As Published In September/October 2006

Handle all your unstructured data with Oracle's content management solution.

Managing streams of unstructured data—documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and image files—is a problem that won't disappear soon. Organizations generate and receive a relentless influx of information from online and offline systems, but companies that can't manage unstructured content effectively not only suffer productivity losses, they risk being out of compliance with government and industry regulations.

How widespread is this problem? John K. Waters writes in Application Development Trends ("Managing Unstructured Information," February 1, 2005) that more than 80 percent of the information that companies generate is unstructured and that managing it has become critical. "Just about every company is coping with an explosion of [data]," he writes, and finding ways to use that unstructured data has become "a competitive differentiator."

With hundreds of team members working on more than 2,000 concurrent projects, POWER Engineers constantly contends with vast quantities of documents, all of which must be consistently accessed, archived, and shared. The company, headquartered in Hailey, Idaho, specializes in the energy, facilities, and communications markets.

To streamline its activities, POWER Engineers is migrating from a paper-based archiving process to an Oracle-based content management solution that uses a single, integrated repository for capturing, classifying, retaining, and retiring content based on enterprisewide policies. "Our products are documents to our clients," says Loren Dugan, IT director at POWER Engineers. "As such, we need to find a way to better support how they're generated, how they're maintained, how they're delivered to the clients—and how they're destroyed when the documents reach the end of their lifecycle."

Oracle's content management solution is centered around two new database options. Oracle Content Database (Oracle Content DB) enables customers to manage large volumes of unstructured content in a single Oracle database. Oracle Records Database (Oracle Records DB) provides for the lifecycle management of electronic records, so organizations can fulfill regulatory compliance mandates in an accurate, repeatable way.

Both of these options use Oracle Database 10g as the repository for storing and managing unstructured content. "Customers can now use Oracle Database 10g to store everything: data; files; metadata; text indexes; relationships between objects, security, and access control," says Andy Mendelsohn, senior vice president of Database Server Technologies at Oracle. "Everything you need to know about your content is in there, and it's all managed in a consistent, auditable, highly controlled way. Unlike the proprietary content management systems of the past, Oracle has created easy-to-use Windows and Web interfaces to help organizations more easily control, secure, and manage large volumes of structured and unstructured content."

This solution has worked for POWER Engineers. "The management and control of documents is the backbone of our business. Using and searching for documents and records is much more efficient and effective with a single repository," says Dugan.

"We chose Oracle's database before we even chose the ERP [enterprise resource planning] system. We were sold on the fact that we needed a world-class database to support our existing enterprise applications. Knowing that Oracle's database is the underlying fabric holding everything together for us makes me sleep better at night," he says.

Before selecting Oracle's content management system, Dugan and his colleagues at POWER Engineers evaluated several third-party content management systems, but they found them all too expensive and difficult to use—mainly because they depend on external connections between an Oracle database and third-party file systems to link documents, images, and other content.

Snapshots POWER Engineers www.powereng.com Location: Hailey, Idaho Industry: Engineering and Construction Employees: 700 Oracle Products and Services: Oracle Content DB, Oracle Records DB, Oracle Content Services, Oracle Real-Time Collaboration, Oracle Projects, Oracle Financials, Oracle Human Resources, Oracle Purchasing, Oracle iLearning Allstate Insurance Company www.allstate.com Location: Northbrook, Illinois Industry: Insurance Employees: More than 40,000 Oracle products: Oracle Content DB, Oracle Records DB, Oracle Content Services

The Right Stuff

The Oracle solution had the capabilities they needed: It allowed the engineering company to manage both structured data and unstructured content in a cohesive way. This includes not just transactional and analytical data, but also documents, PDF files, all types of images, e-mail messages, URLs, HTML files, spreadsheets, and much more.

"Oracle's vision for enabling content management throughout the enterprise was exactly what POWER had in mind," Dugan says. "From that perspective, it aligned well with what we wanted to do with our business."

The Oracle solution is also very secure. "The security model within Oracle Content DB is extraordinarily flexible, with fine-grained permissions and access-control policies specified by folder or document, together with both out-of-the-box and customer-defined roles," says Rich Buchheim, senior director of enterprise content management strategy at Oracle. "Users don't need to know anything about databases, or do any special archiving, retrieval, or record keeping to take advantage of these services. We handle all that under the covers, while the users see a familiar environment of files and folders."

POWER Engineers appreciates that level of security. "We support more than 2,000 clients in various engineering projects, and they want to know that the information that we house for them, from their projects, is safeguarded," Dugan says. "For example—power substations, or the power distribution part of the grid. Information on these power systems can become a large security issue if it were to fall into the wrong hands."

The Oracle infrastructure is ideal for POWER Engineers' growing repository of more than three million documents, many of which need to be stored for 20 years. The company is scanning many of these documents into Oracle Content DB using technology from Kofax, an Oracle partner based in Irvine, California, which provides information capture solutions for transforming paper documents into an electronic form that is accessible to POWER Engineers' business applications and databases. All approved project data, including hard-copy documents relating to each project, is stored in a single repository, allowing the company to track and manage data much more easily than before.

Additionally, thanks to Oracle Records DB, POWER Engineers has a sustainable solution for regulatory compliance, which reduces the risk associated with content loss and legal discovery while still keeping management tasks relatively simple. "What I like best about Oracle's system is its simplicity—from a usability standpoint, from an administration standpoint, and from the ability to archive records quickly and destroy them quickly at the end of their lifecycle," Dugan says.

Many organizations can identify with POWER Engineers' issues. To keep up with a company's growing base of information, Oracle Content DB manages all kinds of documents. "Instead of having file servers scattered all over their organization, users can consolidate information into one secure, centrally managed location," says Oracle's Mendelsohn. Meanwhile, Oracle Records DB manages the retention lifecycle of these documents, such as moving them from higher- to lower-cost storage devices and managing the destruction of obsolete documents over time.

Additionally, as more and more business processes are migrated online and the boundaries of the enterprise are extended to include customers and partners, many companies need to integrate documents into complex workflows. While this has been difficult to accomplish with other content management systems, primarily due to their proprietary interfaces, the Oracle solution uses Business Process Execution Language and Web services to integrate documents into standard business processes.

Patricia Cupoli, the Data Management Association's international liaison for the Institute for Certification of Computing Professionals, says that more people need the information that unstructured data provides. "It is the integration of structured and unstructured data that is a challenge. . . . Business users want to browse and search across all types of data for such opportunities as understanding customer issues," she writes in DM Review (June 22,2006). "[Unstructured] data needs to be managed as a corporate asset to provide value. It has to be identified, captured, organized, and made accessible and sharable."

Oracle provides different ways to access unstructured content stored in the database. "As part of its content management solution, Oracle has developed a set of J2EE- and .NET-compatible Web services, protocol services, and Java APIs that can be surfaced in a wide variety of business applications, such as the Oracle E-Business Suite," says Oracle's Buchheim.

"A great deal of unstructured content is often associated with business applications, but now customers can integrate everything into their business processes," he adds. "For example, a simple bill of materials has many types of content attached to it: CAD/CAM drawings, URLs, documents, and so forth. Using Oracle Content DB, all that content is securely stored in the Oracle database for easy access, routing, and integration with corporate business processes."

Many Oracle partners are taking advantage of this open architecture to extend the Oracle content management environment with content-enabled industry applications. For example, Open Text, a leader in enterprise content management software, is delivering content-enabled solutions that solve industry-specific problems. These industries include energy, financial services, telecommunications, and insurance, and Open Text is using Oracle Content DB to deliver its next generation of solutions. Open Text's solutions also enable customers to access and manage content from Oracle's Siebel, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards applications, as well as future Oracle Fusion Applications.

Low-Cost Content Management

Integrated content management is especially important for large, information-intensive corporations like Allstate Insurance Company, the second-largest property and casualty insurer in the United States.

"In a company of Allstate's size, there are many business drivers for a good document management solution," says Anthony Abbattista, Allstate's vice president of Enterprise Technology, Strategy and Planning. "First, there's a massive amount of content that we've been digitizing over the last few years as we make our processes better and more efficient. Second, we have regulatory requirements that necessitate better storage, retention, and retrieval cycles."

The Data Management Association's Cupoli agrees. "In this age of Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations, the overwhelming amount of unmanaged, unstructured data could increase a company's exposure," she writes—especially since the unstructured data is not easily accessible or found.

Allstate was attracted to the reliability and comparative low cost of the Oracle content management platform. "We estimate that the Oracle solution is about one-sixth the cost of any other platform we looked at," Abbattista adds. "That's largely because the solution builds upon our existing infrastructure, is extremely effective in its use of resources, and was engineered to be a robust product. As part of our enterprise architecture, we have been able to deploy it as a Web service, making it very easy for our application programmers to integrate it into our IT environment."

Next Steps Read the IDC White Paper and talk to an Oracle Content Database expert READ more about "Oracle Content DB" "Oracle Records DB" LEARN about content management for the entire enterprise DOWNLOAD Oracle Database 10g

With Oracle's solution, Allstate will easily be able to specify which content should be retained, for how long, and in what form. For example, financial statements must be retained without change for a set period of time, along with an auditable log that controls check-in, check-out, and change management. The company can integrate with familiar desktop and business applications, providing a document audit trail that lets them quickly find vital information. Once the retention period has expired, the content management solution will also administer the disposal of documents in a prescribed way.

Document management and retention policies can be applied on a folder-by-folder basis and controlled as part of an integrated business process. For example, workflows can be associated with specific folders and automatically triggered when events, such as document check-in or deletion, occur in them. This allows Allstate to devise custom workflows that drive review and approval cycles, notify users when a new document version has been checked in, or prevent the deletion of a document without a manager's permission.

"Securing and managing documents inside the Oracle content management solution will help us with our compliance initiatives. First of all, we want a secure doc store. We want to know who's looking at documents, who's creating them, and what the lifecycle has been over time. Secondly, when we want to retrieve documents, a content management solution allows us to tag and organize those records in the appropriate way," Abbattista says.

Allstate sees these technology improvements as a means to improve service to customers and employees. The Oracle solution already stores several hundred million documents. "Over time, we hope to combine our structured and unstructured content in a way that gives us record management capabilities second to none," says Abbattista. "In essence, we want to provide a taxonomy for data. While the data itself might not be structured, being able to find, index, search, and align it to our compliance initiatives is really important. Getting everything into a database helps us accomplish that objective."