By Mark Brousseau
An eye-popping 88 percent of attendees at a recent accounts payable (AP) forum sponsored by Ricoh identified manual data entry as their top AP challenge, providing further evidence of the need for automated invoice processing solutions. Manual data entry came in a whopping 25 percentage points higher than the second biggest challenge identified by attendees at the Houston event.
Routing invoices for approval was identified as a top AP challenge for 63 percent of forum attendees, while 54 percent of attendees stated that resolving errors and exceptions was among their top challenges. Lost or missing invoices (42 percent) and overall payment costs (29 percent) rounded out the list of top AP challenges identified by forum attendees.
What is your top AP challenge?
Showing posts with label data capture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label data capture. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Avoid these document imaging mistakes!
By Mark Brousseau
Despite the lousy economy, document imaging solutions continue to enjoy strong adoption among organizations of all sizes. No wonder: the technology is proven to deliver tremendous operations and business benefits, including lower processing costs, streamlined storage and retrieval, and better information tracking and reporting.
But even the strongest business case for document imaging can be undermined by crucial errors during system deployment, says Brett Rodgers (brodgers@ibml.com), manager, Solution Consulting, Americas, at ibml (www.ibml.com), a Birmingham, AL-based document imaging solutions provider.
If you want to keep your document imaging business case on track (and who doesn't?), Rodgers suggests avoiding the following 10 all-too-common foul-ups during system deployment:
1. Incorrect sizing of the necessary number of document scanners.
2. Not including all stakeholders (business and IT) in the requirements definition.
3. Buying technology without first conducting a proof of concept.
4. Making decisions on front-end and back-end software separately.
5. Not coordinating software and hardware vendors during system deployment.
6. Not using a phased implementation approach (biting off too much at once).
7. Letting "fear of change" take over.
8. Not thinking LEAN.
9. Not cutting the paper cord.
10. Not "sharing" -- as in utilizing shared services.
What was your biggest mistake when deploying document imaging?
Despite the lousy economy, document imaging solutions continue to enjoy strong adoption among organizations of all sizes. No wonder: the technology is proven to deliver tremendous operations and business benefits, including lower processing costs, streamlined storage and retrieval, and better information tracking and reporting.
But even the strongest business case for document imaging can be undermined by crucial errors during system deployment, says Brett Rodgers (brodgers@ibml.com), manager, Solution Consulting, Americas, at ibml (www.ibml.com), a Birmingham, AL-based document imaging solutions provider.
If you want to keep your document imaging business case on track (and who doesn't?), Rodgers suggests avoiding the following 10 all-too-common foul-ups during system deployment:
1. Incorrect sizing of the necessary number of document scanners.
2. Not including all stakeholders (business and IT) in the requirements definition.
3. Buying technology without first conducting a proof of concept.
4. Making decisions on front-end and back-end software separately.
5. Not coordinating software and hardware vendors during system deployment.
6. Not using a phased implementation approach (biting off too much at once).
7. Letting "fear of change" take over.
8. Not thinking LEAN.
9. Not cutting the paper cord.
10. Not "sharing" -- as in utilizing shared services.
What was your biggest mistake when deploying document imaging?
Tuesday, May 24, 2011
Fusion attendees meet Kevin Nealon
Posted by Mark Brousseau
Customers and prospects of Brainware -- sponsor of the Fusion 2011 Wednesday night reception -- had an opportunity to meet actor and comedian Kevin Nealon before his performance.
Click below to see photos from the meet and greet.
http://www.iappnet.org/photo/fusion2011_vip/index.html
Customers and prospects of Brainware -- sponsor of the Fusion 2011 Wednesday night reception -- had an opportunity to meet actor and comedian Kevin Nealon before his performance.
Click below to see photos from the meet and greet.
http://www.iappnet.org/photo/fusion2011_vip/index.html
Monday, May 23, 2011
Where’s the automation?
By Mark Brousseau
Despite revenues in the billions of dollars and the document volumes inherent to that scale of operation, many—possibly even most—companies have not made the leap to automated data capture technology for invoice processing, a proven driver of efficiency and value in accounts payable (AP).
That’s the key takeaway of a survey of attendees of Fusion 2011, held May 8-12 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center near Orlando, Florida. The survey polled AP professionals around the globe, working in numerous industries and for organizations ranging from less than $500 million in annual revenues to well in excess of $10 billion in revenues. It was conducted by The Institute of Financial Operations and sponsored by Brainware. Fusion 2011 brought together more than 1,800 financial operations professionals and 170 exhibiting companies.
With an increased focus on working capital management, many AP professionals are emphasizing a need for greater visibility into and reporting of invoice processing—a demonstrated strength of available data capture and extraction technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document recognition (IDR). That’s what makes these survey findings so surprising.
More than half of the survey respondents (56.3 percent) indicated that their AP organization doesn’t use automated data capture technology. And, only 3.1 percent of respondents stated that their AP organization plans to implement automated data capture within the next six months, while 6.3 percent stated their AP organization plans to implement the technology within the next 12 months.
Why aren’t AP departments making greater use of automated data capture and extraction?
Tight capital budgets are undoubtedly a factor. But AP departments also may not see the need.
Despite their lack of data capture technologies, most of the respondents to the survey are doing a pretty good job of holding the line on invoice processing costs. A plurality of respondents (41.9 percent) indicated that their average invoice processing costs have not changed over the past 12 months, while 38.7 percent of respondents stated their invoice processing costs have dropped slightly. Only 12.9 percent of respondents indicated that their average invoice processing costs have increased either slightly (9.7 percent) or significantly (3.2 percent) over the past 12 months.
Similarly, a plurality of respondents (40 percent) indicated that their average cost to process an invoice is between $2 and $5 – in line with the costs published in surveys by industry research firms. Some 16.7 percent of respondents said their average invoice processing costs are less than $2.
But the survey results show that many AP departments could benefit from labor-saving technologies such as automated data capture. More than a quarter of respondents (26.7 percent) pegged their average invoice processing costs between $5 and $10. Worse, 13.4 percent of respondents stated their average invoice processing costs are between $10 and $20, while 3.3 percent of respondents indicated that their average invoice processing costs were between an eye-popping $20 and $25.
“Among other findings, more than a third of respondents claim it still takes them more than twelve days to process an invoice, inhibiting their ability to take early payment discounts, creating backlogs, and often necessitating increased headcount,” notes Charles Kaplan, vice president of sales and marketing at Brainware. Twenty-five percent of respondents stated it takes their organization more than 15 days to pay invoices. “Automated data capture solves those problems and many others.”
To this point, a plurality of respondents (32.3 percent) believe that “better visibility and reporting” is the biggest benefit of the technology, followed by “faster turnaround” (29 percent), “lower costs” (12.9 percent), “better working capital management” (12.9 percent), and “fewer errors” (9.7 percent). Only 3.2 percent of survey respondents stated that they see “no benefit” to automated data capture.
The bottom line is that despite all the hype about automating invoice processing with data capture technology, vendors have a long way to go in convincing AP departments to deploy them.
What do you think?
Despite revenues in the billions of dollars and the document volumes inherent to that scale of operation, many—possibly even most—companies have not made the leap to automated data capture technology for invoice processing, a proven driver of efficiency and value in accounts payable (AP).
That’s the key takeaway of a survey of attendees of Fusion 2011, held May 8-12 at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Center near Orlando, Florida. The survey polled AP professionals around the globe, working in numerous industries and for organizations ranging from less than $500 million in annual revenues to well in excess of $10 billion in revenues. It was conducted by The Institute of Financial Operations and sponsored by Brainware. Fusion 2011 brought together more than 1,800 financial operations professionals and 170 exhibiting companies.
With an increased focus on working capital management, many AP professionals are emphasizing a need for greater visibility into and reporting of invoice processing—a demonstrated strength of available data capture and extraction technologies such as optical character recognition (OCR) and intelligent document recognition (IDR). That’s what makes these survey findings so surprising.
More than half of the survey respondents (56.3 percent) indicated that their AP organization doesn’t use automated data capture technology. And, only 3.1 percent of respondents stated that their AP organization plans to implement automated data capture within the next six months, while 6.3 percent stated their AP organization plans to implement the technology within the next 12 months.
Why aren’t AP departments making greater use of automated data capture and extraction?
Tight capital budgets are undoubtedly a factor. But AP departments also may not see the need.
Despite their lack of data capture technologies, most of the respondents to the survey are doing a pretty good job of holding the line on invoice processing costs. A plurality of respondents (41.9 percent) indicated that their average invoice processing costs have not changed over the past 12 months, while 38.7 percent of respondents stated their invoice processing costs have dropped slightly. Only 12.9 percent of respondents indicated that their average invoice processing costs have increased either slightly (9.7 percent) or significantly (3.2 percent) over the past 12 months.
Similarly, a plurality of respondents (40 percent) indicated that their average cost to process an invoice is between $2 and $5 – in line with the costs published in surveys by industry research firms. Some 16.7 percent of respondents said their average invoice processing costs are less than $2.
But the survey results show that many AP departments could benefit from labor-saving technologies such as automated data capture. More than a quarter of respondents (26.7 percent) pegged their average invoice processing costs between $5 and $10. Worse, 13.4 percent of respondents stated their average invoice processing costs are between $10 and $20, while 3.3 percent of respondents indicated that their average invoice processing costs were between an eye-popping $20 and $25.
“Among other findings, more than a third of respondents claim it still takes them more than twelve days to process an invoice, inhibiting their ability to take early payment discounts, creating backlogs, and often necessitating increased headcount,” notes Charles Kaplan, vice president of sales and marketing at Brainware. Twenty-five percent of respondents stated it takes their organization more than 15 days to pay invoices. “Automated data capture solves those problems and many others.”
To this point, a plurality of respondents (32.3 percent) believe that “better visibility and reporting” is the biggest benefit of the technology, followed by “faster turnaround” (29 percent), “lower costs” (12.9 percent), “better working capital management” (12.9 percent), and “fewer errors” (9.7 percent). Only 3.2 percent of survey respondents stated that they see “no benefit” to automated data capture.
The bottom line is that despite all the hype about automating invoice processing with data capture technology, vendors have a long way to go in convincing AP departments to deploy them.
What do you think?
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
5 Questions For …
Shayne Magee, director, Client Solutions, Diversified Information Technologies
When you talk to prospects, what do they tell you is their biggest document processing challenge, and why?
Our prospects and clients typically have many customers. The relationship they have is one that requires efficient management of inbound and outbound documents and data. The biggest challenge has been finding a partner that has a complete solution. The solutions needs to seamlessly capture, output, processing, and preservation of increasingly compliant centric environments.
What is your company doing to address this challenge?
Diversified is continuing to develop our virtual mailroom and information lifecycle management solutions. Our solutions can be combined and interfaced seamlessly with our clients infrastructure and systems. All of our offerings are specifically designed to deploy quickly and solve this previously unmet industry challenge for a single source solution.
Additionally, We have been adding integrated document facilities across the country to support the requirements of our financial, healthcare, enterprise and government clients. We added five in the last 12 months and continue to invest in quality programs and certification to support our clients needs. Currently, Diversified holds the following certifications: NARA, ISO 9001, SaS 70 Type II, HIPAA, and, most recently, NAID.
What do you believe will be the major storyline in document processing over the next 12 months, and why?
We are in the middle of a swiftly moving trend of SaaS technology, which is allowing organizations to collaborate and communicate in real time streamlined processes that in many cases eliminate previous steps, antiquated systems, and documents. We feel SaaS-deployed applications, and the inclusion of the mobile Internet tsunami, will be the major ECM storyline in the next 12 months.
What’s the most interesting thing in the documents processing space that you’ve read about recently (that wasn’t put out by your own company)?
Some new data points from some AIIM research have been very interesting regarding the change in paper-based policies in a Facebook era. They forecast an evolution from systems of records to systems of engagement and potentially the end of email, wet signatures, and paper based transactions.
What do you think?
When you talk to prospects, what do they tell you is their biggest document processing challenge, and why?
Our prospects and clients typically have many customers. The relationship they have is one that requires efficient management of inbound and outbound documents and data. The biggest challenge has been finding a partner that has a complete solution. The solutions needs to seamlessly capture, output, processing, and preservation of increasingly compliant centric environments.
What is your company doing to address this challenge?
Diversified is continuing to develop our virtual mailroom and information lifecycle management solutions. Our solutions can be combined and interfaced seamlessly with our clients infrastructure and systems. All of our offerings are specifically designed to deploy quickly and solve this previously unmet industry challenge for a single source solution.
Additionally, We have been adding integrated document facilities across the country to support the requirements of our financial, healthcare, enterprise and government clients. We added five in the last 12 months and continue to invest in quality programs and certification to support our clients needs. Currently, Diversified holds the following certifications: NARA, ISO 9001, SaS 70 Type II, HIPAA, and, most recently, NAID.
What do you believe will be the major storyline in document processing over the next 12 months, and why?
We are in the middle of a swiftly moving trend of SaaS technology, which is allowing organizations to collaborate and communicate in real time streamlined processes that in many cases eliminate previous steps, antiquated systems, and documents. We feel SaaS-deployed applications, and the inclusion of the mobile Internet tsunami, will be the major ECM storyline in the next 12 months.
What’s the most interesting thing in the documents processing space that you’ve read about recently (that wasn’t put out by your own company)?
Some new data points from some AIIM research have been very interesting regarding the change in paper-based policies in a Facebook era. They forecast an evolution from systems of records to systems of engagement and potentially the end of email, wet signatures, and paper based transactions.
What do you think?
Monday, March 28, 2011
The intelligent archive — going beyond intelligent capture
By Wendi Klein, director, marketing & communications, North America, for A2iA
Regardless of your industry of focus, you are sure to have heard the word archive. But what does archive really mean? And does it mean the same thing to you as it does to the person in the next office? Is an archive just a repository where documents are stored, never to be found again? Or is an archive something that can actually provide a benefit, or even better, a measurable ROI?
Because of the high demand for timely record retrieval, organizations both large and small need to look to a content management system that will enable them to securely and accurately store their records with as much information as possible so that the documents can be recalled quickly, creating an intelligent archive. This involves utilizing technology that can locate and recognize varying writing styles or mixed document-types and layouts so that once digital, the information can be searched, with keywords or phrases identified for fast retrieval.
Considering that documents are being imaged, how do you then make the documents intelligent —meaning searchable and reportable — and the archive a beneficial tool for the organization? Data capture and routing is critical, although not an easy feat for most recognition technologies and something that requires advanced capabilities — beyond simple rules-based classification or common OCR or ICR.
Great strides have been made in the ability to automatically locate, extract, search, and index data from electronic documents including those of an unstructured format. Technology now allows digitized documents to be analyzed and indexed on a holistic or transaction level in relation to one another, as well as by their geometric layout and content characteristics. The documents can then be searched for pre-defined elements or keywords and, in addition to being archived, the results may be incorporated into pre-existing discovery, redaction, declassification, or document management systems thus providing unparalleled access to the information.
Users maintain privacy and adhere to compliance regulations, as complex and handwritten documents are no longer a bottleneck requiring manual processing. Advanced technologies make a significant difference in the efficiency of the tasks that were previously performed by hand, by allowing the processes to become automated from initial capture through to archive.
Many still believe that unstructured or complex documents can only be keyed and, given the demands of today’s market, any automated solution must be at least as error-free as the manual processes it replaces. However, accuracy is equally as important as successful discovery, due diligence, compliance, and declassification — features found in today’s more advanced recognition and classification engines.
Additionally, those looking to implement such an archiving solution must also examine the definition of and metrics around success. The question should not only be, “What is the read rate?” but also, “How much can be automated, how much time can be saved, how much manual labor can be eliminated, and how robust and comprehensive of a database can be built for search?” The ROI produced for organizations adopting this technology is not only seen in terms of a savings on their bottom line, but also in terms of the time saved through newly realized efficiencies. And once scanned, complex data that was automatically located and extracted can be entered into the IT system and more quickly distributed to those that need it, as well as indexed for archive and retrieval based on complex queries within the newly built database. This increase in accessible and searchable information from a central repository not only speeds knowledge distribution, but it elevates the organization’s global intelligence.
With new regulations and the continued movement towards the paperless office, organizations must consider more than just how to get their documents into electronic format, but what they will do once these documents are scanned. By utilizing the right tools for capturing all data and indexing all documents, an archive can easily make the transition to intelligent archive.
What do you think?
Regardless of your industry of focus, you are sure to have heard the word archive. But what does archive really mean? And does it mean the same thing to you as it does to the person in the next office? Is an archive just a repository where documents are stored, never to be found again? Or is an archive something that can actually provide a benefit, or even better, a measurable ROI?
Because of the high demand for timely record retrieval, organizations both large and small need to look to a content management system that will enable them to securely and accurately store their records with as much information as possible so that the documents can be recalled quickly, creating an intelligent archive. This involves utilizing technology that can locate and recognize varying writing styles or mixed document-types and layouts so that once digital, the information can be searched, with keywords or phrases identified for fast retrieval.
Considering that documents are being imaged, how do you then make the documents intelligent —meaning searchable and reportable — and the archive a beneficial tool for the organization? Data capture and routing is critical, although not an easy feat for most recognition technologies and something that requires advanced capabilities — beyond simple rules-based classification or common OCR or ICR.
Great strides have been made in the ability to automatically locate, extract, search, and index data from electronic documents including those of an unstructured format. Technology now allows digitized documents to be analyzed and indexed on a holistic or transaction level in relation to one another, as well as by their geometric layout and content characteristics. The documents can then be searched for pre-defined elements or keywords and, in addition to being archived, the results may be incorporated into pre-existing discovery, redaction, declassification, or document management systems thus providing unparalleled access to the information.
Users maintain privacy and adhere to compliance regulations, as complex and handwritten documents are no longer a bottleneck requiring manual processing. Advanced technologies make a significant difference in the efficiency of the tasks that were previously performed by hand, by allowing the processes to become automated from initial capture through to archive.
Many still believe that unstructured or complex documents can only be keyed and, given the demands of today’s market, any automated solution must be at least as error-free as the manual processes it replaces. However, accuracy is equally as important as successful discovery, due diligence, compliance, and declassification — features found in today’s more advanced recognition and classification engines.
Additionally, those looking to implement such an archiving solution must also examine the definition of and metrics around success. The question should not only be, “What is the read rate?” but also, “How much can be automated, how much time can be saved, how much manual labor can be eliminated, and how robust and comprehensive of a database can be built for search?” The ROI produced for organizations adopting this technology is not only seen in terms of a savings on their bottom line, but also in terms of the time saved through newly realized efficiencies. And once scanned, complex data that was automatically located and extracted can be entered into the IT system and more quickly distributed to those that need it, as well as indexed for archive and retrieval based on complex queries within the newly built database. This increase in accessible and searchable information from a central repository not only speeds knowledge distribution, but it elevates the organization’s global intelligence.
With new regulations and the continued movement towards the paperless office, organizations must consider more than just how to get their documents into electronic format, but what they will do once these documents are scanned. By utilizing the right tools for capturing all data and indexing all documents, an archive can easily make the transition to intelligent archive.
What do you think?
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Government e-discovery trends
Posted by Mark Brousseau
The chief information officer increasingly is joining the chief council in setting e-Discovery strategy within government organizations. That's according to a survey by USIS, an Altegrity company, conducted among government leaders from the federal e-Discovery community.
Among the other findings of the survey:
• Information management, data collection, and producing discoverable results in a timely manner are major concerns.
• More than one-third of respondents said the preservation and collection stage of electronic data discovery (EDD) needs the most improvement.
• Organizations that place a strong emphasis on the EDD process and strategy tend to have better e-Discovery processes.
• Among respondents whose organizations do not place an emphasis on the EDD process, not a single one reported being satisfied with their e-Discovery process.
“This survey reinforces how important it is to have good information management practices in place for the e-Discovery program and the burden it can place on a team when those practices simply aren’t there,” notes Michael Santelli, president of USIS’ Information Management Division (LABAT). “Being proactive about managing data can also save money. It is not uncommon to hear that the cost of one litigation would have paid for the technology and services to better manage the data.”
What do you think?
The chief information officer increasingly is joining the chief council in setting e-Discovery strategy within government organizations. That's according to a survey by USIS, an Altegrity company, conducted among government leaders from the federal e-Discovery community.
Among the other findings of the survey:
• Information management, data collection, and producing discoverable results in a timely manner are major concerns.
• More than one-third of respondents said the preservation and collection stage of electronic data discovery (EDD) needs the most improvement.
• Organizations that place a strong emphasis on the EDD process and strategy tend to have better e-Discovery processes.
• Among respondents whose organizations do not place an emphasis on the EDD process, not a single one reported being satisfied with their e-Discovery process.
“This survey reinforces how important it is to have good information management practices in place for the e-Discovery program and the burden it can place on a team when those practices simply aren’t there,” notes Michael Santelli, president of USIS’ Information Management Division (LABAT). “Being proactive about managing data can also save money. It is not uncommon to hear that the cost of one litigation would have paid for the technology and services to better manage the data.”
What do you think?
Monday, March 21, 2011
The business value of managed content
Posted by Mark Brousseau
Managed content can deliver 30 percent productivity gains and a 25 percent in efficiency improvements, according to new research co-sponsored by OpenText and AIIM.
One of the more notable findings from the survey of more than 450 information technology professionals and business managers is that the productivity of professional staff would be improved by 30 percent if they could only find internal information and documents as quickly and as easily as they find information on the Web. Along the same lines, respondents said customer service levels and response times could be improved by 33 percent if all customer-facing staff could immediately access and share all of the customer-related and case-related information.
Additional opportunities for improvement included:
• The productivity of administrative staff could be increased on average by 33 percent through use of workflow, scanned forms and automated data capture.
• Changing to a culture of electronic-only filing would reduce the office space allocated to filing storage from 14.5 percent to 5.9 percent – a 60-percent reduction.
• The size of server farms dedicated to unstructured content and emails could be reduced by between a third and a half if each document or email attachment was stored only once.
• A collaborative, widely accessible team-site environment could improve project delivery by 23 percent on average in terms of time and project costs.
• Respondents indicated they believe that Enterprise 2.0 applications could improve staff productivity and engagement by about 18 percent.
• The improved efficiency from providing office staff with comprehensive mobile access to company information would likely be between 20 and 25 percent.
While the survey indicates a compelling case for adopting enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, it also exposes the significant challenges for companies that get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of documents and content accumulating on shared drives, email, laptops and mobile device and paper files.
According to 61 percent of the survey respondents, organizational knowledge is the first thing to suffer in a badly managed environment, causing the organization to lose its competitive position due to poor decisions and a lack of accumulated corporate expertise. Innovation is considered to be another significant victim of poor collaboration and restricted knowledge-sharing, followed by the productivity impact of information search fatigue.
Compliance breaches and information and data leaks also weighed heavily on the minds of the survey respondents. For instance, 40 percent of organizations would take a financial hit from a compliance breach while fully 66 percent would suffer bad – and costly – publicity. Over a third of organizations reported they would have no way of finding out who was responsible if sensitive data was “leaked” to a competitor or to the press by a trusted employee. Only a quarter could readily point to a specific employee based on activity logs. For 60 percent of the largest organizations, the potential impact of such a leak would be high, and for 13 percent it would be “disastrous.”
“As the research confirms, companies that claim, control and capitalize on content increase their people’s contribution, deliver better customer service, and save money – all of which leads to better business,” said James Latham, chief marketing officer, OpenText. “At the same time, succumbing to fast-growing unstructured content inside the enterprise will increase risk, stifle innovation, or worse yet, leak sensitive documents. The case for ECM has never been stronger.”
What do you think?
Managed content can deliver 30 percent productivity gains and a 25 percent in efficiency improvements, according to new research co-sponsored by OpenText and AIIM.
One of the more notable findings from the survey of more than 450 information technology professionals and business managers is that the productivity of professional staff would be improved by 30 percent if they could only find internal information and documents as quickly and as easily as they find information on the Web. Along the same lines, respondents said customer service levels and response times could be improved by 33 percent if all customer-facing staff could immediately access and share all of the customer-related and case-related information.
Additional opportunities for improvement included:
• The productivity of administrative staff could be increased on average by 33 percent through use of workflow, scanned forms and automated data capture.
• Changing to a culture of electronic-only filing would reduce the office space allocated to filing storage from 14.5 percent to 5.9 percent – a 60-percent reduction.
• The size of server farms dedicated to unstructured content and emails could be reduced by between a third and a half if each document or email attachment was stored only once.
• A collaborative, widely accessible team-site environment could improve project delivery by 23 percent on average in terms of time and project costs.
• Respondents indicated they believe that Enterprise 2.0 applications could improve staff productivity and engagement by about 18 percent.
• The improved efficiency from providing office staff with comprehensive mobile access to company information would likely be between 20 and 25 percent.
While the survey indicates a compelling case for adopting enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, it also exposes the significant challenges for companies that get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of documents and content accumulating on shared drives, email, laptops and mobile device and paper files.
According to 61 percent of the survey respondents, organizational knowledge is the first thing to suffer in a badly managed environment, causing the organization to lose its competitive position due to poor decisions and a lack of accumulated corporate expertise. Innovation is considered to be another significant victim of poor collaboration and restricted knowledge-sharing, followed by the productivity impact of information search fatigue.
Compliance breaches and information and data leaks also weighed heavily on the minds of the survey respondents. For instance, 40 percent of organizations would take a financial hit from a compliance breach while fully 66 percent would suffer bad – and costly – publicity. Over a third of organizations reported they would have no way of finding out who was responsible if sensitive data was “leaked” to a competitor or to the press by a trusted employee. Only a quarter could readily point to a specific employee based on activity logs. For 60 percent of the largest organizations, the potential impact of such a leak would be high, and for 13 percent it would be “disastrous.”
“As the research confirms, companies that claim, control and capitalize on content increase their people’s contribution, deliver better customer service, and save money – all of which leads to better business,” said James Latham, chief marketing officer, OpenText. “At the same time, succumbing to fast-growing unstructured content inside the enterprise will increase risk, stifle innovation, or worse yet, leak sensitive documents. The case for ECM has never been stronger.”
What do you think?
Saturday, February 12, 2011
Mobile technology in the spotlight at Capture 2011
Posted by Mark Brousseau
Smartphones are changing the way people shop, bank, communicate and travel. Now, these types of mobile devices are set to have a profound impact on how knowledge workers organize, access, and use business content, Anne Valaitis, associate director of image scanning trends for Infotrends, said during a keynote presentation this week at Capture 2011 in Dallas. In fact, the integration of mobile technology with data capture processes was a hot topic throughout the Capture 2011 conference.
“Mobile devices are changing how we read and work,” she said, noting that respondents to an Infotrends survey said they read 60 percent of their business documents on a screen versus paper. “As a result of mobile devices, we are accessing more content, in different ways,” Valaitis explained.
“Mobile technology is blurring the line between home and office and business and personal,” she said. Sixty percent of respondents to an Infotrends survey said they purchased their own smartphone or mobile handheld device, about half of the apps on these devices are for business, Valaitis noted.
The challenges facing data capture technology vendors and service providers today is to provide mobile tools and services that enable workers to easily plug into the existing IT infrastructure and business processes without increasing additional layers of complexity and cost, Valaitis explained.
Similarly, corporate IT departments must come to the table as an advocate for the mobile worker and help build bridges that will enable productivity, Valaitis said. “To this point, IT has had a hard time supporting these mobile technologies,” Valaitis said. But there is no time to waste. About half of the respondents to an Infotrends survey said they expect the amount of business-related work they conduct on their mobile phones to increase. What’s more, as knowledge workers return to the workforce, it’s likely they will rely on mobile technologies, Valaitis said: “It’s not clear whether they will work in an office, what tools they will need to be productive, or who will support their IT needs.
Workers already are increasingly mobile. Nearly 40 percent of respondents to an Infotrends survey said they were away from their primary work location at least once a month on business, she said.
What’s more, the evolution of technologies such as GoogleDocs will likely drive mobile adoption. “As some point, GoogleDocs will make it easier to create and edit documents in the cloud,” she said.
Valaitis also foresees growing acceptance of consumer technologies such as social media in the workplace. “Facebook is not just a personal media anymore,” she said, pointing to Goldman Sachs abolishing its policy forbidding Facebook use at work. “It is increasingly being used for business.”
What do you think?
Smartphones are changing the way people shop, bank, communicate and travel. Now, these types of mobile devices are set to have a profound impact on how knowledge workers organize, access, and use business content, Anne Valaitis, associate director of image scanning trends for Infotrends, said during a keynote presentation this week at Capture 2011 in Dallas. In fact, the integration of mobile technology with data capture processes was a hot topic throughout the Capture 2011 conference.
“Mobile devices are changing how we read and work,” she said, noting that respondents to an Infotrends survey said they read 60 percent of their business documents on a screen versus paper. “As a result of mobile devices, we are accessing more content, in different ways,” Valaitis explained.
“Mobile technology is blurring the line between home and office and business and personal,” she said. Sixty percent of respondents to an Infotrends survey said they purchased their own smartphone or mobile handheld device, about half of the apps on these devices are for business, Valaitis noted.
The challenges facing data capture technology vendors and service providers today is to provide mobile tools and services that enable workers to easily plug into the existing IT infrastructure and business processes without increasing additional layers of complexity and cost, Valaitis explained.
Similarly, corporate IT departments must come to the table as an advocate for the mobile worker and help build bridges that will enable productivity, Valaitis said. “To this point, IT has had a hard time supporting these mobile technologies,” Valaitis said. But there is no time to waste. About half of the respondents to an Infotrends survey said they expect the amount of business-related work they conduct on their mobile phones to increase. What’s more, as knowledge workers return to the workforce, it’s likely they will rely on mobile technologies, Valaitis said: “It’s not clear whether they will work in an office, what tools they will need to be productive, or who will support their IT needs.
Workers already are increasingly mobile. Nearly 40 percent of respondents to an Infotrends survey said they were away from their primary work location at least once a month on business, she said.
What’s more, the evolution of technologies such as GoogleDocs will likely drive mobile adoption. “As some point, GoogleDocs will make it easier to create and edit documents in the cloud,” she said.
Valaitis also foresees growing acceptance of consumer technologies such as social media in the workplace. “Facebook is not just a personal media anymore,” she said, pointing to Goldman Sachs abolishing its policy forbidding Facebook use at work. “It is increasingly being used for business.”
What do you think?
Saturday, January 22, 2011
A real-world AP automation journey
Posted by Mark Brousseau
It’s not often that an organization can reduce its workforce while significantly growing its volume, but that’s exactly what University Hospitals, one of the nation’s leading healthcare systems, did by rethinking and automating processes in its accounts payable (AP) shared services department.
The healthcare system’s shared services center has supported a 63 percent increase in invoice volume with a 17 percent reduction in full-time equivalents (FTEs), Jeff Lubbe, corporate finance director, University Hospitals, told attendees at Kofax Transform 2011 Americas this week in San Diego.
When University Hospitals set out to revamp its AP operations a few years back, several factors were driving its thinking: external pressure to improve profitability, its desire to reduce back-office costs and reinvest the savings in patient care, and its desire to improve satisfaction with AP processing. What’s more, the AP department’s old technology infrastructure presented several challenges:
• Lost and misplaced invoices
• High costs for non-value added tasks
• Lots of time focused on keying instead of analytics
• Lack of information for workload monitoring
• Lack of accountability to resolve problem invoices
• Difficult verifying non-PO invoice approvals
• Lag time to receive approval on non-PO invoices
• Issues around coding of invoices to invalid accounts
Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that AP was blamed anytime an invoice was paid late.
With the implementation of an Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, University Hospitals felt it finally had a strong base that it could build on for its automation strategy.
The first phase of University Hospitals’ automation strategy was to consolidate its AP operations, consolidate invoices and suppliers, identify technology-ready suppliers with high invoice counts (“We wanted to see where we could use EDI [electronic data interchange] or spreadsheet uploads,” Lubbe said), and takea hard look at internally generated transactions for process improvements.
In the second phase of its AP automation strategy, Lubbe said University Hospitals implemented a document imaging and automated workflow solution, and began utilizing a self-service solution for expenses and non-PO invoicing. University Hospitals selected MarkView software from 170 Systems (now part of Kofax) for its document imaging and automated workflow solution.
“Our strategy was to select an Oracle application – since we are an Oracle shop – and if one didn’t exist, to select an Oracle partner that had a solution that was intuitive, cost effective and scalable,” Lubbe told attendees. “We chose 170 Systems because of MarkView’s integration with Oracle, the company’s proven track record of best-practices implementations, its extensive financial automation experience, and MarkView’s breadth of out-of-the-box functionality. It was a really great fit for us.”
Today, University Hospitals has automated about 75 percent of the invoices that come into its enterprise, Lubbe said. The final phase of the medical system’s original AP automation plan will include deploying an optical character recognition (OCR) solution, and refocusing AP staff on analytical tasks, such as problem and hold resolution, statement reconciliation, and discount capture.
To automate its data capture, University Hospitals began deploying Kofax Capture and Kofax Transformation Management in December, and expects to complete the implementation in March. Lubbe said the medical system selected the Kofax products because of their integration with MarkView and Kofax’s leadership position in the intelligent data capture market.
While data capture is sure to provide additional benefits, Lubbe said he’s already pleased with the progress the medical system has made in automating its AP processes. “We have improved internal control, improved productivity of the AP department and its manager, increased visibility, avoided AP headcount increases, and improved the perception of AP and finance,” Lubbe concluded.
It’s not often that an organization can reduce its workforce while significantly growing its volume, but that’s exactly what University Hospitals, one of the nation’s leading healthcare systems, did by rethinking and automating processes in its accounts payable (AP) shared services department.
The healthcare system’s shared services center has supported a 63 percent increase in invoice volume with a 17 percent reduction in full-time equivalents (FTEs), Jeff Lubbe, corporate finance director, University Hospitals, told attendees at Kofax Transform 2011 Americas this week in San Diego.
When University Hospitals set out to revamp its AP operations a few years back, several factors were driving its thinking: external pressure to improve profitability, its desire to reduce back-office costs and reinvest the savings in patient care, and its desire to improve satisfaction with AP processing. What’s more, the AP department’s old technology infrastructure presented several challenges:
• Lost and misplaced invoices
• High costs for non-value added tasks
• Lots of time focused on keying instead of analytics
• Lack of information for workload monitoring
• Lack of accountability to resolve problem invoices
• Difficult verifying non-PO invoice approvals
• Lag time to receive approval on non-PO invoices
• Issues around coding of invoices to invalid accounts
Against this backdrop, it’s not surprising that AP was blamed anytime an invoice was paid late.
With the implementation of an Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, University Hospitals felt it finally had a strong base that it could build on for its automation strategy.
The first phase of University Hospitals’ automation strategy was to consolidate its AP operations, consolidate invoices and suppliers, identify technology-ready suppliers with high invoice counts (“We wanted to see where we could use EDI [electronic data interchange] or spreadsheet uploads,” Lubbe said), and takea hard look at internally generated transactions for process improvements.
In the second phase of its AP automation strategy, Lubbe said University Hospitals implemented a document imaging and automated workflow solution, and began utilizing a self-service solution for expenses and non-PO invoicing. University Hospitals selected MarkView software from 170 Systems (now part of Kofax) for its document imaging and automated workflow solution.
“Our strategy was to select an Oracle application – since we are an Oracle shop – and if one didn’t exist, to select an Oracle partner that had a solution that was intuitive, cost effective and scalable,” Lubbe told attendees. “We chose 170 Systems because of MarkView’s integration with Oracle, the company’s proven track record of best-practices implementations, its extensive financial automation experience, and MarkView’s breadth of out-of-the-box functionality. It was a really great fit for us.”
Today, University Hospitals has automated about 75 percent of the invoices that come into its enterprise, Lubbe said. The final phase of the medical system’s original AP automation plan will include deploying an optical character recognition (OCR) solution, and refocusing AP staff on analytical tasks, such as problem and hold resolution, statement reconciliation, and discount capture.
To automate its data capture, University Hospitals began deploying Kofax Capture and Kofax Transformation Management in December, and expects to complete the implementation in March. Lubbe said the medical system selected the Kofax products because of their integration with MarkView and Kofax’s leadership position in the intelligent data capture market.
While data capture is sure to provide additional benefits, Lubbe said he’s already pleased with the progress the medical system has made in automating its AP processes. “We have improved internal control, improved productivity of the AP department and its manager, increased visibility, avoided AP headcount increases, and improved the perception of AP and finance,” Lubbe concluded.
Monday, January 17, 2011
Information explosion driving capture growth
Posted by Mark Brousseau
There continues to be an enormous explosion of information, Alan Kerr, executive vice president of field operations, Kofax, said this morning during Kofax Transform 2011 Americas in San Diego. There also are “more and more ways” that information is coming into an organization, Kerr added.
It’s for these reasons that capture solutions are becoming more strategic, Kerr said. “People have to be able to increase service, meet compliance demands, and take costs out of the business,” Kerr said.
Not surprisingly, Kofax thinks the future is bright for capture solutions. “The capture market is about $2 billion a year and is expected to grow at an 11 percent compound annual growth rate through 2013,” Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish told attendees during his opening address.
Why the growth in capture solutions? Bish identified several driving factors:
… “As we improve our products, we continue to growth the market,” he said.
… “There is an increasing realization on the part of our customers that the paper will not go away,” Bish said. “Users have concluded that the only way to make it go away is to scan it.”
… “Paper is a compliance risk,” he noted.
… “There is a desire to convert all of that unstructured content into accessible information,” Bish said.
… “We have seeded the market for enterprise solutions with our tactical installations,” he said.
… “We can deliver proven short-term return on investments, often through the elimination of manual processes,” Bish said.
The growth of capture solutions represents “a lot of potential, as well as some challenges,” for Kofax Transform 2011 Americas attendees, Bish said.
For end-users, the challenge is to unlock the data stuck in their paper-driven business processes. “Improving business processes starts with information,” Kerr noted. “How do you capture this information? How do you transform it to make it useful? And how do you exchange it across the enterprise?”
For their part, capture vendors have to be able to provide departmental solutions, enterprise solutions, big batch back-office solutions, and knowledge solutions, Kerr said. “You have to be able to scale up and across. You must also be able to support global capabilities,” Kerr added.
So what else are end-users looking for from a capture solutions provider? Kerr said there are several key criteria:
… Partners that understand the end-user’s business problems and enterprise
… A financially stable company that is investing in the marketplace
… A strategic business relationship
… Return on investment
Against this backdrop, Bish concluded: “I really believe that the future is really bright here at Kofax and there is a tremendous opportunity for us to engage with end-users and our channel partners.”
What do you think?
There continues to be an enormous explosion of information, Alan Kerr, executive vice president of field operations, Kofax, said this morning during Kofax Transform 2011 Americas in San Diego. There also are “more and more ways” that information is coming into an organization, Kerr added.
It’s for these reasons that capture solutions are becoming more strategic, Kerr said. “People have to be able to increase service, meet compliance demands, and take costs out of the business,” Kerr said.
Not surprisingly, Kofax thinks the future is bright for capture solutions. “The capture market is about $2 billion a year and is expected to grow at an 11 percent compound annual growth rate through 2013,” Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish told attendees during his opening address.
Why the growth in capture solutions? Bish identified several driving factors:
… “As we improve our products, we continue to growth the market,” he said.
… “There is an increasing realization on the part of our customers that the paper will not go away,” Bish said. “Users have concluded that the only way to make it go away is to scan it.”
… “Paper is a compliance risk,” he noted.
… “There is a desire to convert all of that unstructured content into accessible information,” Bish said.
… “We have seeded the market for enterprise solutions with our tactical installations,” he said.
… “We can deliver proven short-term return on investments, often through the elimination of manual processes,” Bish said.
The growth of capture solutions represents “a lot of potential, as well as some challenges,” for Kofax Transform 2011 Americas attendees, Bish said.
For end-users, the challenge is to unlock the data stuck in their paper-driven business processes. “Improving business processes starts with information,” Kerr noted. “How do you capture this information? How do you transform it to make it useful? And how do you exchange it across the enterprise?”
For their part, capture vendors have to be able to provide departmental solutions, enterprise solutions, big batch back-office solutions, and knowledge solutions, Kerr said. “You have to be able to scale up and across. You must also be able to support global capabilities,” Kerr added.
So what else are end-users looking for from a capture solutions provider? Kerr said there are several key criteria:
… Partners that understand the end-user’s business problems and enterprise
… A financially stable company that is investing in the marketplace
… A strategic business relationship
… Return on investment
Against this backdrop, Bish concluded: “I really believe that the future is really bright here at Kofax and there is a tremendous opportunity for us to engage with end-users and our channel partners.”
What do you think?
Kofax kicks off its Transform event with some news
Posted by Mark Brousseau
Kofax Transform 2011 Americas opened with breaking news this morning as Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish announced the sale of the company’s European hardware business to Hannover Finanze, a private equity firm in Germany. The hardware business represented about one-third of Kofax’s total revenues. Bish told attendees that he signed the paperwork for the transaction over the weekend.
“Since all of that hardware business is conducted in EMEA, it won’t affect anything in the Americas,” Bish told the announced crowd of 650 here in San Diego. About a year ago Kofax announced that it was exploring whether to sell its hardware business. The increasingly competitive market for hardware in EMEA, and the company’s desire to focus more closely on its fast-growing software business were key factors in that decision. The transaction is expected to close in March.
Kofax also announced plans today to restructure its EMEA software business. “This will not affect how we engage with channel partners or end-users,” Bish explained. “It will be business as usual.”
Bish summed up the announcements by stating: “As a result of these moves, there’s a whole lot to be excited about at Kofax in addition to everything else that we’ve accomplished in the past year.”
Among the company’s achievements in the past year cited by Bish:
… Kofax added more than 1,900 new customers
… The company closed many more enterprise sales, including 17 deals worth more than $500,000 -- up from 10 the prior year – and nine deals worth more than $1 million – up from five in the prior year
… Kofax closed the two largest sales in the company’s history, including one worth $5.9 million to a leading global freight company and another worth $4.4 million to a major financial services firm
… The company launched eight new software products
… Kofax finished upgrading its executive management team
… The company’s overall market share increased from 10 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2009, according to data from Harvey Spencer Associates
… Kofax maintained its leadership position in image capture with a 25 percent share, according to data from Harvey Spencer Associates
What do you think?
Kofax Transform 2011 Americas opened with breaking news this morning as Kofax CEO Reynolds Bish announced the sale of the company’s European hardware business to Hannover Finanze, a private equity firm in Germany. The hardware business represented about one-third of Kofax’s total revenues. Bish told attendees that he signed the paperwork for the transaction over the weekend.
“Since all of that hardware business is conducted in EMEA, it won’t affect anything in the Americas,” Bish told the announced crowd of 650 here in San Diego. About a year ago Kofax announced that it was exploring whether to sell its hardware business. The increasingly competitive market for hardware in EMEA, and the company’s desire to focus more closely on its fast-growing software business were key factors in that decision. The transaction is expected to close in March.
Kofax also announced plans today to restructure its EMEA software business. “This will not affect how we engage with channel partners or end-users,” Bish explained. “It will be business as usual.”
Bish summed up the announcements by stating: “As a result of these moves, there’s a whole lot to be excited about at Kofax in addition to everything else that we’ve accomplished in the past year.”
Among the company’s achievements in the past year cited by Bish:
… Kofax added more than 1,900 new customers
… The company closed many more enterprise sales, including 17 deals worth more than $500,000 -- up from 10 the prior year – and nine deals worth more than $1 million – up from five in the prior year
… Kofax closed the two largest sales in the company’s history, including one worth $5.9 million to a leading global freight company and another worth $4.4 million to a major financial services firm
… The company launched eight new software products
… Kofax finished upgrading its executive management team
… The company’s overall market share increased from 10 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2009, according to data from Harvey Spencer Associates
… Kofax maintained its leadership position in image capture with a 25 percent share, according to data from Harvey Spencer Associates
What do you think?
Monday, November 8, 2010
The Challenges in Records Management
Posted by Mark Brousseau
The convergence of physical and digital records management – and tying them together to create an “umbrella” information governance model – is the top concern of records managers, Jim Cuff, vice president of strategy, Iron Mountain Digital, said today during a panel discussion at the ARMA Annual Conference. “Complicating matters is the growing volume of digital data and the issues of eDiscovery.”
Cuff said that the most significant stumbling block in creating an information governance model is that organizations have content – which Cuff affectionately calls “stuff” -- everywhere. “Records managers must figure out where all of this stuff is, and how to bring it all together in a sane approach,” Cuff said.
“Records managers are most successful are those instances where they involve other groups, whether they are IT, legal, compliance or even business folks,” said panelist Victor Owour, senior director, Oracle.
Historically, there hasn’t been a lot of collaboration in records management technology, Cuff noted.
But these stakeholders must determine the components that records managers should focus on. “What we found is that a number of our customers have been successful by planning the obit for their records management program early on in the process. They think through the entire problem and what they hope to achieve,” Owour said. “You want to tie records management into your business processes so it fits seamlessly into what the organization does; this way, it’s no longer a task, it is a convenience.”
Regardless, organizations need a retention hold policy, said Perceptive CTO Darren Knipp.
What do you think?
The convergence of physical and digital records management – and tying them together to create an “umbrella” information governance model – is the top concern of records managers, Jim Cuff, vice president of strategy, Iron Mountain Digital, said today during a panel discussion at the ARMA Annual Conference. “Complicating matters is the growing volume of digital data and the issues of eDiscovery.”
Cuff said that the most significant stumbling block in creating an information governance model is that organizations have content – which Cuff affectionately calls “stuff” -- everywhere. “Records managers must figure out where all of this stuff is, and how to bring it all together in a sane approach,” Cuff said.
“Records managers are most successful are those instances where they involve other groups, whether they are IT, legal, compliance or even business folks,” said panelist Victor Owour, senior director, Oracle.
Historically, there hasn’t been a lot of collaboration in records management technology, Cuff noted.
But these stakeholders must determine the components that records managers should focus on. “What we found is that a number of our customers have been successful by planning the obit for their records management program early on in the process. They think through the entire problem and what they hope to achieve,” Owour said. “You want to tie records management into your business processes so it fits seamlessly into what the organization does; this way, it’s no longer a task, it is a convenience.”
Regardless, organizations need a retention hold policy, said Perceptive CTO Darren Knipp.
What do you think?
Thursday, October 7, 2010
26 Tips to Remember When Classifying Documents
By Jim Thumma
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Optical Image Technology
Before the inception of electronic document management (EDM), most of us organized documents alphabetically by subject. As EDM continues to redefine how we file and store important information—classifying documents by their type and use or by vital content that can be searched—alpha listings are slowly become obsolete. Yet humans often learn best by association. Thus, this alpha listing seems a viable way to provide useful tips for transitioning from a paper-based filing system to electronically indexed documents. The path is fairly straightforward, but unseen obstacles can play havoc with your intent.
With this cursory nod to the past and both eyes fixed on your future, we’re sharing our experience helping customers in the form of 26 ‘directives’. A bit presumptuous, perhaps? Maybe. After all, we can’t make you take these steps, but if you do, you’ll be off to a good start. If you don’t, well… that’s for another article. Take heed!
Analyze your document types. Who will use each? Which content is important to each type of end user in your department? Which content is valuable to users in other areas of the business?
Be a good listener. If you want your business to run smoothly, vital content must be available to the right people when they need it. To build a strong indexing plan, listen first and make decisions later.
Classify your information with process automation in mind. Which routine processes depend on each document type? What content must be available, and at what point in each process is it needed?
Don’t under- or over-index. Indexing too little information makes future search challenging or futile. Classifying extraneous information that no one cares about makes searches slow and cumbersome.
Educate your end users. Show them how EDM will help them to succeed in their jobs. Fear breeds doubt; insecurity promotes lackluster projects. Address users’ fears. Provide sufficient training.
Find an indexing structure that meets your needs. Should searches return direct hits or just narrow your search results? Consider your resources. Simplified indexing schemes help if resources are stretched.
Give workers adequate time for training. Although a configurable and user-friendly solution should demand minimal schooling, everyone’s needs are different. Hire temporary help to get other jobs done.
Hire outside know-how where you need it. Some vendors and consultants conduct document inventories, create indexing schemes, and more. Know your limitations. Plan accordingly.
Identify which documents are non-essential. If a doc type isn’t needed for business, legal, historical, or reference purposes, it’s probably not worth keeping. Streamline the clutter before you start indexing.
Join in the conversation. Employees need to see their managers stand behind and support document management projects they are expected to embrace. Don’t be invisible. Show enthusiasm.
Keep pace with project timelines. Everyday fires of business can draw workers away from a project. As business needs continue to advance and change, your project may risk becoming irrelevant.
Leverage all available resources to support discoverability. Capture and index pertinent emails, faxes, images, and documents into EDM. Indexing documents into one central repository eases search.
Minimize manual data entry. Wherever you can, standardize and automate indexing using data captured in document scans, bar codes, and online forms. This reduces the likelihood of human errors.
Note who needs access to which information and decide how they will be able to use it. Consider who should be allowed to list, amend, annotate, save, or delete documents. Configure security accordingly.
Organize documents by type. Use batch scanning to save time. Before indexing, consider whether each type should be scanned as-is, or whether pages should be combined or split into multiple documents.
Populate from existing sources and third-party apps such as customer/vendor databases and accounting systems. Re-use data during indexing to reduce duplication and conflicting or erroneous information.
Question your document types as well as your mode of filing them. Work with employees to determine more effective ways to file, search, and retrieve. Don’t assume the status quo still makes sense.
Remember that reports require specific content. Legislative requirements, audits, and quality control reports may require data you otherwise wouldn’t consider indexing. Revise your plans accordingly.
Standardize data collection by providing drop-down boxes, tips for data entry (i.e., the correct format for a date or number sequence), etc., to encourage accurate input. Your end users will appreciate it.
Test-drive your file plan parallel to existing systems before going fully digital. Ensure diverse users can find documents and information they need to work efficiently. Adjust your indexing scheme if needed.
Unearth inconsistencies between departments regarding data collection practices. Are middle names or initials used? Are PIN numbers a separate field or concatenated with last names? Standardize. Now.
Verify questionable scans and imported files immediately. Quality systems should identify problematic files; a smart indexing plan is worthless if it returns useless images. Re-scan/re-import, then index.
Weave an imaginary line through your business, showing where each doc type is used for decisions or processing. Understand how content is used. Then re-examine your plan to ensure successful search.
X-ray your documents: study them closely. Now is the time to streamline. Can document types be combined or eliminated to streamline data collection and reduce duplicate or conflicting information?
Yammer no more. With the advanced technology that’s available, there is no reason to lose a document…ever. Test, test, test. If you don’t get expected search results, go back to the drawing board.
Zero in on effective change management from day one. Communicate goals and plans. Collaborate. Ensure all ideas are heard. Train employees well. Mark milestones when they are met. Celebrate!
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Optical Image Technology
Before the inception of electronic document management (EDM), most of us organized documents alphabetically by subject. As EDM continues to redefine how we file and store important information—classifying documents by their type and use or by vital content that can be searched—alpha listings are slowly become obsolete. Yet humans often learn best by association. Thus, this alpha listing seems a viable way to provide useful tips for transitioning from a paper-based filing system to electronically indexed documents. The path is fairly straightforward, but unseen obstacles can play havoc with your intent.
With this cursory nod to the past and both eyes fixed on your future, we’re sharing our experience helping customers in the form of 26 ‘directives’. A bit presumptuous, perhaps? Maybe. After all, we can’t make you take these steps, but if you do, you’ll be off to a good start. If you don’t, well… that’s for another article. Take heed!
Analyze your document types. Who will use each? Which content is important to each type of end user in your department? Which content is valuable to users in other areas of the business?
Be a good listener. If you want your business to run smoothly, vital content must be available to the right people when they need it. To build a strong indexing plan, listen first and make decisions later.
Classify your information with process automation in mind. Which routine processes depend on each document type? What content must be available, and at what point in each process is it needed?
Don’t under- or over-index. Indexing too little information makes future search challenging or futile. Classifying extraneous information that no one cares about makes searches slow and cumbersome.
Educate your end users. Show them how EDM will help them to succeed in their jobs. Fear breeds doubt; insecurity promotes lackluster projects. Address users’ fears. Provide sufficient training.
Find an indexing structure that meets your needs. Should searches return direct hits or just narrow your search results? Consider your resources. Simplified indexing schemes help if resources are stretched.
Give workers adequate time for training. Although a configurable and user-friendly solution should demand minimal schooling, everyone’s needs are different. Hire temporary help to get other jobs done.
Hire outside know-how where you need it. Some vendors and consultants conduct document inventories, create indexing schemes, and more. Know your limitations. Plan accordingly.
Identify which documents are non-essential. If a doc type isn’t needed for business, legal, historical, or reference purposes, it’s probably not worth keeping. Streamline the clutter before you start indexing.
Join in the conversation. Employees need to see their managers stand behind and support document management projects they are expected to embrace. Don’t be invisible. Show enthusiasm.
Keep pace with project timelines. Everyday fires of business can draw workers away from a project. As business needs continue to advance and change, your project may risk becoming irrelevant.
Leverage all available resources to support discoverability. Capture and index pertinent emails, faxes, images, and documents into EDM. Indexing documents into one central repository eases search.
Minimize manual data entry. Wherever you can, standardize and automate indexing using data captured in document scans, bar codes, and online forms. This reduces the likelihood of human errors.
Note who needs access to which information and decide how they will be able to use it. Consider who should be allowed to list, amend, annotate, save, or delete documents. Configure security accordingly.
Organize documents by type. Use batch scanning to save time. Before indexing, consider whether each type should be scanned as-is, or whether pages should be combined or split into multiple documents.
Populate from existing sources and third-party apps such as customer/vendor databases and accounting systems. Re-use data during indexing to reduce duplication and conflicting or erroneous information.
Question your document types as well as your mode of filing them. Work with employees to determine more effective ways to file, search, and retrieve. Don’t assume the status quo still makes sense.
Remember that reports require specific content. Legislative requirements, audits, and quality control reports may require data you otherwise wouldn’t consider indexing. Revise your plans accordingly.
Standardize data collection by providing drop-down boxes, tips for data entry (i.e., the correct format for a date or number sequence), etc., to encourage accurate input. Your end users will appreciate it.
Test-drive your file plan parallel to existing systems before going fully digital. Ensure diverse users can find documents and information they need to work efficiently. Adjust your indexing scheme if needed.
Unearth inconsistencies between departments regarding data collection practices. Are middle names or initials used? Are PIN numbers a separate field or concatenated with last names? Standardize. Now.
Verify questionable scans and imported files immediately. Quality systems should identify problematic files; a smart indexing plan is worthless if it returns useless images. Re-scan/re-import, then index.
Weave an imaginary line through your business, showing where each doc type is used for decisions or processing. Understand how content is used. Then re-examine your plan to ensure successful search.
X-ray your documents: study them closely. Now is the time to streamline. Can document types be combined or eliminated to streamline data collection and reduce duplicate or conflicting information?
Yammer no more. With the advanced technology that’s available, there is no reason to lose a document…ever. Test, test, test. If you don’t get expected search results, go back to the drawing board.
Zero in on effective change management from day one. Communicate goals and plans. Collaborate. Ensure all ideas are heard. Train employees well. Mark milestones when they are met. Celebrate!
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
eForms Checklist: Find the Right Fit for Your Business
By Laurel Sanders, Director of Public Relations and Communications, Optical Image Technology (lsanders@docfinity.com)
“Work faster.”
“Get everything right the first time.”
“Outperform our competitors with better service.”
In challenging economic times, these goals are imperative. Yet achieving all three simultaneously can be challenging.
According to AIIM’s State of the ECM Industry 2010 report, 41% of businesses aren’t confident their digital information (except emails) is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy — a severe obstacle to efficiency. Forms are a small part of the web of business information. Yet when content is captured accurately and managed properly, eForms address the challenges of accuracy, accessibility, and trustworthiness while transforming service, increasing profitability, and encouraging sustainability. How? By:
... Capturing data quickly, consistently, and cost-effectively.
... Offering self service.
... Making the information captured on forms useful instantly, enterprise-wide.
... Establishing a framework for information governance.
However, just implementing eForms software doesn’t guarantee results. You must understand your business objectives and ensure the solution you choose will meet those needs.
This checklist will help you to develop a customized requirements list to ensure your eforms solution meets your unique needs.
Form Design
Useful forms begin with good design, so the design function must be user friendly, flexible, and adaptable. Examine your broader organizational needs so your selected product meets requirements as your installation expands.
Will your solution let you:
___ Design custom forms, or will you be restricted to templates?
___ Add unlimited components to the design canvas, with form length expanding according to your needs?
___ Align, match, select, delete, or erase form components during the design process?
___ Decide the order in which form-related actions will be completed?
___ Save unfinished form designs so you can complete them later?
Also, are online user guides and tool tips available to guide you through every step of the process?
Applying Form Controls
Form controls help designers to ensure standardized documents are completed correctly. Ideally, they enforce behind-the-scenes rules, dictating how each form should be completed and used.
Can you apply:
___ Form controls wherever you want them, to regulate how forms are completed?
___ Data entry controls for each field you create, so you can ensure quality data input?
___ Validations that compare data entered on forms with pre-specified criteria for each field?
___ Data sources to the eForm, so data captured in pre-specified fields can be extracted from (or pushed to) other databases and applications, recycling information meaningfully and eliminating errors?
Data Management
Data — the specific fields of information that you collect, such as name, contact information, dates, terms, and more — drives processes forward, enabling smart and timely decision making.
Can you:
___ Apply validations that compare entered data on a form against specified criteria and alert users when entered data is invalid?
___ Extract pre-specified form data as variables within a business process, allowing specific content to be available without making entire forms visible to users? (This is essential if sensitive information is stored on the form, and some of the data needs to be processed by employees who shouldn’t see every detail.)
___ Configure your ECM system to store form data in a third-party database or other external location after a form has been completed or submitted?
Form Administration and Security
Regulations and internal policies demand controlled access to sensitive information. eForms that are part of an integrated electronic document management (EDM) solution let you secure sensitive information while making sure those who need it have appropriate access.
Will your solution let you:
___ Assign forms to specific groups, controlling who can access, view, delete, annotate, or sign them?
___ Hide specific text on forms so only specified user groups can view it?
___ Configure actions that should occur whenever a specific type of form is submitted (send an email, launch a business process, send data from a form to another source, convert a form to PDF), based on the needs for that form?
___ Configure validation criteria and specific datasources for each form type?
___ Apply hot keys to certain actions as desired, to make work more efficient?
Form Use
End user needs vary greatly, and an eForms product should be adaptable enough to meet diverse requirements.
Will your forms product:
___ Convert forms to PDF when desired?
___ Provide helpful online user guides and tool tips to guide you through form completion and submission?
___ Apply drag-and-drop design components to assist end users in completing forms?
___ Index completed forms as PDFs, forms, or both, as desired?
___ Add a form (or its PDF) into a package of documents and send the complete package into a business process?
___ Search for completed forms?
___ Resize your windows and workspaces so you can work efficiently?
Launch a Business Process
Ultimately, you will most likely want eForms to launch routine business processes and exponentially increase efficiency. Will your solution:
___ Automatically launch a pre-specified business process when a form is submitted?
___ Amend/manage form data within a business process?
___ Make specific forms viewable at the correct time within a business process?
___ Use a submission to trigger an email message, accompanied by a link to the form?
___ Create drop-down menus to guide data entry and ensure relevant, accurate data is collected?
End the content chaos
If you are already implementing EDM, eForms will help you to gain control over your content at the point of capture, where benefits are greatest. If you’re evaluating EDM for the first time, consider eForms and business process automation as part of your strategy from the beginning so you can extract the full value of digital information. Understand short- and longer term needs so the technology you select supports your goals. Make sure your vendor is as committed to your success as you are, since a strong partnership dramatically improves business outcomes.
Fast, accurate, and customer-friendly service is the aim of any business. eForms, EDM, and good planning can help you to achieve all three. Now…get started!
“Work faster.”
“Get everything right the first time.”
“Outperform our competitors with better service.”
In challenging economic times, these goals are imperative. Yet achieving all three simultaneously can be challenging.
According to AIIM’s State of the ECM Industry 2010 report, 41% of businesses aren’t confident their digital information (except emails) is accurate, accessible, and trustworthy — a severe obstacle to efficiency. Forms are a small part of the web of business information. Yet when content is captured accurately and managed properly, eForms address the challenges of accuracy, accessibility, and trustworthiness while transforming service, increasing profitability, and encouraging sustainability. How? By:
... Capturing data quickly, consistently, and cost-effectively.
... Offering self service.
... Making the information captured on forms useful instantly, enterprise-wide.
... Establishing a framework for information governance.
However, just implementing eForms software doesn’t guarantee results. You must understand your business objectives and ensure the solution you choose will meet those needs.
This checklist will help you to develop a customized requirements list to ensure your eforms solution meets your unique needs.
Form Design
Useful forms begin with good design, so the design function must be user friendly, flexible, and adaptable. Examine your broader organizational needs so your selected product meets requirements as your installation expands.
Will your solution let you:
___ Design custom forms, or will you be restricted to templates?
___ Add unlimited components to the design canvas, with form length expanding according to your needs?
___ Align, match, select, delete, or erase form components during the design process?
___ Decide the order in which form-related actions will be completed?
___ Save unfinished form designs so you can complete them later?
Also, are online user guides and tool tips available to guide you through every step of the process?
Applying Form Controls
Form controls help designers to ensure standardized documents are completed correctly. Ideally, they enforce behind-the-scenes rules, dictating how each form should be completed and used.
Can you apply:
___ Form controls wherever you want them, to regulate how forms are completed?
___ Data entry controls for each field you create, so you can ensure quality data input?
___ Validations that compare data entered on forms with pre-specified criteria for each field?
___ Data sources to the eForm, so data captured in pre-specified fields can be extracted from (or pushed to) other databases and applications, recycling information meaningfully and eliminating errors?
Data Management
Data — the specific fields of information that you collect, such as name, contact information, dates, terms, and more — drives processes forward, enabling smart and timely decision making.
Can you:
___ Apply validations that compare entered data on a form against specified criteria and alert users when entered data is invalid?
___ Extract pre-specified form data as variables within a business process, allowing specific content to be available without making entire forms visible to users? (This is essential if sensitive information is stored on the form, and some of the data needs to be processed by employees who shouldn’t see every detail.)
___ Configure your ECM system to store form data in a third-party database or other external location after a form has been completed or submitted?
Form Administration and Security
Regulations and internal policies demand controlled access to sensitive information. eForms that are part of an integrated electronic document management (EDM) solution let you secure sensitive information while making sure those who need it have appropriate access.
Will your solution let you:
___ Assign forms to specific groups, controlling who can access, view, delete, annotate, or sign them?
___ Hide specific text on forms so only specified user groups can view it?
___ Configure actions that should occur whenever a specific type of form is submitted (send an email, launch a business process, send data from a form to another source, convert a form to PDF), based on the needs for that form?
___ Configure validation criteria and specific datasources for each form type?
___ Apply hot keys to certain actions as desired, to make work more efficient?
Form Use
End user needs vary greatly, and an eForms product should be adaptable enough to meet diverse requirements.
Will your forms product:
___ Convert forms to PDF when desired?
___ Provide helpful online user guides and tool tips to guide you through form completion and submission?
___ Apply drag-and-drop design components to assist end users in completing forms?
___ Index completed forms as PDFs, forms, or both, as desired?
___ Add a form (or its PDF) into a package of documents and send the complete package into a business process?
___ Search for completed forms?
___ Resize your windows and workspaces so you can work efficiently?
Launch a Business Process
Ultimately, you will most likely want eForms to launch routine business processes and exponentially increase efficiency. Will your solution:
___ Automatically launch a pre-specified business process when a form is submitted?
___ Amend/manage form data within a business process?
___ Make specific forms viewable at the correct time within a business process?
___ Use a submission to trigger an email message, accompanied by a link to the form?
___ Create drop-down menus to guide data entry and ensure relevant, accurate data is collected?
End the content chaos
If you are already implementing EDM, eForms will help you to gain control over your content at the point of capture, where benefits are greatest. If you’re evaluating EDM for the first time, consider eForms and business process automation as part of your strategy from the beginning so you can extract the full value of digital information. Understand short- and longer term needs so the technology you select supports your goals. Make sure your vendor is as committed to your success as you are, since a strong partnership dramatically improves business outcomes.
Fast, accurate, and customer-friendly service is the aim of any business. eForms, EDM, and good planning can help you to achieve all three. Now…get started!
Make More of Your Data-rich Systems to Meet Dodd-Frank Requirements
By Laurel Sanders, Optical Image Technology (lsanders@docfinity.com)
Remember Aesop’s fable, The Miser and His Gold? A miser buries his cache of gold coins under a tree, periodically unearthing them and marveling at his lustrous collection before hiding them again. One day, an onlooker notices. Shortly afterward, the fortune disappears. The miser’s opportunity to use his treasure is gone. The moral: “Wealth unused might as well not exist.”
The lesson applies to the valuable information systems you own, too. If they aren’t integrated to enable efficient sharing of your content everywhere it has value, their potential is wasted. Idle information might as well not exist.
Dodd-Frank: implications for the enterprise
If you’ve followed the latest financial publications, you’re aware of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Like other current legislation, the new laws are designed to:
· Reduce fragmentation and complexity in data management;
· Demand data consistency enterprise-wide; and
· Increase organizational transparency.
Similar to recent healthcare regulations, Dodd-Frank has significant implications for data management across the enterprise. The good news: if you already have quality information systems, you may be able to meet numerous challenges without starting over—by giving your systems a common foundation.
Building on what you have
When your institution chose its core financial systems, line-of-business applications, email application and other software, significant deliberation probably preceded each purchase. Unless your systems are ancient (or worthless), we’ll assume good quality capture of data, and solutions that achieve what they were designed to do.
Challenges in meeting recent regulatory requirements arise from demands that exceed what your systems were designed to accomplish. Many solutions were intended to address departmental needs without a vision to enterprise-wide communication. Now, legislation is demanding an enterprise approach that:
· Unifies data classification practices;
· Certifies information accuracy and consistency;
· Standardizes reporting; and
· Creates uniform data governance frameworks.
Enterprise content management (ECM) software, when integrated with business systems, provides centralized, uniform access to diverse digital information -- no matter how it’s captured or where it resides. Think of it like a credit card. If you’ve traveled internationally, you know it’s challenging to manage purchases amid constantly changing currency. A credit card alleviates the aggravation, allowing diverse systems to communicate seamlessly. Instead of converting currencies, just swipe your card. The exchange is automatic; the transfer is understood. You get what you need, within moments, wherever you are.
The role of browser-based ECM
If your workers value their separate information systems – which they probably do – ECM doesn’t demand change. Instead, it enables secure 24/7 access to a centralized repository that connects authorized persons with all of the systems and information they’re allowed to see, and to use the latter according to their permissions. ECM lets you dictate things like:
· Who can list or view specific document types;
· Who can edit, annotate, sign, or email them; and
· Who may purge or delete files.
Information becomes standardized, accessible via a single repository and a consistent interface. The system knows where all of your content resides, and which information belongs together, just as your credit card recognizes purchases you make and the countries, currencies, and US equivalencies each represents.
1.Unifies data classification practices
Uniform classification requires a strategic file plan alongside carefully conceived taxonomies that meet diverse needs. ECM provides the tools to execute that plan faithfully. Scans, bar codes, and online forms consistently follow your prescribed indexing rules, easing search.
Together, your indexing plan and ECM ensure:
· Metadata criteria are complete upon document capture (file type, lifespan, format, source, etc.);
· Data captured meets criteria for length, format, type, etc. (i.e., ID numbers requiring a pre-set sequence of digits/dashes);
· Data pertinent to search is complete and compliant, ensuring success;
· Document types are segmented to ensure searches return relevant information.
2.Encourages information accuracy and consistency
When ECM includes process automation, meaningful data is captured and re-used intelligently. Business process management (BPM) software throws your documents and information against your rules, ensuring speed and uniformity in routine decision making and exception handling.
Together, they let you:
· Associate, package, and flow related files for action;
· Pre-fill forms and documents with stored information, eliminating keying errors;
· Extract and push data from one source to another at specific points in recurrent processes.
3.Enables standardized reporting
Just as your credit card bill summarizes your purchases--regardless of where and how they were made--ECM extracts data from multiple systems with which it is integrated so you can create holistic, complete reports. Instead of separate audits detailing customer transactions from various applications, everything is centralized, providing better insight. Automatic conversion to PDF and other formats ensures universal access while guarding against tampering.
4.Creates uniform data governance frameworks
Good governance--a central thrust of Dodd-Frank legislation--requires an IT infrastructure that supports fairness and uniformity in decision-making and implementation. For informed decision-making, data used to reach decisions must be accurate, timely, and appropriately accessible at the exact moment individuals need it. Information no longer required to be kept (and could put you at risk) can be migrated, purged, deleted, or destroyed according to the law.
Wide-ranging document types, diverse users, ever-changing retention laws, and the challenges of overseeing them make quality governance one of the greatest enterprise challenges. ECM levels the playing field, ensuring organizational practices are upheld. Rather than subjecting your documents, information and policies to the preferences and personalities of departmental managers, they are subject to your rules. No favoritism. No oversights. No mistakes…and a thorough, digital audit trail of transactional activity verifies compliance.
Use what you have—better
Managing your content effectively is like managing your credit card: it requires forethought, planning, and procedural adherence. Don’t be miserly with your data; ECM ensures you use it while it’s timely and relevant.
ECM can’t do your planning, but it ensures policies and rules are honored faithfully without exception, enterprise-wide. I can’t speak for you, but when someone invents a credit card that knows every resource at my disposal and flawlessly honors my intent, I want one!
Remember Aesop’s fable, The Miser and His Gold? A miser buries his cache of gold coins under a tree, periodically unearthing them and marveling at his lustrous collection before hiding them again. One day, an onlooker notices. Shortly afterward, the fortune disappears. The miser’s opportunity to use his treasure is gone. The moral: “Wealth unused might as well not exist.”
The lesson applies to the valuable information systems you own, too. If they aren’t integrated to enable efficient sharing of your content everywhere it has value, their potential is wasted. Idle information might as well not exist.
Dodd-Frank: implications for the enterprise
If you’ve followed the latest financial publications, you’re aware of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. Like other current legislation, the new laws are designed to:
· Reduce fragmentation and complexity in data management;
· Demand data consistency enterprise-wide; and
· Increase organizational transparency.
Similar to recent healthcare regulations, Dodd-Frank has significant implications for data management across the enterprise. The good news: if you already have quality information systems, you may be able to meet numerous challenges without starting over—by giving your systems a common foundation.
Building on what you have
When your institution chose its core financial systems, line-of-business applications, email application and other software, significant deliberation probably preceded each purchase. Unless your systems are ancient (or worthless), we’ll assume good quality capture of data, and solutions that achieve what they were designed to do.
Challenges in meeting recent regulatory requirements arise from demands that exceed what your systems were designed to accomplish. Many solutions were intended to address departmental needs without a vision to enterprise-wide communication. Now, legislation is demanding an enterprise approach that:
· Unifies data classification practices;
· Certifies information accuracy and consistency;
· Standardizes reporting; and
· Creates uniform data governance frameworks.
Enterprise content management (ECM) software, when integrated with business systems, provides centralized, uniform access to diverse digital information -- no matter how it’s captured or where it resides. Think of it like a credit card. If you’ve traveled internationally, you know it’s challenging to manage purchases amid constantly changing currency. A credit card alleviates the aggravation, allowing diverse systems to communicate seamlessly. Instead of converting currencies, just swipe your card. The exchange is automatic; the transfer is understood. You get what you need, within moments, wherever you are.
The role of browser-based ECM
If your workers value their separate information systems – which they probably do – ECM doesn’t demand change. Instead, it enables secure 24/7 access to a centralized repository that connects authorized persons with all of the systems and information they’re allowed to see, and to use the latter according to their permissions. ECM lets you dictate things like:
· Who can list or view specific document types;
· Who can edit, annotate, sign, or email them; and
· Who may purge or delete files.
Information becomes standardized, accessible via a single repository and a consistent interface. The system knows where all of your content resides, and which information belongs together, just as your credit card recognizes purchases you make and the countries, currencies, and US equivalencies each represents.
1.Unifies data classification practices
Uniform classification requires a strategic file plan alongside carefully conceived taxonomies that meet diverse needs. ECM provides the tools to execute that plan faithfully. Scans, bar codes, and online forms consistently follow your prescribed indexing rules, easing search.
Together, your indexing plan and ECM ensure:
· Metadata criteria are complete upon document capture (file type, lifespan, format, source, etc.);
· Data captured meets criteria for length, format, type, etc. (i.e., ID numbers requiring a pre-set sequence of digits/dashes);
· Data pertinent to search is complete and compliant, ensuring success;
· Document types are segmented to ensure searches return relevant information.
2.Encourages information accuracy and consistency
When ECM includes process automation, meaningful data is captured and re-used intelligently. Business process management (BPM) software throws your documents and information against your rules, ensuring speed and uniformity in routine decision making and exception handling.
Together, they let you:
· Associate, package, and flow related files for action;
· Pre-fill forms and documents with stored information, eliminating keying errors;
· Extract and push data from one source to another at specific points in recurrent processes.
3.Enables standardized reporting
Just as your credit card bill summarizes your purchases--regardless of where and how they were made--ECM extracts data from multiple systems with which it is integrated so you can create holistic, complete reports. Instead of separate audits detailing customer transactions from various applications, everything is centralized, providing better insight. Automatic conversion to PDF and other formats ensures universal access while guarding against tampering.
4.Creates uniform data governance frameworks
Good governance--a central thrust of Dodd-Frank legislation--requires an IT infrastructure that supports fairness and uniformity in decision-making and implementation. For informed decision-making, data used to reach decisions must be accurate, timely, and appropriately accessible at the exact moment individuals need it. Information no longer required to be kept (and could put you at risk) can be migrated, purged, deleted, or destroyed according to the law.
Wide-ranging document types, diverse users, ever-changing retention laws, and the challenges of overseeing them make quality governance one of the greatest enterprise challenges. ECM levels the playing field, ensuring organizational practices are upheld. Rather than subjecting your documents, information and policies to the preferences and personalities of departmental managers, they are subject to your rules. No favoritism. No oversights. No mistakes…and a thorough, digital audit trail of transactional activity verifies compliance.
Use what you have—better
Managing your content effectively is like managing your credit card: it requires forethought, planning, and procedural adherence. Don’t be miserly with your data; ECM ensures you use it while it’s timely and relevant.
ECM can’t do your planning, but it ensures policies and rules are honored faithfully without exception, enterprise-wide. I can’t speak for you, but when someone invents a credit card that knows every resource at my disposal and flawlessly honors my intent, I want one!
Friday, September 3, 2010
ECM & Shared Services
By David Buttgereit senior partner, the BPM Group, KeyMark
Succinctly and in the context of Shared Services, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the conceptual term for a range of tools, processes, and procedures used to capture, store, deliver, manage, and preserve business process documents.
But what does all this mumbo-jumbo really mean? Let’s break it down and see how it applies to the Shared Services Organization (SSO) model of business service delivery.
Nomenclature, with SSO Flair
• Enterprise – not just departmental in scope; at its core ECM is supportive of the SSO model.
• Content – the paper documents, faxes, e-mail messages, electronic forms, and – increasingly so – instant messages (IMs) that drive and contain supporting information about business processes and transactions.
SSOs by their nature require content but can drown in it too. For example, the content necessary to complete a complex Accounts Payable transaction may include a lengthy master contract, multiple purchase orders, receipt confirmations, invoices, and perhaps records of IM communications among purchasing agents, requesters, and vendors spelling out discount terms.
Importantly, content often spans departments and multiple lines-of-business software applications and needs to be managed and stored in a manner that makes it accessible to multiple systems and SSO staff members concurrently.
• Capture – the collection, electronic transformation (recognition, classification, validation, quality control, etc.), and delivery of content into a format usable by other computer processing systems.
Traditionally, capture has been thought of as the process of scanning paper documents, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and similar automated technologies to extract information from the documents, and then sending the resulting data to lines-of-business applications for transaction processing.
Fortunately, capture has now matured to the point that it can also handle additional sources (faxes, e-mails, IMs, etc.) and can be used to sort, classify, and authenticate complex document sets according to pre-defined sets of business rules. In an efficient SSO, these advanced capture capabilities mean that fewer hands need touch content, greatly minimizing exceptions processing downstream.
• Store – once content has been captured, it must be properly indexed and securely stored – typically in an enterprise repository – for later processing.
• Deliver – the process of making content available to multiple lines-of-business applications while at the same time allowing it to be easily located and viewed through a variety of user interfaces. For example, an SSO Customer Service Representative may need to locate and view an outstanding HR document as part of a customer contact (a job promotion status inquiry, for example) at the same time the document is being actively used to drive corresponding payroll and benefits line-of-business transactions.
• Manage – has multiple meanings, from initiation and management of workflow processes that span multiple lines-of-business applications, to enforcing document security according to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and similar compliance rules, through providing metrics to Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) applications. It is here that most SSO business transactions are completed and the greatest efficiencies can be gained, with all other components of an integrated ECM system playing important supporting roles.
• Preserve – long-term management of content after it has been used for transactional purposes. Typically preservation is based on sets of Document and Records Management (RM) rules and is tightly controlled for both compliance and discovery purposes. Content may be maintained in an enterprise repository for a finite length of time (or in perpetuity, in some cases) or may be migrated to an off-line storage medium or external repository for archival and eventual destruction.
It’s clear from the above that ECM has great implications for SSOs that provide transactional business services across a single or multiple organizations or agencies.
SSO Content Challenges
Without ECM, an SSO will likely:
• Handle paper documents, faxes, e-mails, e-mail attachments, and IMs in an ad hoc manual manner, slowing processing as transactions traverse departmental boundaries.
• Employ scores of data entry clerks to transcribe information from documents into lines-of-business applications – often multiple times and likely inconsistently.
• Manually validate data accuracy and integrity, with inevitable human errors causing significant rework, exceptions, and costs downstream.
• Inconsistently or poorly secure and protect the data and privacy of customers and business partners.
• Create multiple copies of documents as they traverse departmental boundaries as each department is skeptical that the next will adequately preserve documents if they are needed for review or rework (lengthy contracts can be prime offenders because they consume a significant amount of both paper and storage space).
• Incur high costs for paper, transport, duplication, and eventual destruction of documents.
• Complete complex transactions in a serial manner, even though many components could be processed simultaneously if the supporting content was simultaneously available to multiple staff members and systems.
• Gather BI metrics in an inconsistent manner where the output from one process or system may not easily or directly map to the input of the next, losing continuity.
• Apply the perhaps flawed BI metrics as the basis for managing productivity, quality, staffing, load balancing, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Employ multiple manual searches when attempting to retrieve transaction, customer, or business partner content found on different documents and housed in different locations.
• Preserve historical business documents and apply RM rules inconsistently, if only because of the multiple copies stored in physical files in multiple departments.
ECM Solutions to SSO Content Challenges
With a properly implemented ECM, the SSO described above could:
• Efficiently capture and store all input types in a consistent, automated manner while speeding transaction initiation.
• Consistently extract business data from captured documents – once – and then feed multiple lines-of-business applications with precise input.
• Automate validation of data accuracy and integrity, reducing downstream rework costs for correcting input errors.
• Consistently secure and protect the data and privacy of customers and business partners, reducing both business risk and easing inevitable audit burdens.
• Use a single, canonical, set of documents for all business purposes and systems – simultaneously.
• Employ a single, comprehensive search and retrieval function, eliminating costly and time-consuming multiple searches and ensuring that only canonical versions of documents are returned.
• Eliminate most of the costs for document storage, transport, duplication, and destruction.
• Complete complex transactions in a parallel manner, supporting aggressive SLAs and leading to higher customer satisfaction.
• Leverage a set of cross-referenceable BI metrics to manage productivity, quality, staffing, load balancing, and SLAs.
• Appropriately preserve historical documents by consistently applying RM rules to the single set of canonical electronic documents.
Pulling it All Together
In conclusion, a robust and comprehensive ECM system can augment and link the multiple lines-of business applications inherent to SSOs, while decreasing costs and yet increasing consistency and customer satisfaction. Careful implementation of an appropriate ECM system should be considered a best practice for any SSO.
Succinctly and in the context of Shared Services, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the conceptual term for a range of tools, processes, and procedures used to capture, store, deliver, manage, and preserve business process documents.
But what does all this mumbo-jumbo really mean? Let’s break it down and see how it applies to the Shared Services Organization (SSO) model of business service delivery.
Nomenclature, with SSO Flair
• Enterprise – not just departmental in scope; at its core ECM is supportive of the SSO model.
• Content – the paper documents, faxes, e-mail messages, electronic forms, and – increasingly so – instant messages (IMs) that drive and contain supporting information about business processes and transactions.
SSOs by their nature require content but can drown in it too. For example, the content necessary to complete a complex Accounts Payable transaction may include a lengthy master contract, multiple purchase orders, receipt confirmations, invoices, and perhaps records of IM communications among purchasing agents, requesters, and vendors spelling out discount terms.
Importantly, content often spans departments and multiple lines-of-business software applications and needs to be managed and stored in a manner that makes it accessible to multiple systems and SSO staff members concurrently.
• Capture – the collection, electronic transformation (recognition, classification, validation, quality control, etc.), and delivery of content into a format usable by other computer processing systems.
Traditionally, capture has been thought of as the process of scanning paper documents, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and similar automated technologies to extract information from the documents, and then sending the resulting data to lines-of-business applications for transaction processing.
Fortunately, capture has now matured to the point that it can also handle additional sources (faxes, e-mails, IMs, etc.) and can be used to sort, classify, and authenticate complex document sets according to pre-defined sets of business rules. In an efficient SSO, these advanced capture capabilities mean that fewer hands need touch content, greatly minimizing exceptions processing downstream.
• Store – once content has been captured, it must be properly indexed and securely stored – typically in an enterprise repository – for later processing.
• Deliver – the process of making content available to multiple lines-of-business applications while at the same time allowing it to be easily located and viewed through a variety of user interfaces. For example, an SSO Customer Service Representative may need to locate and view an outstanding HR document as part of a customer contact (a job promotion status inquiry, for example) at the same time the document is being actively used to drive corresponding payroll and benefits line-of-business transactions.
• Manage – has multiple meanings, from initiation and management of workflow processes that span multiple lines-of-business applications, to enforcing document security according to Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and similar compliance rules, through providing metrics to Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) applications. It is here that most SSO business transactions are completed and the greatest efficiencies can be gained, with all other components of an integrated ECM system playing important supporting roles.
• Preserve – long-term management of content after it has been used for transactional purposes. Typically preservation is based on sets of Document and Records Management (RM) rules and is tightly controlled for both compliance and discovery purposes. Content may be maintained in an enterprise repository for a finite length of time (or in perpetuity, in some cases) or may be migrated to an off-line storage medium or external repository for archival and eventual destruction.
It’s clear from the above that ECM has great implications for SSOs that provide transactional business services across a single or multiple organizations or agencies.
SSO Content Challenges
Without ECM, an SSO will likely:
• Handle paper documents, faxes, e-mails, e-mail attachments, and IMs in an ad hoc manual manner, slowing processing as transactions traverse departmental boundaries.
• Employ scores of data entry clerks to transcribe information from documents into lines-of-business applications – often multiple times and likely inconsistently.
• Manually validate data accuracy and integrity, with inevitable human errors causing significant rework, exceptions, and costs downstream.
• Inconsistently or poorly secure and protect the data and privacy of customers and business partners.
• Create multiple copies of documents as they traverse departmental boundaries as each department is skeptical that the next will adequately preserve documents if they are needed for review or rework (lengthy contracts can be prime offenders because they consume a significant amount of both paper and storage space).
• Incur high costs for paper, transport, duplication, and eventual destruction of documents.
• Complete complex transactions in a serial manner, even though many components could be processed simultaneously if the supporting content was simultaneously available to multiple staff members and systems.
• Gather BI metrics in an inconsistent manner where the output from one process or system may not easily or directly map to the input of the next, losing continuity.
• Apply the perhaps flawed BI metrics as the basis for managing productivity, quality, staffing, load balancing, and Service Level Agreements (SLAs).
• Employ multiple manual searches when attempting to retrieve transaction, customer, or business partner content found on different documents and housed in different locations.
• Preserve historical business documents and apply RM rules inconsistently, if only because of the multiple copies stored in physical files in multiple departments.
ECM Solutions to SSO Content Challenges
With a properly implemented ECM, the SSO described above could:
• Efficiently capture and store all input types in a consistent, automated manner while speeding transaction initiation.
• Consistently extract business data from captured documents – once – and then feed multiple lines-of-business applications with precise input.
• Automate validation of data accuracy and integrity, reducing downstream rework costs for correcting input errors.
• Consistently secure and protect the data and privacy of customers and business partners, reducing both business risk and easing inevitable audit burdens.
• Use a single, canonical, set of documents for all business purposes and systems – simultaneously.
• Employ a single, comprehensive search and retrieval function, eliminating costly and time-consuming multiple searches and ensuring that only canonical versions of documents are returned.
• Eliminate most of the costs for document storage, transport, duplication, and destruction.
• Complete complex transactions in a parallel manner, supporting aggressive SLAs and leading to higher customer satisfaction.
• Leverage a set of cross-referenceable BI metrics to manage productivity, quality, staffing, load balancing, and SLAs.
• Appropriately preserve historical documents by consistently applying RM rules to the single set of canonical electronic documents.
Pulling it All Together
In conclusion, a robust and comprehensive ECM system can augment and link the multiple lines-of business applications inherent to SSOs, while decreasing costs and yet increasing consistency and customer satisfaction. Careful implementation of an appropriate ECM system should be considered a best practice for any SSO.
Meaningful RE-use
Posted by Mark Brousseau
Jim Thumma, vice president of sales and marketing at Optical Image Technology, says insurers can pick up the pace in underwriting, claims and more by re-using data meaningfully:
Recycling is vital as society seeks solutions for sustainable living. For insurers, however, the relevance of recycling lies in reusing valuable information meaningfully. Consider the information you collect from policyholders and others, and how many decisions are contingent on what they supply. How can you extract more value from what you have?
Understanding information value
Technology today is about building bridges so insurers can work efficiently, provide quality service, and compete successfully in a challenging marketplace. Trying to bridge existing gaps in the information flow isn’t new; insurers have discussed it for years. Business process management software tied to ECM is an effective enabler, but technology alone doesn’t guarantee meaningful use. Typically, gaps arise from a failure to understand—and manage—our information and its multiple uses.
Defining meaningful use
To make astute decisions, information must be accurate and timely. Knowledge workers need it whether they’re in the office, traveling, or visiting clients. If you want to capitalize on information value as it’s harvested, it should be captured digitally at the source and shared efficiently everywhere within your business where it could influence processes or outcomes.
Ideally:
Incoming mail, data captured via online forms, and email attachments launch pertinent business processes and advance appropriate actions.
Pertinent policyholder data feeds automatically into billing software as new policies are approved and issued, expediting billing and ensuring accuracy.
Data captured in rules-driven voice mail and faxes launches appropriate business processes.
For information to be worthy of reuse, it must be accurate and readable. Front-end capture makes it instantly useful, restricting human involvement to tasks requiring analytical thinking and decisions. Even the smartest knowledge workers are prone to mistakes when information must be gleaned, copied, or re-keyed.
By implementing rules-driven business process management software as part of your content management strategy, accurate information can be re-used logically, promoting actionable intelligence. Many clients of well-deployed ECM/BPM solutions that re-use meaningful information wisely underwrite upwards of 35% more policies; cut claims turnaround from weeks to days; and handle 30-40% more work using the same staff, increasing profitability significantly.
Discovering where meaning lies
Virtual communication can connect people and processes by enabling the seamless transfer of information to every place it has value. Yet like physical bridges, virtual conduits have requirements that plead to be satisfied. You need to:
... Understand the types of information that flow into your company ― which data is critical, in which business areas, and for which specific decisions.
Know all of the sources where that information is found (email, documents, eForms, faxes, handwritten correspondence, voice mails, images).
... Discover every place within your organization where the information has value.
Identify individuals who require access.
... Ensure the business rules you establish with your enterprise content management (ECM) software reflect your governance policies and controls.
Swift, seamless communication doesn’t happen by accident.
Masterminding meaningful use with BPM and smart integration
Consider the interrelationship between policy administration, claims, and accounts payable in a standard claim submission that is aided by a well-planned ECM and BPM implementation and integrated across all business areas:
Selma, a policyholder, returns from work. Someone has broken into her home, stealing valuable jewelry and small appliances. She contacts her agent to submit a claim.
Agent
· The agent completes the First Notice of Loss (FNOL) and faxes it to the insurer. The fax is imported automatically into the ECM system and key data is used to automatically index the document for immediate, secure retrieval. BPM assigns a unique number to the claim and sends the FNOL to the appropriate reviewer based on information detailing staff roles, current workloads, and schedules.
Claims reviewer
· The assigned reviewer sees the job as the top task in his queue. He clicks on the link to the FNOL and views policyholder’s information, selecting the policy pertinent to the claim. The next click packages the documents and sends them for supervisory review along with the appropriate, automatically generated email message.
Claims supervisor
· The supervisor views the policy via a link in her email. She compares it to the FNOL, verifies the match, and forwards it to the adjuster.
Adjuster
· The adjuster adds relevant photos to the file. He requests police reports. As they arrive, they are imported and indexed. When the file is complete, BPM packages the field survey, images, and reports, linking them to the policy and FNOL, and the folder is returned to the supervisor.
Claims supervisor
· The supervisor receives email notification the claim is ready for final review. She approves it for payment.
Accounting
· Relevant claim information is extracted electronically (name, policy number, contact information, deductible, payment due) and pushed by BPM into the A/P software, ensuring accuracy and expediting payment.
Customer service
· The claimant calls to inquire about the claim’s status. The answering service determines from voice response which claim is in question. The call is routed appropriately. Support views the up-to-date claim status, assuring the customer the check has been sent and providing details.
By integrating policy administration, claims, and billing with ECM and using BPM to orchestrate the flow of information wherever it’s needed according to business rules, Selma’s claim is processed quickly and cost effectively. Work is more efficient. Resources are used wisely. Fewer mistakes are made. The company gains financially and reduces its risk to legal exposure and unhappy clients.
Evaluate your routines
Contrast this with your everyday routines. How many opportunities for meaningful use are overlooked? How much time is wasted? How many customers are underserved? How much money is lost because of inefficiency?
Are the shortcomings acceptable, or are you ready to change?
Take steps toward improvement
Whenever you collect information from applicants, policyholders, staff, or third parties, it likely has value in more than one place. Analyze and understand the value of your business information. Use ECM and BPM to maximize the meaningful use of it. Your business will profit measurably.
What do you think?
Jim Thumma, vice president of sales and marketing at Optical Image Technology, says insurers can pick up the pace in underwriting, claims and more by re-using data meaningfully:
Recycling is vital as society seeks solutions for sustainable living. For insurers, however, the relevance of recycling lies in reusing valuable information meaningfully. Consider the information you collect from policyholders and others, and how many decisions are contingent on what they supply. How can you extract more value from what you have?
Understanding information value
Technology today is about building bridges so insurers can work efficiently, provide quality service, and compete successfully in a challenging marketplace. Trying to bridge existing gaps in the information flow isn’t new; insurers have discussed it for years. Business process management software tied to ECM is an effective enabler, but technology alone doesn’t guarantee meaningful use. Typically, gaps arise from a failure to understand—and manage—our information and its multiple uses.
Defining meaningful use
To make astute decisions, information must be accurate and timely. Knowledge workers need it whether they’re in the office, traveling, or visiting clients. If you want to capitalize on information value as it’s harvested, it should be captured digitally at the source and shared efficiently everywhere within your business where it could influence processes or outcomes.
Ideally:
Incoming mail, data captured via online forms, and email attachments launch pertinent business processes and advance appropriate actions.
Pertinent policyholder data feeds automatically into billing software as new policies are approved and issued, expediting billing and ensuring accuracy.
Data captured in rules-driven voice mail and faxes launches appropriate business processes.
For information to be worthy of reuse, it must be accurate and readable. Front-end capture makes it instantly useful, restricting human involvement to tasks requiring analytical thinking and decisions. Even the smartest knowledge workers are prone to mistakes when information must be gleaned, copied, or re-keyed.
By implementing rules-driven business process management software as part of your content management strategy, accurate information can be re-used logically, promoting actionable intelligence. Many clients of well-deployed ECM/BPM solutions that re-use meaningful information wisely underwrite upwards of 35% more policies; cut claims turnaround from weeks to days; and handle 30-40% more work using the same staff, increasing profitability significantly.
Discovering where meaning lies
Virtual communication can connect people and processes by enabling the seamless transfer of information to every place it has value. Yet like physical bridges, virtual conduits have requirements that plead to be satisfied. You need to:
... Understand the types of information that flow into your company ― which data is critical, in which business areas, and for which specific decisions.
Know all of the sources where that information is found (email, documents, eForms, faxes, handwritten correspondence, voice mails, images).
... Discover every place within your organization where the information has value.
Identify individuals who require access.
... Ensure the business rules you establish with your enterprise content management (ECM) software reflect your governance policies and controls.
Swift, seamless communication doesn’t happen by accident.
Masterminding meaningful use with BPM and smart integration
Consider the interrelationship between policy administration, claims, and accounts payable in a standard claim submission that is aided by a well-planned ECM and BPM implementation and integrated across all business areas:
Selma, a policyholder, returns from work. Someone has broken into her home, stealing valuable jewelry and small appliances. She contacts her agent to submit a claim.
Agent
· The agent completes the First Notice of Loss (FNOL) and faxes it to the insurer. The fax is imported automatically into the ECM system and key data is used to automatically index the document for immediate, secure retrieval. BPM assigns a unique number to the claim and sends the FNOL to the appropriate reviewer based on information detailing staff roles, current workloads, and schedules.
Claims reviewer
· The assigned reviewer sees the job as the top task in his queue. He clicks on the link to the FNOL and views policyholder’s information, selecting the policy pertinent to the claim. The next click packages the documents and sends them for supervisory review along with the appropriate, automatically generated email message.
Claims supervisor
· The supervisor views the policy via a link in her email. She compares it to the FNOL, verifies the match, and forwards it to the adjuster.
Adjuster
· The adjuster adds relevant photos to the file. He requests police reports. As they arrive, they are imported and indexed. When the file is complete, BPM packages the field survey, images, and reports, linking them to the policy and FNOL, and the folder is returned to the supervisor.
Claims supervisor
· The supervisor receives email notification the claim is ready for final review. She approves it for payment.
Accounting
· Relevant claim information is extracted electronically (name, policy number, contact information, deductible, payment due) and pushed by BPM into the A/P software, ensuring accuracy and expediting payment.
Customer service
· The claimant calls to inquire about the claim’s status. The answering service determines from voice response which claim is in question. The call is routed appropriately. Support views the up-to-date claim status, assuring the customer the check has been sent and providing details.
By integrating policy administration, claims, and billing with ECM and using BPM to orchestrate the flow of information wherever it’s needed according to business rules, Selma’s claim is processed quickly and cost effectively. Work is more efficient. Resources are used wisely. Fewer mistakes are made. The company gains financially and reduces its risk to legal exposure and unhappy clients.
Evaluate your routines
Contrast this with your everyday routines. How many opportunities for meaningful use are overlooked? How much time is wasted? How many customers are underserved? How much money is lost because of inefficiency?
Are the shortcomings acceptable, or are you ready to change?
Take steps toward improvement
Whenever you collect information from applicants, policyholders, staff, or third parties, it likely has value in more than one place. Analyze and understand the value of your business information. Use ECM and BPM to maximize the meaningful use of it. Your business will profit measurably.
What do you think?
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
World of work is changing fast
Posted by Mark Brousseau
The world of today is dramatically different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work already badly frayed, Gartner predicts that the nature of work will witness 10 key changes through 2020. Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends.
“Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”
Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required.
1. De-routinization of Work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process.
2. Work Swarms
Swarming is a work style characterized by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity; Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is emerging. Teams have historically consisted of people who have worked together before and who know each other reasonably well, often working in the same organization and for the same manager. Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.
3. Weak Links
In swarms, if individuals know each other at all, it may be just barely, via weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. They are indirect indicators and rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Navigating one's own personal, professional and social networks helps people develop and exploit both strong and weak links and that, in turn, will be crucial to surviving and exploiting swarms for business benefit.
4. Working With the Collective
There are informal groups of people, outside the direct control of the organization, who can impact the success or failure of the organization. These informal groups are bound together by a common interest, a fad or a historical accident, as described by Gartner as “the collective.” Smart business executives discern how to live in a business ecosystem they cannot control; one they can only influence. The influence process requires understanding the collectives that potentially influence their organization, as well as the key people in those external groups. Gathering market intelligence via the collective is crucial. Equally important is figuring out how to use the collective to define segments, markets, products and various business strategies.
5. Work Sketch-Ups
Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It is very important that organizations try to capture the criteria used in making decisions but, at least for now, Gartner does not expect most non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns. Over time, we believe that work patterns for more non-routine work will emerge, justifying a light-handed approach to collecting activity information, but it will take years before a real return on investment for this effort is visible. In the meantime, the process models for most non-routine processes will remain simple "sketch-ups," created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous Work
This property is also implied in Gartner’s description of work swarms. Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
7. Simulation and Experimentation
Active engagement with simulated environments (virtual environments), which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets. This suggests the use of n-dimensional virtual representations of all different sorts of data. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content. People will interact with the data and actively manipulate various parameters reshaping the world they’re looking at.
8. Pattern Sensitivity
Gartner has published a major line of research on Pattern-Based Strategy. The business world is becoming more volatile, affording people working off of linear models based on past performance far less visibility into the future than ever before. Gartner expects to see a significant growth in the number of organizations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive.
9. Hyperconnected
Hyperconnectedness is a property of most organizations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them. While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract," there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply chain is in-house. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
10. My Place
The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.
The world of today is dramatically different from 20 years ago and with the lines between work and non-work already badly frayed, Gartner predicts that the nature of work will witness 10 key changes through 2020. Organizations will need to plan for increasingly chaotic environments that are out of their direct control, and adaptation must involve adjusting to all 10 of the trends.
“Work will become less routine, characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, 'swarming' and more,” said Tom Austin, vice president and Gartner fellow. By 2015, 40 percent or more of an organization’s work will be ‘non-routine’, up from 25 percent in 2010. “People will swarm more often and work solo less. They’ll work with others with whom they have few links, and teams will include people outside the control of the organization,” he added. “In addition, simulation, visualisation and unification technologies, working across yottabytes of data per second, will demand an emphasis on new perceptual skills.”
Organizations will need to determine which of the 10 key changes in the nature of work will affect them, and consider whether radically different technology governance models will be required.
1. De-routinization of Work
The core value that people add is not in the processes that can be automated, but in non-routine processes, uniquely human, analytical or interactive contributions that result in words such as discovery, innovation, teaming, leading, selling and learning. Non-routine skills are those we cannot automate. For example, we cannot automate the process of selling a life insurance policy to a skeptical buyer, but we can use automation tools to augment the selling process.
2. Work Swarms
Swarming is a work style characterized by a flurry of collective activity by anyone and everyone conceivably available and able to add value. Gartner identifies two phenomena within the collective activity; Teaming (instead of solo performances) will be valued and rewarded more and occur more frequently and a new form of teaming, which Gartner calls swarming, to distinguish it from more historical teaming models, is emerging. Teams have historically consisted of people who have worked together before and who know each other reasonably well, often working in the same organization and for the same manager. Swarms form quickly, attacking a problem or opportunity and then quickly dissipating. Swarming is an agile response to an observed increase in ad hoc action requirements, as ad hoc activities continue to displace structured, bureaucratic situations.
3. Weak Links
In swarms, if individuals know each other at all, it may be just barely, via weak links. Weak links are the cues people can pick up from people who know the people they have to work with. They are indirect indicators and rely, in part, on the confidence others have in their knowledge of people. Navigating one's own personal, professional and social networks helps people develop and exploit both strong and weak links and that, in turn, will be crucial to surviving and exploiting swarms for business benefit.
4. Working With the Collective
There are informal groups of people, outside the direct control of the organization, who can impact the success or failure of the organization. These informal groups are bound together by a common interest, a fad or a historical accident, as described by Gartner as “the collective.” Smart business executives discern how to live in a business ecosystem they cannot control; one they can only influence. The influence process requires understanding the collectives that potentially influence their organization, as well as the key people in those external groups. Gathering market intelligence via the collective is crucial. Equally important is figuring out how to use the collective to define segments, markets, products and various business strategies.
5. Work Sketch-Ups
Most non-routine processes will also be highly informal. It is very important that organizations try to capture the criteria used in making decisions but, at least for now, Gartner does not expect most non-routine processes to follow meaningful standard patterns. Over time, we believe that work patterns for more non-routine work will emerge, justifying a light-handed approach to collecting activity information, but it will take years before a real return on investment for this effort is visible. In the meantime, the process models for most non-routine processes will remain simple "sketch-ups," created on the fly.
6. Spontaneous Work
This property is also implied in Gartner’s description of work swarms. Spontaneity implies more than reactive activity, for example, to the emergence of new patterns. It also contains proactive work such as seeking out new opportunities and creating new designs and models.
7. Simulation and Experimentation
Active engagement with simulated environments (virtual environments), which are similar to technologies depicted in the film Minority Report, will come to replace drilling into cells in spreadsheets. This suggests the use of n-dimensional virtual representations of all different sorts of data. The contents of the simulated environment will be assembled by agent technologies that determine what materials go together based on watching people work with this content. People will interact with the data and actively manipulate various parameters reshaping the world they’re looking at.
8. Pattern Sensitivity
Gartner has published a major line of research on Pattern-Based Strategy. The business world is becoming more volatile, affording people working off of linear models based on past performance far less visibility into the future than ever before. Gartner expects to see a significant growth in the number of organizations that create groups specifically charged with detecting divergent emerging patterns, evaluating those patterns, developing various scenarios for how the disruption might play out and proposing to senior executives new ways of exploiting (or protecting the organization from) the changes to which they are now more sensitive.
9. Hyperconnected
Hyperconnectedness is a property of most organizations, existing within networks of networks, unable to completely control any of them. While key supply chain elements, for example, may be "under contract," there is no guarantee it will perform properly, not even if the supply chain is in-house. Hyperconnectedness will lead to a push for more work to occur in both formal and informal relationships across enterprise boundaries, and that has implications for how people work and how IT supports or augments that work.
10. My Place
The workplace is becoming more and more virtual, with meetings occurring across time zones and organizations and with participants who barely know each other, working on swarms attacking rapidly emerging problems. But the employee will still have a "place" where they work. Many will have neither a company-provided physical office nor a desk, and their work will increasingly happen 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In this work environment, the lines between personal, professional, social and family matters, along with organization subjects, will disappear. Individuals, of course, need to manage the complexity created by overlapping demands, whether from the new world of work or from external (non-work-related) phenomena. Those that cannot manage the underlying "expectation and interrupt overloads" will suffer performance deficits as these overloads force individuals to operate in an over-stimulated (information-overload) state.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Putting the kibosh on the soaring software maintenance and upgrade costs
By Randy Davis (rdavis@egisticsinc.com)
Finextra reports that in a recent speech to the Committee for Economic Development in Australia (CEDA), CBA Chief Information Officer Michael Harte lambasted legacy technology vendors for their slow embrace of cloud-based computing and their apparent preference for solutions that lock-in users to a "never-ending spiral" of costly maintenance and upgrades.
"We're saying that we will never buy another data center. We will never buy another rack or server or storage device or network device again," Harte said. "I will never let any organization that I work for get locked into proprietary hardware or software again. I'll never tell my teams in the business that it will be weeks to get them hardware provision. I'll never pay upfront for any infrastructure and certainly would never pay for any, or rent any, infrastructure that I would never use."
Harte concluded: "I will never implement an internal solution for a common problem that I could procure on subscription across the Web."
With increasing demand for cloud-based solutions, combined with a general reluctance to pay hefty upfront capital costs, Harte's comments would seem to reflect growing dissatisfaction with the traditional licensed software model -- and its “never-ending spiral” of ongoing expenses.
Are you as fed-up as Harte?
Finextra reports that in a recent speech to the Committee for Economic Development in Australia (CEDA), CBA Chief Information Officer Michael Harte lambasted legacy technology vendors for their slow embrace of cloud-based computing and their apparent preference for solutions that lock-in users to a "never-ending spiral" of costly maintenance and upgrades.
"We're saying that we will never buy another data center. We will never buy another rack or server or storage device or network device again," Harte said. "I will never let any organization that I work for get locked into proprietary hardware or software again. I'll never tell my teams in the business that it will be weeks to get them hardware provision. I'll never pay upfront for any infrastructure and certainly would never pay for any, or rent any, infrastructure that I would never use."
Harte concluded: "I will never implement an internal solution for a common problem that I could procure on subscription across the Web."
With increasing demand for cloud-based solutions, combined with a general reluctance to pay hefty upfront capital costs, Harte's comments would seem to reflect growing dissatisfaction with the traditional licensed software model -- and its “never-ending spiral” of ongoing expenses.
Are you as fed-up as Harte?
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