Why ECM systems are core to compliance.Compliance is a headache.Ask anyone who has to worry about it.Theres an alphabet soup of regulations such as the Sarbanes Oxley Act SOX, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act HIPAA and Basel II not to mention various internal policies that require adherence.By tracking and managing documents, an enterprise content management ECM system eases the burden of complying with these regulations somewhat.But ECM is not without challenges If you are just beginning this process, you need to build the case for investment and then scope your project and create a team.Even when you have things up and running, an ECM system can face challenges with user acceptance.And, as with any technology, the implementation alone cannot serve as the solution.You need to establish governance policies and best practices to put the technology to best use.Moreover, these policies need to reflect the processes and workflows associated with your business.Using technology to marry with these processes can be difficult, particularly for companies with numerous departments, international divisions or other kinds of structures that spawn different processes among these various branches of a business.Beyond compliance Managing unstructured information.Still, despite its challenges, ECM is one of the most important tools for meeting compliance goals, noted Apoorv Durga, a senior analyst at Real Story Group.Browse GlobalSpecs Datasheet directory to locate information and specifications for more than 8 million products.The archive is organized by product area view.Component Content Management Ecm Software Programs' title='Component Content Management Ecm Software Programs' />For one thing, ECM is broad and adaptable.While regulatory compliance for SOX and HIPAA are the primary drivers of compliance initiatives, these regulations arent the only motivations for introducing ECM systems.There could be company specific compliance efforts, such as those for organizations that define their own processes that allow them to function in a uniform way, maintain quality, protect their assets or be more responsive to their customers and employees, he said.These efforts, in turn, could involve controls and audit procedures for internal financial operations, human resource policies, tracking professional requirements such as certifications or visa status, or managing confidentiality requirements such as information related to nondisclosure agreements NDAs, copyrights, patents or insider information related to trading.ECM is a powerful tool for compliance efforts, but success requires a broader view.Melissa Webster. IDC.In order for a business to respond to the challenges associated with those various compliance issues, it needs to have sound practices and processes to manage information, Durga explained.While most organizations have effectively managed structured information such as data that resides in enterprise systems like ERP enterprise resource planning systems, they have not mastered unstructured information such as that found in physical paper documents, images, microfilm and numerous document repositories, he said.The practice of ECM, attempts to address the challenges posed by unstructured information such as content storage effective classification and retrieval archiving and disposition policies mitigating legal and compliance risk and reducing paper usage, Durga said.Melissa Webster, program vice president of content and digital media technologies at IDC, agreed that properly managing unstructured content is key to ensuring compliance.In fact, she noted, ECM systems are specifically designed to ensure content is properly managed, and they can provide the records management capabilities that govern retention and disposition.ECM vendors typically offer archiving in addition to content and document management, and its that combination of contentdocument management, records management and archiving that together ensure all of the organizations unstructured information is properly governed, noted Webster.Governance and access management.Still, according to Alan Weintraub, a principal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., its important to look at ECM in relation to the business as a whole.Specifically, he explained, Forrester focuses on the role of ECM in extracting data from email messages, faxes, contracts and other sources and providing it to transaction processes.On the business side, ECM is about taking policies, processes, research and collaborative capabilities and mining that to get value, he said.A component of that is ensuring that ECM incorporates governance the process of checks and balances.Within that, Weintraub said, roles, responsibilities, processes and procedures need to be in place to ensure the integrity of governance, to define proper use of data, and to provide procedures to access, approve or publish information.The governance program defines when you can use information and what is protected, he added.Thus, he noted, in the context of compliance challenges such as HIPAA, enterprise content management can manage issues such as data classification specifying what levels of information individuals can have access to.In the HIPAA world, for example, he continued, you have patient privacy issues, so while there are certain documents that anybody can see, for example, something describing potential adverse drug reactions when the document describes drugs that an individual has been prescribed that must be private.That is where ECM systems can specify what information certain groups can see and what they cant.Fortunately, those capabilities are standard among ECM products, Weintraub said, because the underlying technology is now largely commoditized.There are differentiations between vendors, primarily between systems that are more business or more transactionally oriented, he said.User adoption can be an obstacle.But despite increasing standardization among features, users still present a wild card in terms of implementation.Indeed, Weintraub said that the biggest roadblock to ECM implementation is not the technology or the vendors, it is the users.Based on interviews Forrester has conducted, Weintraub said ECM is one of the most disruptive technologies an organization can adopt.With other systems, such as data warehouses, customer relationship management, or financial systems, there is no real alternative way of operating.You need those systems to get the job done, Weintraub said.But there are many ways to work around an ECM or match some of its capabilities with other systems.Thus, When you adopt an ECM, you are telling people they have to work differently documents must be kept in a certain way and in a certain system, and they must employ metadata values that require more work.So the challenge is user acceptance and adoption, he noted.In fact, said Durga, organizations may not always be ready for ECM.Thus, he suggested, organizations and decision makers should examine the ECM maturity model that is available for free at www.It helps to provide a structured framework for building a roadmap, in the context of an overall strategy, he said.According to Durga, the framework suggests graded levels of capabilities ranging from rudimentary information collection and basic control, through increasingly sophisticated levels of management and integration.The final result is a mature state of continuous experimentation and improvement.And if your organization is somewhat mature, ECM can deliver value and strengthen and simplify compliance requirements.Finally, noted Webster, while she sees ECM as a powerful tool for compliance efforts, success requires a bigger view.The structured information in systems of record such as ERP, customer relationship management, human capital management and supply chain management also needs to be managed properly for compliance.In other words, ECM is crucial but it is not the whole picture.About the author Alan R.Earls is a Boston area freelance writer focused on business and technology.Understanding and comparing six types of data processing systems.Availability. Availability is the fraction of time a TP system is up and running and able to do useful work that is, it isnt.By submitting your personal information, you agree that Tech.Target and its partners may contact you regarding relevant content, products and special offers.You also agree that your personal information may be transferred and processed in the United States, and that you have read and agree to the Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy.Availability is an important measure of the capability of a TP system because the TP application usually is offering a service thats mission critical, one thats essential to the operation of the enterprise, such as airline reservations, managing checking accounts in a bank, processing stock transactions in a stock exchange, or offering a retail storefront on the Internet.Obviously, if this type of system is unavailable, the business stops operating.Therefore, the system must operate nearly all the time.Just how highly available does a system have to be We see from the table in Figure 1.Thats too much time for many types of businesses, which would consider 9.An availability of 9.X 2. 4 hoursday X 6.X 11. 00. Many TP applications would find this unacceptable if it came in one 1.It might be tolerable, provided that it comes in short outages of just a few minutes at a time.But in many cases, even this may not be tolerable, for example in the operation of a stock exchange where short periods of downtime can produce big financial losses.An availability of 9.Further, 9. 9. 9.That number may seem incredibly ambitious, but it is attainable telephone systems typically have that level of availability.People sometimes talk about availability in terms of the number of 9s that are attained for example, five 9s means 9.Figure 1. 1. 1 Downtime at Different Availability Level.The number of nines after the decimal point is of practical significance.Downtime. Availability1 hourday.Some systems need to operate for only part of the day, such as 9 AM to 5 PM on weekdays.In that case, availability usually is measured relative to the hours when the system is expected to be operational.Thus, 9. 9. 9 availability means that it is down at most 2.X 6. 0 minuteshour X 11.Today s TP system customers typically expect availability levels of at least 9.Generally, attaining high availability requires attention to four factors The environment making the physical environment more robust to avoid failures of power, communications, air conditioning, and the like.System management avoiding failures due to operational errors by system managers and vendors field service.Hardware having redundant hardware, so that if some component fails, the system can immediately and automatically replace it with another component thats ready to take over.Software improving the reliability of software and ensuring it can automatically and quickly recover after a failure.This book is about software, and regrettably, of the four factors, software is the major contributor to availability problems.Software failures can be divided into three categories application failures, database system failures, and operating system failures.Because were using transactions, when an application fails, any uncommitted transaction it was executing aborts automatically.Its updates are backed out, because of the atomicity property.Theres really nothing that the system has to do other than re execute the transaction after the application is running again.When the database system fails, all the uncommitted transactions that were accessing the database system at that time have to abort, because their updates may be lost during the database system failure.A system management component of the operating system, database system, or transactional middleware has to detect the failure of the database system and tell the database system to reinitialize itself.During the reinitialization process, the database system backs out the updates of all the transactions that were active at the time of the failure, thereby getting the database into a clean state, where it contains the results only of committed transactions.A failure of the operating system requires it to reboot.All programs, applications, and database systems executing at the time of failure are now dead.Everything has to be reinitialized after the operating system reboots.On an ordinary computer system all this normally takes between several minutes and an hour, depending on how big the system is, how many transactions were active at the time of failure, how long it takes to back out the uncommitted transactions, how efficient the initialization program is, and so on.Very high availability systems, such as those intended to be available in excess of 9.Even when they fail, they are down only for a very short time.They usually use some form of replicated processing to get this fast recovery.When one component fails, they quickly delegate processing work to a copy of the component that is ready and waiting to pick up the load. The Icu Book 4Th Edition Release Date . The transaction abstraction helps the programmer quite a bit in attaining high availability, because the system is able to recover into a clean state by aborting transactions.And it can continue from where it left off by rerunning transactions that aborted as a result of the failure.Without the transaction abstraction, the recovery program would have to be application specific.It would have to analyze the state of the database at the time of the failure to figure out what work to undo and what to rerun.We discuss high availability issues and techniques in more detail in Chapter 7, and replication technology in Chapter 9.In addition to application, database system, and operating system failures, operator errors are a major contributor to unplanned downtime.Many of these errors can be attributed to system management software that is hard to understand and use.If the software is difficult to tune, upgrade, or operate, then operators make mistakes.The ideal system management software is fully automated and requires no human intervention for such routine activities.Styles of systems.Weve been talking about TP as a style of application, one that runs short transaction programs that access a shared database.TP is also a style of system, a way of configuring software components to do the type of work required by a TP application.Its useful to compare this style of system with other styles that you may be familiar with, to see where the differences are and why TP systems are constructed differently from the others.There are several other kinds of systems that we can look at here Batch processing systems, where you submit a job and later receive output in the form of a file.Real time systems, where you submit requests to do a small amount of work that has to be done before some very early deadline.Data warehouse systems, where reporting programs and ad hoc queries access data that is integrated from multiple data sources.Designing a system to perform one of these types of processing is called system engineering.Rather than engineering a specific component, such as an operating system or a database system, you engineer an integrated system by combining different kinds of components to perform a certain type of work.Often, systems are engineered to handle multiple styles, but for the purposes of comparing and contrasting the different styles, well discuss them as if each type of system were running in a separately engineered environment.Lets look at requirements for each of these styles of computing and see how they compare to a TP system.Batch processing systems.A batch is a set of requests that are processed together, often long after the requests were submitted.Data processing systems of the 1.Today, batch workloads are still with us.But instead of running them on systems dedicated for batch processing, they often execute on systems that also run a TP workload.TP systems can execute the batches during nonpeak periods, since the batch workload has flexible response time requirements.To make the comparison between TP and batch clear, we will compare a TP system running a pure TP workload against a classical batch system running a pure batch workload, even though mixtures of the two are now commonplace.
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