A DIGITAL STRATEGY FOR LEVERAGING ECM IN PUBLIC …...within must also be taken into consideration...

Derrick [email protected]: @Derrick_Lau

A DIGITAL STRATEGY FOR LEVERAGING ECM IN PUBLIC TRANSIT

2015 EMC Proven Professional Knowledge Sharing 2

Table of Contents

Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 3

Supporting the Pillars .................................................................................................................. 4

Engagement and Access ........................................................................................................... 4

Infrastructure and Assets ........................................................................................................... 6

Economy ...................................................................................................................................11

Organizational Digital Maturity ..................................................................................................13

Recommendation ...................................................................................................................... 13

Appendix…………………………………………………………………………………………………14

Disclaimer: The views, processes or methodologies published in this article are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect EMC Corporation’s views, processes or methodologies.


Introduction

The velocity at which consumer markets are embracing digital goods and channels is often so

fast that public transit organizations are struggling to keep pace with the technology.

Additionally, consumer demand for real-time transit service status, public demand for

transparency in government, and fiscal pressure from ballooning government debt have evolved

application development shops into agile but siloed DevOps teams, working at a frenzied pace

to serve multiple masters, often with conflicting priorities. In this environment it is easy to

overlook dependencies across the enterprise. Hence the need for a comprehensive digital

strategy that looks at all these initiatives at an enterprise and ultimately public level, to evolve

public transit organizations to a point where not only can they respond rapidly to disruptive

technological developments, but also deploy their own disruptive forces into the digital market.

Such a strategy would be unique depending on the public transit body, but generally speaking,

the vision or mission objective should be:

To enhance multidirectional digital connections amongst commuters, businesses, and

the public transit agency (both internally and externally).

Most mission drivers resulting from this generic vision can be grouped into four pillars:

Engagement and Access:

Citizens and businesses can easily interact with interconnected regional transit authorities

through digital channels, demonstrated by responsive event-driven digital channels and a

seamless digital experience across regional transit boundaries.

Infrastructure and Assets:

Public transit knowledge will be managed in order to proactively keep everyone informed, as

well as provide full transparency into the organization for public accountability.

Economy:

Public transit entities should support digital business opportunities and encourage private sector

innovation with open government platforms.

Organizational Digital Maturity:

Public transit organizations should enact standards to enforce information governance, break

down internal knowledge silos, and encourage innovation with digital technologies.


To address these four pillars, public transit agencies should leverage enterprise content

management (ECM) solutions, especially cloud-based ECM platforms, in all of their technology

strategies. I intend to focus on the public transit-related challenges for ECM, such as vehicle

location, transit service disruptions, and regular commute planning versus trip planning, across

regional transit service provider boundaries. Additionally, I will identify some of the work

streams required to enact a public transit digital strategy and highlight interdependencies that

need to be watched. It is my hope that the digital strategy I present will be easily adaptable to

other public transit agencies in order to help them evolve to meet the ever increasing needs of

the rising digital generation. Finally, the sample solutions provided with this article are based on

my personal knowledge of the ECM marketspace, which is primarily EMC focused, but that

doesn’t mean other vendor solutions should be excluded. It does not reflect a bias towards

EMC, but rather a more concrete strategy implementation based on a product and solution suite

I am familiar with.

Supporting the Pillars

Engagement and Access

Enhancing Multidirectional Digital Connections

To properly deliver a truly engaging multidirectional user experience, one must first understand

certain interaction concepts, such as real-time. In my own experience quite a few public transit

organizations are unclear on the definition of real-time. Real-time normally refers to systems

where response times are crucial, such as the guidance and control software of a cruise missile.

In the online digital world, it usually refers to push notifications which reach their destination

within one second of being transmitted, and is commonly referred to as web real-time. What

most public transit agencies claim as real-time is actually on-demand, with each response

providing current data that is up to date based upon the time of the request, and can be easily

achieved through an ECM system’s supported digital channels.

By following an event-driven architecture web real-time behaviour is naturally supported. Some

real life examples of such architecture can be seen in social media sites like Twitter and

Facebook. These two websites experience high concurrent user load on a regular basis and use

event-driven architecture push techniques such as Comet to manage the load effectively.

However, performance will depend upon the amount of content pushed. The larger the message

content, the longer it will take to reach its intended targets. Most ECM systems don’t have

asynchronous push behaviour out of the box, but can be customized to support event-driven


architectures. EMC Documentum® naturally supports this behaviour via custom Type Based

Objects (TBOs).

What types of public transit content would benefit from web real-time behaviour? Breaking

news, service status updates, and winter storm warnings would be great applications to enable

push notifications, so users wouldn’t have to constantly watch their devices to see, but instead

have an alert pushed to their mobile devices or desktop browser. Proper tuning of the ECM

solution must be done if digital assets within the repository are required to be pushed to the

public as well. Again, this is simplified when employing cloud-based ECM solutions.

Decoupled WCM: A Crucial Pillar to any Digital Strategy

Currently there are two types of WCM systems on the market.

In tightly coupled systems each user’s request for content is brought to the WCM system, and

the required content is returned to the user. This requires the WCM service to be installed on

every public-facing web server instance, and if the content is stored in a relational database

system, a database instance farm or cluster to support it. Additionally, content authors and

editors will be modifying content on the same servers the public uses to access content, so high

user load will hamper the ability to deliver urgent content in a timely fashion. Obviously this

frustrates the digital user’s experience. If you must use this approach, I strongly recommend

going with a cloud-based ECM and WCM solution.

Decoupled systems follow a different architectural model, which I refer to as the decoupled

content delivery pattern:

Figure 1: Decoupled content delivery pattern


In these systems, content is stored in the ECM solution, but instead of having a WCM service

on the public-facing web node, the WCM service puts the content into pre-designed templates

and publishes these files to the public web facing nodes. That way requests for up to date

content terminate at the public web server tier. This will keep the user load away from the ECM

solution, and without requiring a visit to the WCM and eventually ECM solution each time new

content requested will not require installations of the WCM solution on each public facing web

server. With less software contending for resources, more of the public web server resources

will be focused on feeding just HTML flat files to the public, thus reducing the impact upon

performance caused by increased concurrent user load. Thus, I believe it is crucial for an ECM

solution to employ a decoupled WCM architecture for an engaging user experience, regardless

of whether it is in the cloud or not.

Digital Signage

Public transit agencies often disperse information signage across stations and vehicles as a

way of communicating service information to customers, and in some cases including

advertising streams. Many digital signage solutions already include a content management

component, so integrating with a central ECM solution should not be an insurmountable

challenge. Integration will also facilitate the distribution of any compatible knowledge or media

from the organization to the signage, increasing public engagement with this particular digital

channel. Given the typical size and resolution of most digital signage, the content files involved

could become very large, warranting cloud-based ECM solutions to be used for ease of

scalability.

Infrastructure and Assets

Enterprise Content Management

ECM is probably the most important application infrastructure required for implementing any

digital strategy. The core principles of ECM enable engagement and access by breaking down

knowledge silos within the organization, as well as allowing free flow of knowledge from inside

the corporate firewall to the outside world. This would require a combination of records

management, document management, web content management, digital asset management,

and business process management (BPM), with a strong supporting information architecture.


Information Architecture

Public transit agencies will have knowledge to catalogue such as timetables, service status,

fares, and other forms of information. These will all be stored in different systems specific to

their needs, but need to be related to allow the seamless flow and full transparency of

knowledge. For example, timetable information is normally stored in a scheduling system, like

Giro HASTUS, and information from there would need to be related to fares if the pricing model

was based on distance of travel. Scheduling systems should also track bus routes, train lines,

and stops, so these could also be related to fares as well as service status information.

Additionally, architectural diagrams and renderings of vehicles, stations, and facilities may also

exist, and these could be related by routes, geographical location, or timetable

Having a proper information architecture that correctly relates this information is crucial in

developing the ability to provide the public with a personalized knowledge experience within an

acceptable request response duration. This is especially true of timetable data. Scheduling

systems often will have two sets of schedules: the commitment and the confirmed. The

commitment indicates what was planned for a seasonal period, whereas the confirmed is what

the schedule will be for a specific date, having taken into account known exceptions. This is

important because if a choice is made to return the confirmed schedule, the information

architecture must account for the storage of a larger amount of schedule data, especially if the

public has to select a schedule based on a date. From personal experience, date-based

scheduling complicates things and can lead to performance issues in user responsiveness if not

adequately architected for.

For public transit agencies, geographical information systems such as Esri are becoming

increasingly popular, and ensuring their information is related to vehicle location tracking

systems like Siri may be necessary. Depending on the size of the public transit system, this can

be an enormous amount of information to manage.

Additionally, for communications to the media, such as open letters to other government

officials, statements to the press regarding major transit disruptions, and recorded public board

meetings, care must be taken to ensure this information is properly reviewed and released to

the public in a timely fashion. Quality of the media upon which this information is transmitted

within must also be taken into consideration to avoid public embarrassment. This information

may be represented in a multitude of digital assets, such as videos, audio recordings, document

images, or even emails, but need to be flagged to follow a special workflow to ensure

appropriate governance for public communications.


Finally, even information technology knowledge should be properly governed and related to

appropriate capital projects and business needs. With the challenge of diffusing traffic

congestion in expanding urban areas, more and more complex solutions and architectures will

be procured, and managing this knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. Add to that the need

for cooperation at the IT architectural level between multiple public transit agencies and the

amount of architectural knowledge to manage multiplies. This knowledge should be governed

under the same ECM umbrella as the rest of the corporate information within the enterprise, so

changes to the enterprise architecture can be tracked and if necessary, properly shared with

appropriate parties within the enterprise.

Ultimately having an optimal information architecture will simplify the ECM adoption program,

thus accelerating the realization of the digital strategy objectives.

Big Data?

With the vast amount of different types of knowledge in public transit organizations, it will at

times require plenty of computing resources to manage and process the information. This type

of data center isn’t easy to architect or build, but luckily existing pre-built solutions which offer

Software as a Service (SaaS) in the cloud exist, such as EMC’s cloud-based enterprise content

management solution and Geospatial Information System (GIS) cloud solution. Such cloud-

based solutions already come with sufficient storage and archiving capabilities, and easily

handle increasing system load with a generally affordable pay for use model. Cloud-based

solutions are also great for Big Data applications, however, I’m not sure if public transit agencies

have a large enough data set (counting both structured and unstructured information), to require

factoring in Big Data architectures. But it is a potential contingency, especially if historical

information regarding vehicle locations is required.

If the situation does fulfil the requirement for Big Data, one of the greatest challenges will be

analytics. Such data visualizations may require the analysis of unstructured information assets,

such as sifting through gigabytes of CCTV feeds for a person of interest, in addition to traditional

data warehouse analytics. These types of analytics will require a data lake architecture, which

the cloud naturally supports, along with software such as Apache Hadoop. However, even with

the cloud, these data analyses will take some time to execute, so for context-enabled computing

scenarios, consider augmenting any standard cloud architecture with tactical cloudlets at

satellite offices for supporting edge analytics.


Knowledge Federation within the Organization

This is very challenging as there are multiple ways to integrate systems for knowledge sharing,

from using provided application programming interfaces (APIs) for making updates and

notifications, to actually reaching into their database schemas and using batch jobs for creating

views to join the data. From past experience I have found it easier to integrate utilizing vendor

APIs and following an event-driven architecture model, updating knowledge as it changes.

However, knowledge federation complicates the systems integration architecture, especially

with large data sets. Although it is easier to maintain solutions architected upon a single source

of the truth, such systems are vulnerable to high concurrent user load. Additionally, based on

this model, if the public is anxious to see a very specific set of information, the enormous public

traffic could be invited down to the specific system with said information. If that system was not

architected for heavy load, it would be impacted and internal corporate users would share in the

pain.

Knowledge federation should be achieved through a decoupled information architecture, by

caching entire information sets from several separate systems within the ECM system. Keeping

systems in sync should be done again with an event-driven architecture, as long running batch

jobs will always leave the ECM store somewhat behind the master systems. Caching the

federated knowledge in the cloud is best as continually expanding data sizes are best handled

with cloud computing architectures.

My preferred event-driven architecture would be a services-based notification layer that would

reside between the ECM solution and the other systems that store corporate knowledge. This

layer would alert all systems of user updates as they occur, and replicate updates made to any

system across the enterprise, including the ECM solution. That way updates made to the

outlying systems can be replicated within the ECM solution as they come, and if necessary,

pushed to the appropriate parties.

In public transit agencies there will at least be scheduling, trip planning, vehicle-tracking, and

customer communication systems. By integrating these systems in an event-driven fashion,

changes to one system can immediately trigger related changes to occur in the others.

Updating based on these small changes will be quicker and more efficient than periodical batch

jobs, which take more time causing the ECM repository to be out of date for a longer time

window. This approach requires custom development effort, but the overall time cost can be

reduced if there are existing pre-built ECM connectors on the market for the systems requiring


integration. Time spent architecting an appropriate infrastructure can be reduced too if cloud-

based ECM solutions are leveraged.


Possible architecture using EMC Solutions

From personal experience I know the EMC Content Management solution suite offers a wide

range of products that would satisfy these requirements, but the implementation costs would not

be insignificant. From that perspective one should consider a combination of private cloud-

based services interacting with local on-premise services to provide the optimum ECM solution.

Cloud-based solutions offer pre-deployed software and hardware, easing ECM implementation.

Figure 2: Possible solution architecture

Economy

By managing knowledge and distributing it digitally through an ECM solution, public transit

agencies will have the ability to disrupt the digital economy through the following high level

business drivers:

Open Government

Once all the knowledge of the public transit agency has been captured in an ECM solution, it will

be simple to share this information to the public via RESTful and web real-time services.

Although this information is freely available, third party developers will now be able to utilize it to

provide value added services to consumers. Additionally, by leveraging ECM solutions, non-

structured information can easily be vetted via a system-enforced business process before

release to the general public.


Online Media Plan

An online media plan will help communications staff determine how to promote the public transit

agency across social media and other digital channels or websites. This should include search

engine optimization, which should be possible due to the information architecture providing

metadata that can be used as search terms against the ECM system.

One industry vertical that relies on public transit and should be included in the online media plan

is the real estate market. Many real estate websites already contain links to public transit

agencies. Leveraging ECM to give them information such as locations of nearby public transit

stops to homes on the market will help real estate agencies more easily align buyers with

locations. However, there is also the possibility that homes located near existing or future public

transit stops may experience an inflation in valuation. Speculation on property valuations based

on information in the ECM solution may help drive the local economy (or hurt it).

Seamless Knowledge Federation Across Regional Service Boundaries

With rising real estate prices in urban cores driving families further from their work locations,

commuters more often need to plan their travel across multiple regional boundaries. Cloud-

based ECM solutions should be leveraged in this scenario to capture and relate all regional

public transit knowledge for regional trip planning solutions like Google Maps or even a multi-

system timetable to help commuters plan their weekly travel. This information can be leveraged

through the ECM cloud by other organizations to plan value-added services along public transit

routes. Additionally, cloud-based ECM solutions with regional trip planning customizations make

systems integration and maintenance more cost effective. Finally, the federation of multiple

transit agencies’ service updates and disruption notifications in an event-driven architecture will

allow the public to see all possible disruptions to their upcoming trips, regardless of regional

service boundaries and plan accordingly.

Risk of Advertising Streams

Advertisers who wish to advertise on public transit digital channels would benefit from ECM to

simplify the process of transmitting their advertising content across the public transit agency’s

digital channels. However, there is a risk where some public members may not appreciate

viewing advertising streams while viewing online public transit content. For this, the integration

of advertising streams into the ECM solution should include compatibility with identity

management, to allow each public member to individually choose whether they wish to view the


advertising or not. This may lead to charging individuals for advertising-free digital information

streams, another controversial topic that is out of scope of this article.

Organizational Digital Maturity

Once utilized, ECM will allow knowledge to easily flow between government employees and the

public. It will also simplify records management. ECM systems naturally break down internal

knowledge silos and provide a strong foundation for future digital workflows and proactive

knowledge-based applications. Knowledge management will naturally be enforced with the built-

in digital governance in the form of BPM and content-level security built into most ECM systems.

Thus, ECM will help mature public transit agencies digitally by smoothly transitioning them into

effective digital workforces.

One major challenge to note in public transit agencies is the adoption of ECM. If the

organization manages a transit system there will inevitably be bus drivers and forward-deployed

station personnel employed, as well as other employees who are mobile throughout the day.

Training these employees on new systems will be a challenge.

Recommendation

As demonstrated above, implementing the right ECM solution into a public transit agency will

help it meet the mission of any digital strategy. Most major ECM vendor solutions naturally

manage and deliver corporate knowledge over multiple digital channels, and therefore provide a

strong and fully featured stable knowledge platform, or architectural runway, upon which to base

future applications. By utilizing a cloud-based ECM platform, public transit agencies will be able

to quickly deploy and manage a custom ECM solution, allowing them to soon realize the

benefits of ECM. As public transit agencies and commuters become more familiar with the

capabilities of ECM, more innovative applications will be realized, quickly evolving their abilities

to manage and share knowledge. Finally, extrapolating this evolution into the future, as more

knowledge is managed, the volume of information stored may grow at such a rate that the

amount of information may be viewed as Big Data, which a cloud-based ECM solution will

handle effectively.


Appendix

Sources:

http://vancouver.ca/files/cov/City_of_Vancouver_Digital_Strategy.pdf http://chucksblog.emc.com/chucks_blog/2012/09/the-digital-business-strategy.html http://www.cutaactu.ca/en/public-transit/publicationsandresearch/vision_2040.asp http://www.emc.com/industry/public-sector/transportation-planning-environment.htm#!solution_description http://www.emc.com/collateral/software/solution-overview/h8792-emc-gis-cloud-sol-pub-sect-so.pdf http://www.emc.com/campaign/global/hybridcloud/serviceproviders.htm David Orde, Natasha Campbell (EMC) Andrew Douglas, Ingeniux

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A DIGITAL STRATEGY FOR LEVERAGING ECM IN PUBLIC …...within must also be taken into consideration...

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