digital form, just like our content.

If digitization is about content, digitalization is about process.

Digital Transformation

The union of digitized content and digital processes is a powerful combination, and that helps create the conditions for digital transformation.  How?

In my opinion (and many others) the single most important thing to happen to technology in recent memory is the rise of the open standards web API.  APIs have been around on the web for decades.  In fact, my first company was founded to build out solutions on top of the public XML based API provided by DHL to generate shipments and track packages.  That was all the way back in the very early 2000s, a lifetime ago by tech standards.  Even then though, people were thinking about how to expose parts of their business as an API.

One of the watershed moments in the story of the API happened way back in the early 2000s as well, at Amazon.  By this point everybody has read about Amazon’s “Big Mandate”.  If you haven’t read about it yet, go read it now.  I’ll wait.  Ok, ready?  Great.  So now we know that the seeds for Amazon’s dominance in the cloud were planted over a decade and a half ago by the realization that everything needs to be a service, that the collection of services that you use to run your business can effectively become a platform, and that platform (made accessible) changes the rules.  By treating every area of their business as part of the platform, all the way down to the infrastructure that ran them, Amazon changed the rules for everybody.

How does this tie into the first two paragraphs?  What about content and process?  I’m glad you asked.  Content and process management systems take two critical parts of a business (the content it generates and the processes that it executes) and surface them as an API.  Want to find a signed copy of an insurance policy document?  API.  Want to see how many customers are in your sign up pipeline and at what stage?  API.  Want to see all of the compliance related records from that last round of lab testing?  API.  Want to release an order to ship?  API.  Want to add completed training to somebody’s personnel record?  API.  You get the idea.  By applying best practices around content and process management systems, you can quickly expose large chunks of your business as a service, and begin to think of your company as a platform.

This is transformative.  When your business is a platform, you can do things you couldn’t do before.  You can build out new and better user experiences much more quickly by creating thin UI layers on top of your services.  Your internal teams or vendors that are responsible for software that provides the services can innovate independently (within the bounds of the API contract) which immediately makes them more agile.  You can selectively expose those services to your customer or partners, enabling them to innovate on top of the services you provide them.  You can apply monitoring and analytics at the service layer to see how the services are being used, and by whom (This is one, in fact, I would argue that you MUST do if you plan to orient yourselves toward services in any meaningful way, but that’s a separate article) which adds a new dimension to BI.  This is the promise of digital transformation.

There’s certainly more to come on this in the near future as my team continues our own journey toward digital transformation.  We are already well down the path and will share our insights and challenges as we go.