Enterprise Content Management: GreenPowerOps - Paper Example

GreenPowerOps is a globally distributed conglomerate arising from a governmental agency in the field of energy and environmental sustainability to become an independent organization staffed by the brightest minds in energy and research. The organization is presently headquartered in Paris, France, even though it makes a presence in 51 other locations found in Europe, Asia, the United States, and Canada. GreenPowerOps serves at least 2000 global clients some of which constitute governments, manufacturers as well as distributors with a global footprint. The company has earned a reputation in the industry since its launch in 2010, a reputation that not only gives it a considerable advantage over its global and local peers evident from the 85% win on all its bids, but also demands that the company defends by taking to note its present structural bottlenecks that may negatively impact its capacity to deliver to its clients, more so in the event that its customer base widens.

Some of the strengths GreenPowerOps could wield around to take advantage of opportunities in the macro environment include the global presence of the company which widens its knowledge scope all the while giving it the much-needed competitive edge over its peers, and an unrivalled team who bring wealth of knowledge, experience, and commitment from conventional and alternative forms of energy from the perspective of different disciplines just to mention a few. However, the future of the company in a more or less dynamic industry may presently be uncertain more so as bottleneck begin to appear in its organizational framework. The threats and weaknesses facing GreenPowerOps need immediate address reinvigorate its staff, uplift its liaison, empower its corporate culture, revitalize its direction, and reroute its resources towards processes and adjustments with a higher return on investment and with little chance of wastefulness.

Problem Statement

An in-depth analysis of GreenPowerOps reveals that the company faces a myriad of issues from its staff, to the liaison protocols, structure, and guiding corporate principles and policies, factors which must be addressed in the shortest time possible. The energy industry is dynamic and stalked by high competition that implies that threats and weaknesses within the macro and micro environment could exacerbate vulnerabilities and consequently affect not only the company but also the energy industry given GreenPowerOps dominance in the field. Therefore in that regard, two steps need to be taken. The first is analyzing the issues stalking GreenPowerOps as a company which would provide a broad window on how to stem its vulnerabilities. The second is charting the mechanism of dealing with some of the more compelling issues that threaten the future of the company.

On the first note, the issues facing GreenPowerOps range from structural inefficiencies and deficiencies, to inadequate technological adoption, insufficient communication techniques, sluggishness, weak process silos, an inadequate informational infrastructure, and cross-border compliance issues, just to mention a few. Other problems including lack of standard authoring and information sharing protocols, fragmented information storage, indexing, and retrieval standards, legal hurdles, mechanisms of research collaboration and review, and data warehousing. On the second note, despite the myriad of issues mentioned above, three selected matters of critical importance would form the central argument of this paper and include,

The future of the companys enterprise content management (ECM) and specifically how GreenPowerOps would modernize its customer RFP response process.

How GreenPowerOps would revise its content delivery process so that clients have comprehensive information and on time.

The mechanism of adopting new skills by the GreenPowerOps staff so that the proposed Enterprise Content Management could exhibit a decent return on investment.

Assumptions

Acceptance

One of the more obvious challenges noted in trying to adopt a new system that confronts the status quo within the microenvironment of GreenPowerOps is acceptance by the scientific community. While some give reasons for preferring regional culture when it comes to managing the working framework of the internal environment, or challenge its complexity and costly adjustment, or altogether ignore such a proposition and continue to use unsanctioned content management such as email, the question remains, how would a newly proposed ECM help GreenPowerOps achieve its goals? It is therefore assumed that the information systems director has developed a technique of overcoming the rejection barrier that would otherwise compromise the project.

Standardization

Another issue to contend with outside the acceptance front is the difference in legal frameworks as one traverses borders and the cultural differences thereby that tend to reflect the preferences of both staff and clients. If a new standardized system is to be adopted, it is assumed that underlying framework would remain intact even though a few segments could be contextualized according to a region or national culture and laws. That way, a bargain is struck between preserving nationally relevant factors while adhering to the GreenPowerOps corporate culture.

Monitoring

Developing a new ECM and equipping the staff with the appropriate knowledge that exploits the new opportunities provided by the revitalized system could not be said to a static one-time process. The infusion of the sustainability agenda in the energy industry implies that GreenPowerOps will always be faced with the need to readapt to sudden changes as global laws and cultures make adjustments according to changes in energy availability and the effects of exploiting energy sources to the environment. It is imperative that to retain its competitive advantage over its peers, GreenPowerOps stays ahead of the energy and sustainability debate and predicts changes in the industry with accuracy. In that case, it is assumed that the proposed changes would be incorporated in a cyclic systems development life cycle (SDLC) that would oversee the rapid adoption of critical changes if there be the need.

Enterprise Content Management and Modernization of RFP Customer Response Process

The key issues and observations that characterize GreenPowerOps when it comes to content are that the company face the dilemma of reconciling its global focus with local approaches, assembling the right team that resonates with the task at hand and that dedicate towards achieving the goals of a client. There are also issues of liaising with the customer by keeping them up to date and involving them in the project, finding the optimal way of accessing, uploading, and sharing documents regardless of the location of the accessing client, and ensuring that the informational infrastructure is not only up to date but complete.

The future of the RFP customer response process will have to find a balance between paper-based and electronic based communication and document sharing. Due to the wide variety of clients that GreenPowerOps serves, some prefer a purely paper-based communication, while others prefer electronic or a blend of the two. Therefore the model of the communication will have to vary according to the client and reflected in the company policy. The communication process would, therefore, have to be speeded up beyond its current rate even though the company provides the most comprehensive correspondence. The company will have to balance how quality and speed match against the urgency index of the client. There will also have to be a simple yet robust communication and follow-up protocol between GreenPowerOps and its client. Involving the client on the project right from the beginning would cut back the cost overheads that would most likely occur in case the report fails to correctly highlight the issues the client is facing rather than a more general outlook based on scientific analysis of the customers industry and market profile.

In that regard, the enterprise content management (ECM) framework will have to dwell on how the company ought to restructure its internal environment and working culture to support its business direction by laying down the criteria and hallmarks of information governance, and type of content and its particular classification. Additionally, the ECM will outline the mannerisms of capturing unstructured data and organizing it into understandable and indexed information, ways of collaborating between authors, mechanisms of searching and retrieving information with little effort, and approaches to publishing and delivering information.

However, launching such an ECM structure will necessitate the adoption of an optimal systems development life cycle (SDLC) that pays critical attention to how knowledge is managed within the internal environment of GreenPowerOps and how it is availed to clients without compromising the informational infrastructure of the company. The future will, therefore, have to break down the regional silo structure into a more fluid virtual informational sharing grid that implements the right collaboration technique, preferably through cloud computing technology. The adopted SDLC would have to take into account such variables usability of the ECM support tool, the architectural concept and how it incorporates data transfer rates, security during the data read-write-post-retrieve processes, and the database indexing and metadata needed for retrieval. Not only so, but the future ECM and customer RFP response process will also be cost-effective to run due to little wastage of resources such as data connectivity and hosting, relatively lightweight due to robust algorithms, dependable due to informational redundancy, and therefore quick to respond to answer client queries. It will exhibit a higher return on investment in the long run, which is assuming the information system department manage the infrastructure properly.

Content Delivery Process

The projected improvement of the companys (GreenPowerOps) enterprise content management (ECM) and the modernized RFP customer response process would be a focal point in ensuring that the future state of working with content within the companys content delivery is a fluid process. The basic approach the informational system that would oversee the delivery of information from raw data to final client-ready information through the internal processes of the company involves, capturing raw information in any potential format depending on the source, processing such data into useful information through available processing technologies, classifying such data through indexing, managing the information such as storing and archiving, and finally delivering actionable information to the client in the form of hard copies, electronic copies, and web pages.

However, the content delivery process does not only aim at passing over information to the due client, but also necessitates outlining formatting approaches considering the global audiences that the company serves, the security of the content delivery process, mechanisms of moderating volume of information exchange at any given time, number of accessing end-user devices at any one time, and access rights, managing information rights and the billing model and accompanying options. The audiences, or rather client and associates, who would receive and interact with researched and published information by GreenPowerOpss team of scientists working on a particular project need to understand the information if at is it to invoke action and be able to access it on their devices from their locales. Therefore formatting comes in as a key feature of the cont...