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Information Bridges
ENTERPRISE INFORMATICS QUARTERLY eNEWSLETTER

In This Issue - September 2008

- A View from the Bridge: Announcing the NEW eB for SharePoint  Alan Kiraly – CEO, Enterprise Informatics

- Feature Story:
City of Las Vegas uses eB to comply with regulatory mandates - Webinar and Case Study available now

- Industry Perspective:
Nuclear Executive Advisory Council Meets

- Product Profile:
Digital Approval Records

- Enterprise Informatics in the News:
New clients using eB, Nuclear News advertising campaign

- Industry events where we will be exhibiting:
Enterprise Informatics invited to launch new eB for SharePoint solution at DEMOFall08

- Upcoming Webinars:
Learn more about eB for SharePoint and Design Engineering for Nuclear Plants

A View from the Bridge

At Enterprise Informatics we believe the only way to manage the cost of meeting compliance requirements and mitigating information-related risk is through the use of enterprise information management. While enterprise applications create, consume and use information to perform business functions, they only manage the information needed to do this. Even when they have the connections to information in other applications they are really only concerned in the “form factor” of this information that best enhances their application. There is nothing wrong with this, in fact products that are better at “tuning” information to meet the needs of their application users are generally more successful.

However, from an enterprise information management perspective having multiple views of information is problematic. What information can be trusted? What is the impact of changing information in one system and not another? What is the impact of not knowing why or how information is related? And what is the cost of keeping those relationships current, updated, and constantly growing in knowledge richness?

We have seen via our customers the need to tie multiple information sets together using eB. This information linking allows them to easily manage the change of information necessary not only to meet industry regulatory requirements, but also to efficiently provide visibility into the performance of key operating processes. Traditional datasets include those owned by work maintenance systems, training/certification systems, and engineering systems. And over the last year or so we have seen the explosive arrival of one of the biggest new information datasets within an application – Microsoft SharePoint.

Microsoft tells us they have sold over 100 million SharePoint licenses. This product has made portal, collaboration, and content management technology available to thousands of companies who previously could not afford to purchase and administrate these kinds of tools. This is really fantastic for those of us who want to help companies manage information. Microsoft SharePoint has single-handedly provided the means to collect and harvest information that would normally be inaccessible to a product like eB. Once this information is in SharePoint, an information management system can be used to properly identify, classify, and relate this information within the context of the enterprise. A properly designed information management system could even be used to manage the expansion and provisioning of a SharePoint implementation.

Microsoft has provided the means to access an information dataset that has been largely inaccessible. Like any information dataset it needs to be managed in the context of all the other information related to it–in and out of SharePoint. As a Microsoft Gold Certified partner working with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 before it was even released as beta, we are prepared to offer complementary products based on the same Microsoft technology that enables organizations to reduce the cost of managing compliance requirements when the information is in SharePoint.

This week at DEMOFall 2008, the premier event that showcases the latest, best technologies, we have been invited to launch our newest solution, eB for SharePoint. Visit our website soon to learn how this new eB solution extends SharePoint's benefits by adding governance, visibility, and control, all while maintaining its ease-of use and productivity.

Sincerely,
Alan Kiraly
CEO, Enterprise Informatics

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Feature Story
City of Las Vegas uses eB to comply with regulatory mandates

Information is a government's most important asset-and one of its biggest challenges. Government has always been synonymous with mountains of paperwork, which can quickly become an avalanche without the right record and document management tools. The City of Las Vegas (CLV), with a frantic growth rate and millions of records, found its system difficult to use and inefficient, and determined the need to implement a new solution that would carry the city forward more efficiently.

The paperwork required for such a massive, dynamic organization is daunting. The sheer output of documents alone is intimidating–but all aspects of a document's lifecycle–capture, tracking, distributing, protecting, preserving, retrieving, authenticating and archiving–is complicated. And when multiplied by the millions, it is a monumental endeavor.

CLV's existing method of managing records and documents did not integrate with the city's ERP system (Hansen/Infor), was too expensive to maintain and too difficult to use. Moreover, the Freedom of Information Act, which requires public agencies to disclose information upon any public request, demanded that CLV improve the speed, accuracy and thoroughness of fulfilling each request.

CLV established the specific requirements and goals for its new system, including:
  • Commercial off–the–shelf product
  • Document tracking, imaging and records management
  • Extensive search and reporting functionality
  • Workflow functions — audit trails for all functions
  • Secure web access through a standard browser
  • Interface with Enterprise Resource Planning system
  • Security defined at user, document and folder levels
CLV selected eB, and has now implemented across nine city departments, linking their resources, managing workflows, and significantly improving communications. “Prior to this system we had nine unlinked databases. Until we began using eB, we hadn't really recognized the breadth of document distribution and the numbers of iterations some of these documents went through. Version control and accuracy will improve measurably from now on,” comments Don Jacobson, Enterprise Project Manager, City of Las Vegas.

Download the complete case study and view the on-demand webinar detailing CLV's successful implementation of eB and its plans for future expansion of the system here.

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Industry Perspective
Nuclear Executive Advisory Council Meets

Enterprise Informatics held its annual Nuclear Executive Advisory Council (NEAC) from July 30 – August 1, 2008, continuing its commitment to the nuclear industry.

NEAC is composed of experts representing customers and industry representatives throughout the nuclear industry. This year the Council included:
  • Vince Gilbert, Director/Principal Strategist, Model Performance
  • Steve Easterbrook, President, CMPIC
  • Janice Hoerber, IT Supervisor, AmerenUE/Callaway Plant
  • Mani Dravida, IT Projects Director, Constellation Energy
  • Jim Szivos, Engineering CM Manager, Constellation Energy
  • Angie Million, Project Manager, Nuclear Fuel Services
  • Kraig Deike, Engineering Analyst, Sandia National Laboratories
The NEAC agenda is selected to benefit all participants, with presentations provided by customers and industry experts in addition to Enterprise Informatics staff. “I do believe it is one of the most successful events for information exchange among eB customers and with your company,” commented Janice Hoerber. Hoerber shared examples of effective business application interfaces to eB being used at AmerenUE, including work management, operator logs and rounds, scanning, batch rendering and HR software.

Industry representatives provided unique insight during the meeting, with Steve Easterbrook presenting methods for achieving effective Configuration Management through effective training and Vince Gilbert leading a discussion focused on how Knowledge Management can be supported by IT, and how eB is particularly suited to this function.

Thanks again to all of our participants – through your support, collaboration and deep industry experience we are able to provide the strongest enterprise information management solution for nuclear industry.

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Product Profile
Digital Approval Records

In today's age of electronic content generation, how comfortable are we at accepting that a document has been appropriately validated for content correctness and verified for completeness and accuracy including an indication of approval–for–use?

For many of us baby–boomers, we feel more comfortable rendering electronic documents to hardcopy to get that ‘wet–ink’ signature to provide the undeniable proof of content approval. Knowing the paper media type is transportable and accessible regardless of network connectivity or power issues gives us a sense of control, even though we may feel a bit guilty for depleting the rain forests.

As part of their mission to move the information process forward, NIRMA (Nuclear Information and Records Management Association) has had an interest in document digital signatures for years. Due to the lack of standardization many interesting techniques have been used to achieve the equivalent of a wet–ink signature. These techniques tend to give the Nuclear Records departments extra work to ensure that the electronic document carries some form of an approval indicator.

Technology advancements have assisted in providing different approaches to satisfy the requirements for marking document content as approved, but there has been no standardization to date for our industry to comply with the requirements defined in standards like 10CFR 50 Appendix B, sections 6 and 17, and others.

The difference between digital signatures and digital approval is that a digital signature is embedded into the document using an encryption algorithm which is invalidated whenever the document is changed, while digital approval is an integrated process that is captured in the details of an approval workflow.

AmerenUE's Callaway Nuclear Plant has recently transitioned to a digital approval process. The process that Ameren replaced was to scan a wet-ink signature and then associate the signature copy to the electronic file(s) representing the approved document. Their new digital approval process emulates their signature sheet (traveler) using workflow automation.

The signature sheet carries the signatures of the responsible persons involved in the process of document creation or revision, review, approval and release (validation and verification). The routing of the signature sheet is a work process that consists of predefined tasks depending on the type of document. The data captured about the actions associated with each task is recorded and identifies the action, who completed it (only a person designated for each task has authorization), and when it was completed satisfactorily.

Work flow templates for each of the different approval level process needs are predefined and are associated to each document and record type to ensure consistency. Strict data management and authentication rules are enforced to ensure that all the data associated with the process has the highest level of integrity possible and cannot be altered once the process is completed. Criteria applied to ensure the integrity of the data includes the following:

  • Document Management System user authentication to ensure that only authorized persons accept and complete the task allocated to them.
  • Only one ‘approval’ type workflow can be associated to a document or record and the relationship between the work flow and document objects cannot be broken once the document is released and the signature record is created.
  • The work flow data and its association with the record is rendered to a neutral data format such as XML and is locked securely so that it cannot be altered. In addition, the option exists to include the association of this data into records retention taxonomy.
  • Approval records need to cater to compound document structures such as work or modification packages. This means that all contained documents carry the same approval data.
  • The status of the document or record is changed to ‘approved’ and then ‘released’ once these steps have been completed.
  • The data snapshot must be an acceptable permanent record per GL 88–18, NRC and INPO®.
At the Callaway plant, signature sheets can be viewed by applying a style sheet which formats the data in the same way as the old hardcopy signature sheet and these can also be rendered to Adobe PDF format for quality record retention purposes.

Hardcopy Signature Page
Hardcopy Signature Page (Click image for larger image)


Digital Approval Record
Digital Approval Record (Click image for larger image)


Applying a Digital Approval process can offer many benefits to an organization. Key benefits include the elimination of the intensive manual process, increased visibility to the approval process and a stored quality record that contains the complete history defining who, when and why each document was approved. If the information is stored in XML data format as is done by Enterprise Informatics' eB, then each organization can choose to tailor the output to meet their business needs using an XML style sheet.

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News
Enterprise Informatics selected to launch eB for SharePoint at DEMOFall08

Only 1,500 companies have been selected to launch on the DEMO stage over the past 18 years, including Palm, Java, TiVo, E*TRADE, Salesforce.com and VMware. Now Enterprise Informatics has been invited to join this exclusive group. See View from the Bridge for more details.

Enterprise Informatics' growing customer list includes Nuclear, Healthcare and Information Security contracts

Enterprise Informatics has celebrated significant wins during the last quarter, with the addition of Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Company and the expansion of existing contracts with Nuclear Fuel Services and Constellation Energy, along with the addition of new customers in the UK.

Wolf Creek Nuclear Operating Company (WCNOC), a single unit operating company located approximately 90 miles south of Kansas City, has selected the Design Engineering solution from the eB Nuclear Application Suite. WCNOC selected eB in part because the out-of-the-box application met the majority of their requirements, and will be using eB for Records Management as well. In addition, eB's Design Engineering solution is in use at their sister plant Callaway, with proven benefits, supporting Enterprise Informatics' in-depth knowledge of the nuclear industry.

A customer since 2006, Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) has now contracted Enterprise informatics to implement its Design Engineering application from the eB Nuclear Application Suite. NFS is a leader in the application of innovative technologies involving nuclear material and a specialty fuel manufacturer specializing in nuclear fuel enrichment. Established in 1957, their primary customer has been the US Navy, and they are now expanding into the commercial market space. NFS' initial eB implementation was for drawing management, controlled documents and records management, as well as for their design work, which they group into the category of Configuration Management. In addition to Design Engineering, eB is now being rolled out as a general content management tool.

Constellation Energy initially selected eB to manage the configuration management of their plants in 2003. Since then eB implementation has been expanded to include Records and Controlled documents, and a robust and industry-leading Corrective Action and Human Performance application being deployed across their Fleet. After further evaluation, eB Nuclear Design Engineering Application has now been selected to control their consolidated Master Equipment List.

The implementation of eB Nuclear Design Engineering will be a two stage effort. The first is to implement the Master Equipment List application, which is a subset of the eB Nuclear Design Engineering solution. The second stage will be the implementation of the balance of the Design Engineering applications.

In Europe, BT Healthcare, through associates 6PM, has selected eB to support the capture of accident and emergency documents at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, a Trust Hospital within the UK's National Health Service. Initially, Kofax Capture will be implemented as the front-end to eB, using barcode recognition to identify documents and group them into Episodes of Treatment for a specific patient. Using the object modeling feature of eB, they will create a person object to represent the patient, so that in the future a much wider set of information can be linked and made available in context with the patient and their complete set of medical records. In addition, eB will be integrated with a system called Cerner, a Patient Administration System that provides a series of clinical applications in use across the hospital.

Detica, a UK-based company specializing in providing solutions to secure information against potential terrorist and organized crime threats, has selected eB for use by their Electronic Systems Group. This division specializes in the design of products used in the defense environment, and will be using eB as a configuration management system to support their internal design and engineering activities. Detica serves a wide range of clients in the global financial services, defense and national security, and corporate market sectors. This important customer win underlines the ability of eB to provide best-in-class configuration management functionality, coupled with its well proven enterprise-strength information management capabilities.

Enterprise Informatics expands Leadership Team

George Castle has joined the Enterprise Informatics Leadership Team as Vice President, Alliances. In this position George will be responsible for developing and executing worldwide partner initiatives that align the company with the industry's most prominent consulting, services and technology firms.

George brings over 20 years of enterprise systems sales and strategic alliances experience to the Enterprise Informatics management team. His proven experience in the areas of strategic selling, alliances, and consulting services will accelerate key growth initiatives. George most recently served as Global Alliance Manager at EMC, an information infrastructure technology and solutions provider. In this role he managed the global business relationship and go to market strategy between EDS and EMC/Documentum. Prior to joining EMC, George held sales and management positions at a number of technology and services organizations - including Epicentric, SDRC and Schlumberger.

eB Highlighted in Nuclear Testimonial Ads

A new ad campaign has been rolled out in Nuclear News, an industry-leading publication widely read within the Nuclear community. These ads feature testimonials from leaders in the industry, Janice Hoerber of AmerenUE/Callaway and Mike Stout, Founder and Former Chairman of CMBG. In case you have not had a chance to see them, here are the first two ads to appear:

eB Nuclear testomonial ad with Mike Stout founder and former Chairman of CMBG eB Nuclear testomonial ad with Janice Hoerber of AmerenUE/Callaway
Nuclear News ad campaign (Click images for larger PDF version)

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Events

September 7-9 - San Diego, CA
DEMOFall 08

Described as ‘The Launchpad for Emerging Technologies,’ DEMO is the premier event that showcases the latest, best technologies. Enterprise Informatics has been invited to launch our newest solution, eB for SharePoint at this prestigious event. Join us and see how we will rearchitect the future.  more More

Sep 29 - Oct 1, 2008 - Stuttgart, Germany
European CMII

Speeding up product changes with best practices in Configuration, Requirements and Change Management.  more More

October 5-8 - Orlando, FL
CMII 2008 World Conference

Hosted by the Institute of Configuration Management (ICM), the 21st Annual CMII Conference includes presentations, workshops and exhibits that focus on aligning CMII methodology with people, processes and technology.  more More

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Upcoming Webinars

October 1, 9:00 am PDT, 1 Hour
Automating Engineering Design Change Process in accordance with INPO® AP-929

Increasing the rigor of the engineering design change process is key to improving the efficiency of Nuclear plant operations and maintenance by -
  • Shortening the time to prepare for an outage
  • Automating the generation of work packages
  • Reducing the number of field change notices
  • Decreasing outage time which improves business performance
Learn how AmerenUE is relying on Enterprise Informatics' Nuclear Design Engineering application to automate the engineering design change process in strict accordance with INPO® AP-929 rev 1. Discover how the AmerenUE Callaway plant has streamlined the engineering change process, improved their outage performance and continue to receive high marks on INPO® reviews.

Enterprise Informatics will demonstrate how the eB Nuclear Design Engineering application provides unprecedented visibility to all affected items, ensures the accuracy of all related information, fully automates the design change process and integrates with other key systems and departments.  Register Now More

October 8, 9:00 am PDT, 1 Hour
What does SharePoint need to become an Enterprise Information Management Platform?

The rapid adoption of Microsoft® SharePoint® is a great advantage to enterprises because it empowers end-users to organize and structure information into a common shared repository - making it easier to search and locate information assets that are important to company operations. But CIOs and information architects are required to ask...
  • What information resides across enterprise SharePoint sites/farms?
  • Whether sensitive, confidential information is secure?
  • If that information is accurate and can be trusted?
  • If the information should be governed by corporate policy and recorded?
eB for SharePoint in concert with Microsoft SharePoint provides a complete Enterprise Information Management (EIM) solution that delivers unparalleled visibility and control of information that resides in SharePoint sites across the enterprise, enabling enterprises to provide proper governance, comply with regulatory mandates, make better informed business decisions and streamline legal discovery.

Enterprise Informatics will demonstrate how eB for SharePoint provides unique information models that identify and classify information, establish relevant information relationships and manage the information and related items through their lifecycle to ensure information integrity - providing information governance without negatively affecting SharePoint's ease-of-use.  Register Now More

Ongoing Webinar Review
City of Las Vegas improves operational efficiency with city-wide records management.

If you missed the live webinar, you still have the opportunity to view this informative free webinar presented by Don Jacobson, Enterprise Project Manager, City of Las Vegas, and Pierre de Wet, Vice President, Operations for Enterprise Informatics.

In this one hour webinar learn how the City of Las Vegas deployed Enterprise Informatics' eB as their city-wide information and records management platform. eB provides a central information repository that enables fast access to accurate business critical information city-wide — Building & Safety, Planning & Development, Code Enforcement, Municipal Courts, Fire Protection, Business Licensing, Traffic Engineering — and more.  more More

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