eGov-July-2006-[21-22]-Providing Enterprise Content Management Solutions-Sanjay Aurora

INDUSTRY PERSPECTIVE

Providing enterprise content management solutions What technology solutions does Interwoven provide to the public sector?

Interwoven is the leader in enterprise content management (ECM) solutions. Content management is the management of different types of information, that exist in digital forms such as text documents, images, video files, web content, through the use of common desktop applications and easy-to-use content authoring tools. Such information exists in two forms, structured data, or unstructured data – data that does not reside within a database or spreadsheet or on someone’s desktop. ECM solutions are especially important for unstructured data that makes up 70-80% of every company’s information.

So what we do is to manage pieces of unstructured information so that they are versioned, stored, archived, and records are kept properly? This has a very significant impact today on what people are trying to do, whether it is government, bank or private sector company.

For example, how do you make good amount of services available on the Internet, because it is cheaper, it is better, your citizens want it and the corporate citizens also take an advantage. And to provide both kinds of services, you need a very strong platform for web content management, where they can find the right information at the right time The second aspect, which is very important is how you manage your papers in the organization. Scanned documents become one step to it, but how does it flow through the organization, how many people are looking at it, how many people are approving it, when the job is done and where is that paper stored. That is a very important piece that is gaining a lot of attention from all kinds of businesses and the government because of regulatory compliance issues, such as banks need to store certain information for certain years, country regulations and so forth. Uncontrolled content can be a liability for regulatory compliance and legal discovery.

How do you tackle the issue of content updation?

This is a very important point. In fact, when you look at very many sites, the content is not updated or different versions may reside on different sites. So the out-dated information becomes the wrong information since it is not valid today. It is also risky today to have wrong information on the websites. When we thought about doing the content management, it was not just managing the content; it was about democratisation of the process. I am using this word ‘democratisation’ very carefully.

For instance, egov publishes this egov magazine, you own the content, but you are not the web specialist, you are not the web technologist. So you have the content in MS word or any other format, and send it to your IT folks. The IT folks may deal with hundreds of | July 2006

Interwoven, Inc. is the leader in enterprise content management solutions for business, enables organizations to unify people, content and processes to minimize business risk, accelerate time-to-value and sustain lower total cost of ownership. In an exclusive interview to Anuradha Dhar of egov, Sanjay Aurora, Regional Vice President, South Asia / Hong Kong, informs about advantages of their solutions and their success stories in e-Government initiatives

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such requests on a daily basis. They prioritize, then the IT guys will load up your data and then a new change comes; it is a process. Now what we provide is that you. the business owner have the capability of publishing content, through a workflow. So, the mistakes are reduced. But you are even more like a template and a work area, these are technical terms, but you know the content better than the IT people, so you should own what goes in your website. Because the website is what your content is. And to facilitate the democratisation, you have things like template, etc. where the copyright body is very clear that, although there are 30 people publishing content, the look and feel, the style, the must have that will go away. So internally, there is workflow, the email that goes around, so when you publish a new article, you like to publish it offline, you will go through an approval process, but you will be in control.

So, we are talking about content updation made very easy for the business users. And the biggest advantage here is the accelerated time to market the right information to reach the right platform and corporate compliance is maintained.

the technology platform needs to be changed, which is a very important criteria today.

The second thing that we bring to the table today is our customer knowledge. The fact that we have worked with the Australian government, the Singapore government, the Brunei government, have domain expertise, can share best practices and references gives us an edge over competitors.

We bring to the table today our customer knowledge. The fact that we have worked with the Australian, Singapore, Brunei government, have domain expertise, can share best practices and references gives us

Can you tell briefly about some of your success stories in eGovernment initiatives?

I would say, one of the biggest successes in the government sector for us is in Australia.

There are several case studies publishedDOTARS, Queensland Government, LGAQ, Department of Justice WA. Several large government departments have done significant amount of work with Interwoven and have provided references. In Singapore, we have done a significant amount of work with various government bodies such as the Ministry of Education, National Heritage Board, IDA and so on. The initiatives range from publishing content to be fitted in, to customizing solutions. For instance, we worked with the National Heritage Board in Singapore in digitization of their artifacts as to how to keep it in the library where people can come in. It is a very unique way of putting a digitized museum and that is what we are working on right now.

Does Interwoven provide e-Government an edge over strategy consulting?

No. We definitely are a product company. competitors What we do have are partners, right from the global companies such as Accenture, HP, How long you have been associated with BEA as well as local and regional partners such as Satyam and the public sector in Asia compared to international market?

Wipro, who have strong e-Government experiences and best We have been associated with the public sector for six years in practices. So, they will then go and put Interwoven solutions as Asia and ten years with the government sector internationally. part of the package for the wider e-Government strategy.

In US, we have a very large government sector federal practice.

So, a lot of work has been done in the US. Australia was the What advantages you give to the customers as compared to first, in context of Asia-Pacific, where significant amount of work was done. And then, we did work in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong many of your local and global competitors?

I think what advantage we give to customers is two-fold. One is Kong and Taiwan. providing a world class robust tool. Being a product company, when you are building a long-term strategy, it is a lot of What percent of business is coming out of Asia? experience that we have gained in the field. So, the biggest We are unable to disclose any figures. We do not have figures advantage that we bring to the market, is an enterprise-level, measuring individual regions or countries. scalable, proven and reliable software; which means when you start building a strategy, need an extend growth and when you What is your future plan for the e-Government sector? say, “I have launched in a state, now can I make it multi-lingual Our future plans are to concentrate on providing e-Government in 22 states, then you do not look back and say my car engine solutions with our partners that will enhance citizen was weak�. Up scaling, regionalisation, even globalisation can experience. India, of course, is a part and parcel of the company’s be done using our software. Companies like GE, Citibank, growth plan. We are right now aligning ourselves to Queensland government, etc. are running their worldwide the eGovernment market in India because I believe; there is a infrastructure leveraging on our technology. very large initiative there. With Interwoven experience in the So, the advantage that we bring is the robust, proven e-Government market, we are well placed to provide the platform, which can start small but when you go regional, solutions for the exponential growth that the e-Government is statewide, countrywide, you will not have the limitation that growing at.

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