Posted by Mark Brousseau
Multi-function printers (MFPs) – devices that can print, fax, copy and scan documents – continue to experience tremendous growth, Daniel Schmidt, product marketing manager, Kofax, told attendees at Kofax Transform 2011 Americas this morning in San Diego.
Schmidt cited statistics from IDC that the MFP market grew by 18 and 22 percent last year, representing a total market of 13 million MFP devices, compared to just 800,000 document scanners.
Despite this tremendous growth, most organizations have an opportunity to further reduce their operations costs by leveraging and extending MFPs as part of their business processes, Schmidt said.
Realizing these costs savings, Schmidt said, are as easy as 1-2-3:
1. Consolidate control of MFPs.
2. Leverage MFPs for distributed scanning.
3. Integrate MFPs into a scan-to-process initiative.
Consolidate
At most organizations, MFPs are fax-enabled via individual telephone lines, Roman Swoboda, vice president, business communications, Kofax told attendees. In cases where a company has thousands of deployed MFPs – possibly across the globe – this means thousands of individual telephone lines.
Swoboda said this type of MFP deployment creates a number of issues, including the tremendous costs associated with the individual phone lines (a single line costs up to $500, Swoboda noted), the lack of document tracking and archival, and the limited security over who can send faxes and where.
“A better approach is to connect the MFPs to a centralized infrastructure where faxes are sent in a consolidated and very structured way,” Swoboda said. This offers a number of advantages, including improved tracking and compliance, lower costs (fewer “trunk lines”), and the ability to leverage a consolidated platform. One company that consolidated its MFP infrastructure was able to eliminate up to two-thirds of its analog lines, delivering payback in six to eight months, Swoboda said.
Optimize
Another opportunity for improving MFP deployments is to extend the process to create searchable PDFs, as well as documents that can be archived. Schmidt suggested companies scan documents in remote offices and send them to a central archive. This reduces the costs of transporting documents between locations, eliminates the opportunity for lost document, improves information security, and enables the end-user to leverage all of the benefits of data capture, including bar code recognition.
Integrate
To maximize their MFP deployments, organizations should integrate the devices with their business processes. Schmidt said this approach can reduce processing time from days to minutes, in turn, providing more timely information that can enhance customer service. It also lowers processing costs, including labor and shipping costs; creates an audit trail for tracking documents end-to-end and improving compliance efforts; and improves security, providing complete document control.
What do you think?
Showing posts with label document automation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label document automation. Show all posts
Monday, January 17, 2011
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?
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Cloud computing's "green" credentials
By R. Edwin Pearce
The market for cloud computing has expanded quickly over the past few years, largely driven by its ability to deliver impressive economic benefits to cash-strapped organizations. But a new study finds that not only can cloud computing keep operations in the black, it also can help them be "green."
Pike Research reports that the growth of cloud computing will have important implications for both energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In fact, by 2020, cloud computing will lead to a 38 percent reduction in worldwide data center energy expenditures, compared to a business-as-usual scenario, Pike Research reports.
“The growth of cloud computing will have a very significant positive effect on data center energy consumption,” says Pike Research Senior Analyst Eric Woods. “Few, if any, clean technologies have the capability to reduce energy expenditures and GHG production with so little business disruption. Software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service are all inherently more efficient models than conventional alternatives, and their adoption will be one of the largest contributing factors to the greening of enterprise IT.”
To be sure, cloud computing's "green" credentials and environmental impact aren't the top reasons for organizations to deploy the technology. But they are certainly incremental benefits, particularly for organizations that list environmental sustainability among their strategic objectives.
R. Edwin Pearce is executive vice president of sales and corporate development for eGistics, Inc., a leading provider of hosted document management solutions. Pearce can be reached at 214-256-4607 or via epearce@egisticsinc.com.
The market for cloud computing has expanded quickly over the past few years, largely driven by its ability to deliver impressive economic benefits to cash-strapped organizations. But a new study finds that not only can cloud computing keep operations in the black, it also can help them be "green."
Pike Research reports that the growth of cloud computing will have important implications for both energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In fact, by 2020, cloud computing will lead to a 38 percent reduction in worldwide data center energy expenditures, compared to a business-as-usual scenario, Pike Research reports.
“The growth of cloud computing will have a very significant positive effect on data center energy consumption,” says Pike Research Senior Analyst Eric Woods. “Few, if any, clean technologies have the capability to reduce energy expenditures and GHG production with so little business disruption. Software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, and platform-as-a-service are all inherently more efficient models than conventional alternatives, and their adoption will be one of the largest contributing factors to the greening of enterprise IT.”
To be sure, cloud computing's "green" credentials and environmental impact aren't the top reasons for organizations to deploy the technology. But they are certainly incremental benefits, particularly for organizations that list environmental sustainability among their strategic objectives.
R. Edwin Pearce is executive vice president of sales and corporate development for eGistics, Inc., a leading provider of hosted document management solutions. Pearce can be reached at 214-256-4607 or via epearce@egisticsinc.com.
Greening Your Mail Can Keep You in the Black
By Greg Brown, Marketing Director, Melissa Data
A recent Aperture Research Institute study reported upwards of 70 percent of organizations have adopted a green initiative of some kind. While those companies should be lauded for their efforts at environmental stewardship, bad days on Wall Street and for the economy have seen some companies abandon or scale back their green initiatives as they tighten their belts.
Now is the time to take a realistic look at your company’s green initiatives and ask whether or not the practices undertaken are “evergreen” – promoting not only environmental sustainability, but also sound business practices and solid return on investment so as to be sustainable in good economic conditions as well as bad.
For instance, over six million trees and more than 300 million pounds of paper are wasted each year on undeliverable-as-addressed Standard class mail, as reported by UAA Clearinghouse. It costs the Post Office over 2 billion dollars annually to process this true “junk mail”. And the cost to mailers is even more dramatic – undeliverable mail costs direct mailers over $6 billion dollars a year.
So, is Postmaster General Jack Potter’s call to reduce UAA mail by 50 percent by 2010 a green initiative designed to decrease global warming and unnecessary environmental waste? Absolutely. But it’s also a common sense business initiative that will save both the USPS and mailers a tremendous amount of money – money better spent on job creation, product development, and effective marketing.
Here are 10 steps you can easily implement to save money as you green your mailings – reducing waste, while improving deliverability, effectiveness and response to ensure you stay in the black, even as the economy sees red:
1. Correct your mailing
2. Update your mailing
3. Dedupe your mailing
4. Suppress your mailing
5. Target your mailing
6. TransPromo your mailing
7. Connect your mailing
8. Downsize your mailing
9. Sustain your mailing
10. Recycle your mailing
Has your organization had success with any of these strategies?
A recent Aperture Research Institute study reported upwards of 70 percent of organizations have adopted a green initiative of some kind. While those companies should be lauded for their efforts at environmental stewardship, bad days on Wall Street and for the economy have seen some companies abandon or scale back their green initiatives as they tighten their belts.
Now is the time to take a realistic look at your company’s green initiatives and ask whether or not the practices undertaken are “evergreen” – promoting not only environmental sustainability, but also sound business practices and solid return on investment so as to be sustainable in good economic conditions as well as bad.
For instance, over six million trees and more than 300 million pounds of paper are wasted each year on undeliverable-as-addressed Standard class mail, as reported by UAA Clearinghouse. It costs the Post Office over 2 billion dollars annually to process this true “junk mail”. And the cost to mailers is even more dramatic – undeliverable mail costs direct mailers over $6 billion dollars a year.
So, is Postmaster General Jack Potter’s call to reduce UAA mail by 50 percent by 2010 a green initiative designed to decrease global warming and unnecessary environmental waste? Absolutely. But it’s also a common sense business initiative that will save both the USPS and mailers a tremendous amount of money – money better spent on job creation, product development, and effective marketing.
Here are 10 steps you can easily implement to save money as you green your mailings – reducing waste, while improving deliverability, effectiveness and response to ensure you stay in the black, even as the economy sees red:
1. Correct your mailing
2. Update your mailing
3. Dedupe your mailing
4. Suppress your mailing
5. Target your mailing
6. TransPromo your mailing
7. Connect your mailing
8. Downsize your mailing
9. Sustain your mailing
10. Recycle your mailing
Has your organization had success with any of these strategies?
Monday, December 6, 2010
With economy improving, IT departments hit the ground running
Posted by Mark Brousseau
High performing information technology (IT) departments at large companies have hit the ground running following the recent economic downturn, recalibrating their efforts to drive more business value from IT, and leaving their less adroit counterparts playing catch-up, according to new research from Accenture.
While many companies slipped into stagnation mode during the downturn, cutting budgets and focusing primarily on maintenance, high-performing organizations viewed IT as a growth engine for their business and the economic conditions as an opportunity to build capability.
Accenture defines high performers in IT as those that achieve excellence in IT execution, IT agility and IT innovation together, balancing the constant and sometimes opposing demands placed on today’s IT function.
High performers in IT not only manage IT like a business, but run IT for the business and with the business. CIOs at these organizations are engaged in their company’s business strategies and are able to truly map out how IT supports those strategies.
“Our survey found that chief information officers (CIOs) of high performance IT organizations are deeply involved in business outcomes and closely attuned to business needs – current and future – across the enterprise,” said Gary Curtis, Accenture’s chief technology strategist. “They are successfully retiring their legacy systems and embracing newer technologies. They are adept at managing the balance between optimizing costs and ensuring that they have the budget, skills, and resources to help fuel business growth.”
The research also found that high performers don’t just do a few things well; they excel across the board when compared to lower performing IT departments. Some examples:
... They have web-enabled 42 percent more of their customer interactions and 93 percent more of their suppliers’ interactions ;
... They are 44 percent more likely to recognize the strategic role IT plays in increasing customer satisfaction;
... They are eight times more likely to measure the benefits realized from IT initiatives;
... They spend 29 percent more annually on developing and implementing new applications rather than on maintaining existing ones; and
... They are twice as likely to view workforce performance as a priority by addressing challenges such as an aging workforce and collaboration, as well as developing technical and soft skills (business knowledge, relationship management)
“High performing IT departments are powerful drivers of value for their organizations – not simply keeping the lights on, but promoting technology initiatives that power innovation and enable the IT organization to function as a business,” said Curtis.
What do you think?
High performing information technology (IT) departments at large companies have hit the ground running following the recent economic downturn, recalibrating their efforts to drive more business value from IT, and leaving their less adroit counterparts playing catch-up, according to new research from Accenture.
While many companies slipped into stagnation mode during the downturn, cutting budgets and focusing primarily on maintenance, high-performing organizations viewed IT as a growth engine for their business and the economic conditions as an opportunity to build capability.
Accenture defines high performers in IT as those that achieve excellence in IT execution, IT agility and IT innovation together, balancing the constant and sometimes opposing demands placed on today’s IT function.
High performers in IT not only manage IT like a business, but run IT for the business and with the business. CIOs at these organizations are engaged in their company’s business strategies and are able to truly map out how IT supports those strategies.
“Our survey found that chief information officers (CIOs) of high performance IT organizations are deeply involved in business outcomes and closely attuned to business needs – current and future – across the enterprise,” said Gary Curtis, Accenture’s chief technology strategist. “They are successfully retiring their legacy systems and embracing newer technologies. They are adept at managing the balance between optimizing costs and ensuring that they have the budget, skills, and resources to help fuel business growth.”
The research also found that high performers don’t just do a few things well; they excel across the board when compared to lower performing IT departments. Some examples:
... They have web-enabled 42 percent more of their customer interactions and 93 percent more of their suppliers’ interactions ;
... They are 44 percent more likely to recognize the strategic role IT plays in increasing customer satisfaction;
... They are eight times more likely to measure the benefits realized from IT initiatives;
... They spend 29 percent more annually on developing and implementing new applications rather than on maintaining existing ones; and
... They are twice as likely to view workforce performance as a priority by addressing challenges such as an aging workforce and collaboration, as well as developing technical and soft skills (business knowledge, relationship management)
“High performing IT departments are powerful drivers of value for their organizations – not simply keeping the lights on, but promoting technology initiatives that power innovation and enable the IT organization to function as a business,” said Curtis.
What do you think?
Cloud computing grows up
By R. Edwin Pearce
The next year will be big for cloud computing, with the technology transitioning from “early adopter status” into a mainstream platform for IT. That’s according to IDC, a leading research and advisory firm, which ranked the maturation of cloud computing among its top IT predictions for 2011.
IDC predicts that spending on public IT cloud services will grow at more than five times the rate of the IT industry in 2011, up 30 percent from 2010, as organizations move a wider range of business applications into the cloud. Small and medium-sized business cloud use will surge in 2011, with adoption of some cloud resources topping 33 percent among U.S. midsize firms by year’s end.
“[Cloud computing] can no longer be invested in, or managed, as sandbox efforts around the edges of the market. Instead, they are rapidly becoming the market itself and must be addressed accordingly,” warns Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at Framingham, MA-based IDC.
Gens is exactly right. Organizations of all sizes are taking a hard look at cloud-based solutions as a way to avoid the hefty capital investments and ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs associated with traditional on-premise solutions, and to ensure their IT infrastructure remains up-to-date.
In addition to changing the way organizations access business applications, the growth of cloud computing also will bring mobile banking and payments one step closer to reality, IDC predicts. But this also is true of mobile applications in other industries, most notably healthcare and insurance.
What do you think?
R. Edwin Pearce is executive vice president of sales and corporate development at eGistics, Inc. (www.egisticsinc.com), a leading provider of hosted solutions for payments and document automation. He can be reached at 214-256-4607 or via e-mail at epearce@egisticsinc.com.
The next year will be big for cloud computing, with the technology transitioning from “early adopter status” into a mainstream platform for IT. That’s according to IDC, a leading research and advisory firm, which ranked the maturation of cloud computing among its top IT predictions for 2011.
IDC predicts that spending on public IT cloud services will grow at more than five times the rate of the IT industry in 2011, up 30 percent from 2010, as organizations move a wider range of business applications into the cloud. Small and medium-sized business cloud use will surge in 2011, with adoption of some cloud resources topping 33 percent among U.S. midsize firms by year’s end.
“[Cloud computing] can no longer be invested in, or managed, as sandbox efforts around the edges of the market. Instead, they are rapidly becoming the market itself and must be addressed accordingly,” warns Frank Gens, senior vice president and chief analyst at Framingham, MA-based IDC.
Gens is exactly right. Organizations of all sizes are taking a hard look at cloud-based solutions as a way to avoid the hefty capital investments and ongoing maintenance and upgrade costs associated with traditional on-premise solutions, and to ensure their IT infrastructure remains up-to-date.
In addition to changing the way organizations access business applications, the growth of cloud computing also will bring mobile banking and payments one step closer to reality, IDC predicts. But this also is true of mobile applications in other industries, most notably healthcare and insurance.
What do you think?
R. Edwin Pearce is executive vice president of sales and corporate development at eGistics, Inc. (www.egisticsinc.com), a leading provider of hosted solutions for payments and document automation. He can be reached at 214-256-4607 or via e-mail at epearce@egisticsinc.com.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
6 tips for messages that resonate
Posted by Mark Brousseau
Today we are overwhelmed with messages. Some are just 140 characters long. Others are much longer, but they are constantly bombarding us—trying to lure us to acquire and consume information (then repeat the process over and over). Technology—social media specifically—allows for constant communication, but easy communication doesn't necessarily translate to messages that are received, understood, and capable of driving action.
At a time when people are tweeting, blogging, emailing, and more 24/7, the best way to genuinely connect and create change, says author and CEO Nancy Duarte, is via truly human, in-person presentations. She stresses that everyone in every company should know how to present and communicate that company's messages with clarity and passion.
"Great presentations are like magic," says Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design, author of the award-winning book Slide:ology, and author of the new book Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences.
"It takes a lot of work to breathe life into an idea. Spending energy to understand the audience and carefully crafting a message that resonates with them means committing time and discipline to the process. Think about it this way: You likely spend countless hours collaborating and innovating to put forth really good ideas. You should spend just as much energy ensuring they are delivered in a way that is impactful. The payoff is that learning how to present in a captivating way—be it at a formal event or to a client across the conference room table—can be your competitive edge in a business environment where too many companies are confusing communication with noise."
So how can you make sure you present information in a way that truly resonates?
"If people can easily recall, repeat, and transfer your message, you did a great job conveying it," says Duarte. "To achieve this, you should have a handful of succinct, clear, and repeatable sound bites planted in your presentation that people can effortlessly remember. A thoroughly considered sound bite can create a Something They'll Always Remember (S.T.A.R.) moment—not only for the people present in the audience but also for the ones who will encounter your presentation through broadcast or social media channels."
To help you get started creating presentations that really stick with your audiences, here are a few tips on how you can incorporate repeatable sound bites:
Create crisp messages. Picture each person you speak to as a little radio tower empowered to repeat your key concepts over and over. "Some of the most innocent-looking people have fifty thousand followers in their social networks," says Duarte. "When one sound bite is sent to their followers, it can get re-sent hundreds of thousands of times."
Craft a rally cry. Your rally cry will be a small, repeatable phrase that can become the slogan and rallying cry of the masses trying to promote your idea. President Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes We Can," originated from a speech during the primary elections.
Coordinate key phrases with the same language in your press materials. For presentations where the press is present, be sure to repeat critical messages verbatim from your press materials. "Doing so ensures that the press will pick up the right sound bites," explains Duarte. "The same is true for any camera crews who might be filming your presentation. Make sure you have at least a fifteen- to thirty-second message that is so salient it will be obvious to reporters that it should be featured in the broadcasts."
Use catchy words. Take time to carefully craft a few messages with catchy words. "For example, Neil Armstrong used the six hours and forty minutes between his moon landing and first step to craft his historic statement," says Duarte. "Phrases that have historical significance or become headlines don't just magically appear in the moment. They are mindfully planned."
Make them remember. Once you've crafted the message, there are three ways to ensure the audience remembers it: First, repeating the phrase more than once. Second, punctuating it with a pause that gives the audience time to write down exactly what you said. And finally, projecting the words on a slide so they receive the message visually as well as aurally.
Imitate a famous phrase. "Everyone knows the Golden Rule," says Duarte. "'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Well, an imitation of that famous phrase might be 'Never give a presentation you wouldn't want to sit through yourself.'"
"The future isn't just a place you'll go," says Duarte. "It's a place you will invent. Your ability to shape your future depends on how well you communicate where you want to be when you get there. When ideas are communicated effectively, people follow and change. Words that are carefully framed and spoken are the most powerful means of communication there is."
What do you think?
Today we are overwhelmed with messages. Some are just 140 characters long. Others are much longer, but they are constantly bombarding us—trying to lure us to acquire and consume information (then repeat the process over and over). Technology—social media specifically—allows for constant communication, but easy communication doesn't necessarily translate to messages that are received, understood, and capable of driving action.
At a time when people are tweeting, blogging, emailing, and more 24/7, the best way to genuinely connect and create change, says author and CEO Nancy Duarte, is via truly human, in-person presentations. She stresses that everyone in every company should know how to present and communicate that company's messages with clarity and passion.
"Great presentations are like magic," says Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design, author of the award-winning book Slide:ology, and author of the new book Resonate: Present Visual Stories That Transform Audiences.
"It takes a lot of work to breathe life into an idea. Spending energy to understand the audience and carefully crafting a message that resonates with them means committing time and discipline to the process. Think about it this way: You likely spend countless hours collaborating and innovating to put forth really good ideas. You should spend just as much energy ensuring they are delivered in a way that is impactful. The payoff is that learning how to present in a captivating way—be it at a formal event or to a client across the conference room table—can be your competitive edge in a business environment where too many companies are confusing communication with noise."
So how can you make sure you present information in a way that truly resonates?
"If people can easily recall, repeat, and transfer your message, you did a great job conveying it," says Duarte. "To achieve this, you should have a handful of succinct, clear, and repeatable sound bites planted in your presentation that people can effortlessly remember. A thoroughly considered sound bite can create a Something They'll Always Remember (S.T.A.R.) moment—not only for the people present in the audience but also for the ones who will encounter your presentation through broadcast or social media channels."
To help you get started creating presentations that really stick with your audiences, here are a few tips on how you can incorporate repeatable sound bites:
Create crisp messages. Picture each person you speak to as a little radio tower empowered to repeat your key concepts over and over. "Some of the most innocent-looking people have fifty thousand followers in their social networks," says Duarte. "When one sound bite is sent to their followers, it can get re-sent hundreds of thousands of times."
Craft a rally cry. Your rally cry will be a small, repeatable phrase that can become the slogan and rallying cry of the masses trying to promote your idea. President Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes We Can," originated from a speech during the primary elections.
Coordinate key phrases with the same language in your press materials. For presentations where the press is present, be sure to repeat critical messages verbatim from your press materials. "Doing so ensures that the press will pick up the right sound bites," explains Duarte. "The same is true for any camera crews who might be filming your presentation. Make sure you have at least a fifteen- to thirty-second message that is so salient it will be obvious to reporters that it should be featured in the broadcasts."
Use catchy words. Take time to carefully craft a few messages with catchy words. "For example, Neil Armstrong used the six hours and forty minutes between his moon landing and first step to craft his historic statement," says Duarte. "Phrases that have historical significance or become headlines don't just magically appear in the moment. They are mindfully planned."
Make them remember. Once you've crafted the message, there are three ways to ensure the audience remembers it: First, repeating the phrase more than once. Second, punctuating it with a pause that gives the audience time to write down exactly what you said. And finally, projecting the words on a slide so they receive the message visually as well as aurally.
Imitate a famous phrase. "Everyone knows the Golden Rule," says Duarte. "'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Well, an imitation of that famous phrase might be 'Never give a presentation you wouldn't want to sit through yourself.'"
"The future isn't just a place you'll go," says Duarte. "It's a place you will invent. Your ability to shape your future depends on how well you communicate where you want to be when you get there. When ideas are communicated effectively, people follow and change. Words that are carefully framed and spoken are the most powerful means of communication there is."
What do you think?
Friday, October 8, 2010
Calculating ERP TCO
By Erik Kass
It's no secret that ERP is a major investment. ERP systems are company-wide and have long-term implications for the financial, human resources and information technology departments and various other aspects of the business as a whole - which is why careful upfront planning is so critical.
Total cost of ownership, or TCO, analysis can help business owners determine how much it will really take to make their ERP implementation projects a success.
Undertaking ERP implementation can be a risky decision, but TCO analysis is designed to help mitigate that risk by preparing a company for all the costs of ERP ownership - not just the obvious ones.
When done right, a good TCO analysis will help companies separate a good ERP investment from a bad one. However, a high TCO doesn't necessarily signal a poor investment if the corresponding returns on that investment are high enough to offset the expenses. The ratio between costs and rewards is more important than the numbers alone.
TCO begins with an estimate of all the direct and indirect costs associated with ERP implementation, including the cost of the software itself, maintenance costs, operational expenses, upgrades and eventual replacement. Naturally, this necessarily involves making some projections and assumptions about the future, so to achieve the most accurate predictions possible, TCO analysis includes several alternative scenarios.
One industry that is heavily invested in TCO analysis is the automotive and transportation industry. Owning a vehicle comes with a few obvious costs - the initial cost of purchasing the car, for example - and a whole lot of hidden costs that accrue over time. First, just driving the vehicle out of the dealership results in a significant loss of value, which means that even if a car owner sold his or her vehicle mere days after purchasing it, he or she would not be able to sell it for the same value the dealer did. Second, owning a car comes with a lot of responsibility. Car owners need to pay for maintenance and check-ups, buy new tires every few years and of course pay for gasoline. All of these factors combine to give an estimated TCO for the cost of owning a car - and that figure going to be significantly more than the car's MSRP on the lot. A similar line of thinking can be applied to determine the cost of a business to own a jet or a yacht, for example.
The same principle goes for ERP software. The cost of owning an ERP system is likely to end up being significantly more than the sticker price on the software, but companies that understand, prepare for and budget for these expenses will find that their ERP systems save them a lot more money than they cost.
The basic tenet of TCO is this: You cannot manage what you do not measure.
There are five major components of TCO analysis - acquisition, implementation, operations, maintenance and replacement. These five components represent the five life-cycle stages of an ERP system, and each one is associated with specific costs. Understanding all of these costs - in other words, planning beyond simply the initial ERP software costs - is one of the best ways that companies can prepare themselves for ERP and better their chances of becoming an ERP success story.
A graph of these expenses often resembles the Nike "swoosh" logo. There is an initial peak in costs when the software is first purchased and implemented, a dip as it begins running smoothly, and then a steady rise as the system becomes older, requires more maintenance and is eventually replaced. This is the natural cost cycle of an ERP system, and budgeting accordingly will help businesses steer clear of any unpleasant cost surprises.
A second critical part of TCO analysis is determining the direct and indirect costs and risks associated with ERP systems, and managing and controlling these costs and risks accordingly. Direct or budgeted costs include anything paid to clients, servers, peripherals and networks, along with capital, fees and labor in each area. Indirect costs are things like downtime and service to end users - costs that can be hidden and difficult to measure.
Once all these costs and risks are known, TCO analysis conducts a series of what-if scenarios to determine the best implementation strategy that will yield the lowest cost of ownership and offer the highest potential reward with the fewest risks.
Evaluating the TCO is the first step to understanding the potential return on investment, or ROI. Once a company is prepared for all the expenses of ERP - from the software to the maintenance to the upgrades - it can begin reaping the significant financial benefits without worrying about unexpected costs.
Erik Kaas is Director of Product Management for Mid Market ERP products at Sage. He is responsible for managing the product line life cycle from strategic planning to tactical activities. Erik manages a team of product managers responsible for specifying market requirements for current and future products.
It's no secret that ERP is a major investment. ERP systems are company-wide and have long-term implications for the financial, human resources and information technology departments and various other aspects of the business as a whole - which is why careful upfront planning is so critical.
Total cost of ownership, or TCO, analysis can help business owners determine how much it will really take to make their ERP implementation projects a success.
Undertaking ERP implementation can be a risky decision, but TCO analysis is designed to help mitigate that risk by preparing a company for all the costs of ERP ownership - not just the obvious ones.
When done right, a good TCO analysis will help companies separate a good ERP investment from a bad one. However, a high TCO doesn't necessarily signal a poor investment if the corresponding returns on that investment are high enough to offset the expenses. The ratio between costs and rewards is more important than the numbers alone.
TCO begins with an estimate of all the direct and indirect costs associated with ERP implementation, including the cost of the software itself, maintenance costs, operational expenses, upgrades and eventual replacement. Naturally, this necessarily involves making some projections and assumptions about the future, so to achieve the most accurate predictions possible, TCO analysis includes several alternative scenarios.
One industry that is heavily invested in TCO analysis is the automotive and transportation industry. Owning a vehicle comes with a few obvious costs - the initial cost of purchasing the car, for example - and a whole lot of hidden costs that accrue over time. First, just driving the vehicle out of the dealership results in a significant loss of value, which means that even if a car owner sold his or her vehicle mere days after purchasing it, he or she would not be able to sell it for the same value the dealer did. Second, owning a car comes with a lot of responsibility. Car owners need to pay for maintenance and check-ups, buy new tires every few years and of course pay for gasoline. All of these factors combine to give an estimated TCO for the cost of owning a car - and that figure going to be significantly more than the car's MSRP on the lot. A similar line of thinking can be applied to determine the cost of a business to own a jet or a yacht, for example.
The same principle goes for ERP software. The cost of owning an ERP system is likely to end up being significantly more than the sticker price on the software, but companies that understand, prepare for and budget for these expenses will find that their ERP systems save them a lot more money than they cost.
The basic tenet of TCO is this: You cannot manage what you do not measure.
There are five major components of TCO analysis - acquisition, implementation, operations, maintenance and replacement. These five components represent the five life-cycle stages of an ERP system, and each one is associated with specific costs. Understanding all of these costs - in other words, planning beyond simply the initial ERP software costs - is one of the best ways that companies can prepare themselves for ERP and better their chances of becoming an ERP success story.
A graph of these expenses often resembles the Nike "swoosh" logo. There is an initial peak in costs when the software is first purchased and implemented, a dip as it begins running smoothly, and then a steady rise as the system becomes older, requires more maintenance and is eventually replaced. This is the natural cost cycle of an ERP system, and budgeting accordingly will help businesses steer clear of any unpleasant cost surprises.
A second critical part of TCO analysis is determining the direct and indirect costs and risks associated with ERP systems, and managing and controlling these costs and risks accordingly. Direct or budgeted costs include anything paid to clients, servers, peripherals and networks, along with capital, fees and labor in each area. Indirect costs are things like downtime and service to end users - costs that can be hidden and difficult to measure.
Once all these costs and risks are known, TCO analysis conducts a series of what-if scenarios to determine the best implementation strategy that will yield the lowest cost of ownership and offer the highest potential reward with the fewest risks.
Evaluating the TCO is the first step to understanding the potential return on investment, or ROI. Once a company is prepared for all the expenses of ERP - from the software to the maintenance to the upgrades - it can begin reaping the significant financial benefits without worrying about unexpected costs.
Erik Kaas is Director of Product Management for Mid Market ERP products at Sage. He is responsible for managing the product line life cycle from strategic planning to tactical activities. Erik manages a team of product managers responsible for specifying market requirements for current and future products.
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!
How Technology Came to Rule the Legal World
By James D. Shook, Esq.
Director of E-Discovery and Compliance
EMC Corporation
Ten years ago, few people, even lawyers, knew much about electronic discovery (e-discovery)—the process of finding, preserving, processing, and producing electronic information that is relevant to a legal dispute. Today, it’s difficult to find anyone who is not at least conversant with the concept, thanks to many high-profile cases and countless articles in both IT and legal journals. And yet even with all of the changes that we have already seen, the next ten years are likely to produce even more.
An extra “e” transforms “discovery”
The U.S. legal system requires that each party in a civil dispute provide the other party with all information, both good and bad, that is relevant to the case. This part of the litigation process is called discovery.
In the “old days”—which in technology terms means before 2000—the discovery process focused primarily on paper documents such as contracts, notes, files, and correspondence, including letters and memoranda. As businesses began using more technology, especially e-mail, the majority of that information shifted from paper to electronic format, and e-discovery was born.
The rules of discovery never specifically included—or excluded—electronic data, creating inconsistencies and confusion. To address this issue, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in December 2006 to specifically include electronic data, defined as electronically stored information or ESI. Although the FRCP only governs disputes in federal courts, it strongly influences state courts, and the rules spread quickly.
Almost overnight, IT systems such as e-mail servers became concerns for lawyers, many of whom are notoriously techno-phobic. Organizations that failed to meet their e-discovery obligations faced the risk of embarrassing and costly sanctions from the courts. Simply collecting and preserving everything was cost-prohibitive. A frequently cited study found that it costs almost $20,000 to have lawyers review a single gigabyte of data (which may seem reasonable since 1 GB represents about 75,000 pages). Extrapolating those costs across hundreds of gigabytes, or even a terabyte or more of data, scared most organizations—and they started looking for a better way to manage both the e-discovery process and their electronic information.
E-discovery strategies at work, today
Organizations that lead the way in e-discovery best practices are attacking the problem in two ways. First, by managing data more centrally and efficiently, they can responsibly delete data that has no value, or which they are under no obligation to retain. Not only does this practice improve the e-discovery process, but it also creates significant savings for storage, backup, and personnel costs.
The second part of this strategy is to bring some—or all—of the e-discovery process in-house. To do this, organizations are creating cross-functional teams that include both IT and Legal, and then deploying technologies that enable fast and efficient in-place search and collection of their ESI.
Yet even today there are many organizations that have done little to address these requirements. Because e-discovery is not a voluntary process, many unprepared organizations perform “faux e-discovery”—they attempt to meet their obligations, but in reality miss significant amounts of relevant data. In doing so, they are taking on significant risk, without understanding or acknowledging it. Other organizations that fail to prepare are forced to turn to expert (and expensive) third-party vendors, frequently spending several hundred thousand to well over a million dollars to respond to a single case—without any ongoing benefit.
More data, more technologies, more challenges, more solutions
The continuing explosion in the amount and varying types of data will continue to significantly impact the e-discovery landscape. With studies noting that we will have 35 zetabytes of data created by 2020, even good processes may be totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume.
In addition, technologies that enhance the speed and efficiency of communication and businesses processes continue to be developed—and they are usually not e-discovery-friendly. Social media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter are further blurring the line between personal and business data, which can be difficult for organizations to locate and preserve. Cloud computing can put a company’s data in the hands of a third party, sometimes in a different country or jurisdiction, which also makes e-discovery more difficult.
But technology is also likely to provide solutions, such as intelligent filtering and review of data. There are tools today that can classify and determine whether documents are relevant to a case based on their similarity to other relevant documents or other criteria. But those technologies are new and complex, and their acceptance in actual court proceedings is not assured.
With all of these issues on the horizon—and certainly more that we cannot yet predict—the next 10 years in e-discovery will be every bit as interesting as the last.
As director of e-discovery and compliance at EMC Corporation, James D. Shook, Esq. works with customers to help them solve challenges related to e-discovery, compliance and privacy. James is a long-time member of The Sedona Conference, a well-known legal think tank, and is an active contributor on several of its committees.
Director of E-Discovery and Compliance
EMC Corporation
Ten years ago, few people, even lawyers, knew much about electronic discovery (e-discovery)—the process of finding, preserving, processing, and producing electronic information that is relevant to a legal dispute. Today, it’s difficult to find anyone who is not at least conversant with the concept, thanks to many high-profile cases and countless articles in both IT and legal journals. And yet even with all of the changes that we have already seen, the next ten years are likely to produce even more.
An extra “e” transforms “discovery”
The U.S. legal system requires that each party in a civil dispute provide the other party with all information, both good and bad, that is relevant to the case. This part of the litigation process is called discovery.
In the “old days”—which in technology terms means before 2000—the discovery process focused primarily on paper documents such as contracts, notes, files, and correspondence, including letters and memoranda. As businesses began using more technology, especially e-mail, the majority of that information shifted from paper to electronic format, and e-discovery was born.
The rules of discovery never specifically included—or excluded—electronic data, creating inconsistencies and confusion. To address this issue, the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were amended in December 2006 to specifically include electronic data, defined as electronically stored information or ESI. Although the FRCP only governs disputes in federal courts, it strongly influences state courts, and the rules spread quickly.
Almost overnight, IT systems such as e-mail servers became concerns for lawyers, many of whom are notoriously techno-phobic. Organizations that failed to meet their e-discovery obligations faced the risk of embarrassing and costly sanctions from the courts. Simply collecting and preserving everything was cost-prohibitive. A frequently cited study found that it costs almost $20,000 to have lawyers review a single gigabyte of data (which may seem reasonable since 1 GB represents about 75,000 pages). Extrapolating those costs across hundreds of gigabytes, or even a terabyte or more of data, scared most organizations—and they started looking for a better way to manage both the e-discovery process and their electronic information.
E-discovery strategies at work, today
Organizations that lead the way in e-discovery best practices are attacking the problem in two ways. First, by managing data more centrally and efficiently, they can responsibly delete data that has no value, or which they are under no obligation to retain. Not only does this practice improve the e-discovery process, but it also creates significant savings for storage, backup, and personnel costs.
The second part of this strategy is to bring some—or all—of the e-discovery process in-house. To do this, organizations are creating cross-functional teams that include both IT and Legal, and then deploying technologies that enable fast and efficient in-place search and collection of their ESI.
Yet even today there are many organizations that have done little to address these requirements. Because e-discovery is not a voluntary process, many unprepared organizations perform “faux e-discovery”—they attempt to meet their obligations, but in reality miss significant amounts of relevant data. In doing so, they are taking on significant risk, without understanding or acknowledging it. Other organizations that fail to prepare are forced to turn to expert (and expensive) third-party vendors, frequently spending several hundred thousand to well over a million dollars to respond to a single case—without any ongoing benefit.
More data, more technologies, more challenges, more solutions
The continuing explosion in the amount and varying types of data will continue to significantly impact the e-discovery landscape. With studies noting that we will have 35 zetabytes of data created by 2020, even good processes may be totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume.
In addition, technologies that enhance the speed and efficiency of communication and businesses processes continue to be developed—and they are usually not e-discovery-friendly. Social media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter are further blurring the line between personal and business data, which can be difficult for organizations to locate and preserve. Cloud computing can put a company’s data in the hands of a third party, sometimes in a different country or jurisdiction, which also makes e-discovery more difficult.
But technology is also likely to provide solutions, such as intelligent filtering and review of data. There are tools today that can classify and determine whether documents are relevant to a case based on their similarity to other relevant documents or other criteria. But those technologies are new and complex, and their acceptance in actual court proceedings is not assured.
With all of these issues on the horizon—and certainly more that we cannot yet predict—the next 10 years in e-discovery will be every bit as interesting as the last.
As director of e-discovery and compliance at EMC Corporation, James D. Shook, Esq. works with customers to help them solve challenges related to e-discovery, compliance and privacy. James is a long-time member of The Sedona Conference, a well-known legal think tank, and is an active contributor on several of its committees.
Monday, September 13, 2010
How Do Apple, Ford, and Microsoft Survive In The New Economy While Others Crash?
Posted by Mark Brousseau
Six out of ten new businesses fail. Unemployment isn’t getting any better. The housing market is set for another bump in the road next quarter. And as if the cake needed icing, the FDIC is reporting that about half of America’s banks -- including the four largest -- are on the bubble, and may fail by the end of the year.
As serious people at serious companies are looking for answers to the dilemma, one expert wants them to focus on a principle that is often overlooked in hard times: innovation.
“The equation is simple: innovate or perish,” says Robert Brands, a veteran corporate executive. “At every major crossroads in the history of American business, innovation has been the driving force behind the companies that made it through the bad times. After all, as we all look for the hot new product or the ‘killer app’ in our respective industries and professions, we tend to overlook the fact that someone has to create or invent it first.”
Brands believes that innovation is the governing philosophy behind companies that succeed.
“Whether it is a multinational corporation or an entrepreneurial startup, innovation can help a business launch, recover or overcome even the greatest of competitive pressures,” he adds. “If you are a manufacturer, distributor, service provider, supplier, retailer or even a not-for-profit, the pressures of the new economy are worse than anything the business world has seen for decades. So, how do you get through it? Look at the companies that are prospering, despite the economy. Apple, Ford, Microsoft and others didn’t stand pat as the economy crashed. They reinvented themselves and their product and service lines. After falling behind to Japanese competition amid the GM bailouts, Ford went back to the drawing board on their line of cars and emerged stronger than before, having one of their best quarters ever. It wasn’t layoffs or the mitigation of risk that accomplished that. It was innovation, creating something new to satisfy its customer base.”
Brands wants people to expand their notion of innovation.
“When people think of innovation, many of them think of simple brainstorming for ideas,” he adds. “This is a fallacy. Brainstorming is just one small element of a much larger process. Innovation is NOT a tactic. It is a process, and if businesspeople follow the right steps, they can achieve innovation regularly -- not just when someone slips on the soap in the shower and the next killer app just comes to them as they put ice on the bruise on their head.”
Brands recommends some rules to govern that process.
“For instance, everyone wants to achieve that ‘a-ha’ moment, when they think they’ve struck upon an idea that could be big for their company,” he says. “Part of it centers on recognizing a need in the market place, but then combining all the elements and resources within your company to see if you have the ability to leverage existing research, development, contacts and distribution to fill that need. For instance, the iPod was an innovation that came about from Apple’s examination of the consumer’s desire to buy single songs instead of whole CDs, and the record industry’s inability to leverage the Internet as a viable delivery medium. Now, in reality, the process was far more complex than that simple sentence, but the essence of the process is there. The key to making innovation a profit center is to be able to sustain it through the entire life cycle of a business."
Brands concludes that, "innovation should not be a one-shot deal.”
Six out of ten new businesses fail. Unemployment isn’t getting any better. The housing market is set for another bump in the road next quarter. And as if the cake needed icing, the FDIC is reporting that about half of America’s banks -- including the four largest -- are on the bubble, and may fail by the end of the year.
As serious people at serious companies are looking for answers to the dilemma, one expert wants them to focus on a principle that is often overlooked in hard times: innovation.
“The equation is simple: innovate or perish,” says Robert Brands, a veteran corporate executive. “At every major crossroads in the history of American business, innovation has been the driving force behind the companies that made it through the bad times. After all, as we all look for the hot new product or the ‘killer app’ in our respective industries and professions, we tend to overlook the fact that someone has to create or invent it first.”
Brands believes that innovation is the governing philosophy behind companies that succeed.
“Whether it is a multinational corporation or an entrepreneurial startup, innovation can help a business launch, recover or overcome even the greatest of competitive pressures,” he adds. “If you are a manufacturer, distributor, service provider, supplier, retailer or even a not-for-profit, the pressures of the new economy are worse than anything the business world has seen for decades. So, how do you get through it? Look at the companies that are prospering, despite the economy. Apple, Ford, Microsoft and others didn’t stand pat as the economy crashed. They reinvented themselves and their product and service lines. After falling behind to Japanese competition amid the GM bailouts, Ford went back to the drawing board on their line of cars and emerged stronger than before, having one of their best quarters ever. It wasn’t layoffs or the mitigation of risk that accomplished that. It was innovation, creating something new to satisfy its customer base.”
Brands wants people to expand their notion of innovation.
“When people think of innovation, many of them think of simple brainstorming for ideas,” he adds. “This is a fallacy. Brainstorming is just one small element of a much larger process. Innovation is NOT a tactic. It is a process, and if businesspeople follow the right steps, they can achieve innovation regularly -- not just when someone slips on the soap in the shower and the next killer app just comes to them as they put ice on the bruise on their head.”
Brands recommends some rules to govern that process.
“For instance, everyone wants to achieve that ‘a-ha’ moment, when they think they’ve struck upon an idea that could be big for their company,” he says. “Part of it centers on recognizing a need in the market place, but then combining all the elements and resources within your company to see if you have the ability to leverage existing research, development, contacts and distribution to fill that need. For instance, the iPod was an innovation that came about from Apple’s examination of the consumer’s desire to buy single songs instead of whole CDs, and the record industry’s inability to leverage the Internet as a viable delivery medium. Now, in reality, the process was far more complex than that simple sentence, but the essence of the process is there. The key to making innovation a profit center is to be able to sustain it through the entire life cycle of a business."
Brands concludes that, "innovation should not be a one-shot deal.”
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!
Saturday, September 4, 2010
(Fr)agile Software Development
By Vijay Balakrishnan, president of StratEx, LLC (vijay.balakrishnan90@gmail.com)
Much of our world is made possible by software. There are myriad software systems that manage and move our money, keep track of our health histories, light our homes and offices, and indeed even enable you to read this post. While the sheer scale of accomplishment from zeros and ones flitting about at the speed of light is astounding, the manner in which some of these systems are developed, tested, and delivered raises a few questions.
Over the falls in a barrel. The early years of evolution in software development owed much to needs of the defense and aerospace industries. These were highly mission-critical systems that had to work correctly almost ten times out of ten. A linear process that involved detailed specifications, technical designs, strict coding discipline, reviews, and rigorous testing ensured the delivery of many high performance systems.
A version of this made its way into the commercial marketplace under the broad "waterfall process" moniker. The series of hand-offs, from product management, to architecture, design, development and testing, with intermediate review cycles, hearkened a series of waterfalls as in a cataract. While the process worked well for the most part, it lacked speed. The many steps limited organizations to one or two releases to the marketplace a year. It was difficult to nimbly respond to competitive and regulatory changes. If changes were not included early enough in the cycle, it was tantamount to missing an exit on a tollway, and waiting for the next one.
Sprints around the racetrack. In the 1970's, the automotive industry introduced the concept of "simultaneous engineering", where design engineers, manufacturing engineers, and quality control worked together in teams. As opposed to the linear, "throw it over the transom" model, this engendered both speed and sharing of ideas. That germ of an idea made its way into software as Agile Development. While there are many agile methodologies, the general concept is that specifiers, programmers, and testers work together in short, iterative, "sprints" to produce executable software. Over multiple sprints, complete, ready-to-release applications can be built.
Lost in translation. While agile development has made it possible to release software more frequently, a few challenges have appeared on the way to nirvana. To the agile purists, I will grant that many of these have to do with incorrect interpretation and implementation, and perhaps not because of fundamental drawbacks in the methodologies. The challenges are amplified when you add offshore development where the advantage of co-located teams disappears. They are also most acute when software is developed for General Availability to a large and varied customer base, as opposed to internal use within an enterprise. Here are some of the pitfalls I have observed over the years:
What we have here is a failure to communicate. With apologies to "Cool Hand Luke", one of the main complaints I have seen is, "We don't know what is coming, and when!" We have moved from exhaustive, written requirements to writing nothing down. The refrain is that the sprint teams communicate with each other, and are on top of release content. Some will add that everything can be discerned from documentation within the code. The problem is that there are many stakeholders outside the sprint team, such as sales, marketing, professional services, and support. These people are not adept at reading code, and think in terms of functions and applications, as opposed to individual features. The result often is that market facing groups either oversell or undersell the product (more often the former!).
Who's on first? While sprint teams are cohesive and democratic, the flip side is that it can result in no one at the helm. While the methodologies call for a "function customer" who signs off on software content and quality, this role is often missing in action. Either the role is completely absent, or it is relegated to a Product Manager who is more of a Product Marketer than someone who can go head-to-head with a technician. In the absence of this key role, many cooks jump in to influence the software broth in one direction or the other, resulting in content churn. The process is agile yes, but highly unstable.
Tried and tested. Agile methodologies like test driven development put testing and quality at the center of the process. In practice, however, quality often ends up getting the short end of the stick. The very expectation of agility can compress timelines due to unrealistic promises made to customers. In the rush to "get it out of the door", thorough testing is skipped, and some vendors essentially do their quality assurance on the customer's dime, by continuously band-aiding software at the customer site until it works. In extreme cases, this becomes a license to hack with little regard to version control, belying the very concept of "General Availability". While poor quality is not limited to agile methods, the less rigid process restrictions can exacerbate the tendency in organizations that already have a culture of treating quality lightly.
Customs and traditions. In organizations that cater to customers of varied sizes, the concept of General Availability can be turned on its head. There is often the case of a large customer that wants software customized to meet a unique need. There are very few vendors that have the discipline to examine whether that particular capability warrants inclusion in the software delivered to the general marketplace. The path of least resistance is to include it as a base capability that is "configurable". Over time, the preponderance of configurable customizations makes the software incredibly difficult to implement and support. Again, the lack of a process to adjudicate the "base versus custom" question can result in a multi-headed Hydra, with hidden heads that can appear to bite you when you least expect it.
Distant shores. Every one of the problems discussed explode in complexity when offshore development is involved. The communication challenge now includes time zones, national cultures, and language. The concept of sprint teams working in iterations is predicated on the concept of co-located personnel who can discuss, white-board, and resolve questions face-to-face. Getting this done with people somewhere else on the planet is very difficult, and contributes to hidden costs in offshore development that can obliterate the wage differential in the early stages of the offshore journey. The challenge can be overcome, but it takes special focus and attention to drive out the inefficiencies.
Brave new world. The benefits of agile development have ensured that it is here to stay in most environments. The word to the wise is that getting it to work right involves recognizing the pitfalls, and addressing them involving the right stakeholders. I would not be surprised if many of you recognized your organizations in some of the challenges I have outlined. It is important to recognize that getting software development to work is not just the purview of the programmers alone. Someone said, "War is too important to be left to the generals". If you'll allow the stretch, let me end by saying, "Software is too important to be left to programmers, and methodologies."
What do you think?
Much of our world is made possible by software. There are myriad software systems that manage and move our money, keep track of our health histories, light our homes and offices, and indeed even enable you to read this post. While the sheer scale of accomplishment from zeros and ones flitting about at the speed of light is astounding, the manner in which some of these systems are developed, tested, and delivered raises a few questions.
Over the falls in a barrel. The early years of evolution in software development owed much to needs of the defense and aerospace industries. These were highly mission-critical systems that had to work correctly almost ten times out of ten. A linear process that involved detailed specifications, technical designs, strict coding discipline, reviews, and rigorous testing ensured the delivery of many high performance systems.
A version of this made its way into the commercial marketplace under the broad "waterfall process" moniker. The series of hand-offs, from product management, to architecture, design, development and testing, with intermediate review cycles, hearkened a series of waterfalls as in a cataract. While the process worked well for the most part, it lacked speed. The many steps limited organizations to one or two releases to the marketplace a year. It was difficult to nimbly respond to competitive and regulatory changes. If changes were not included early enough in the cycle, it was tantamount to missing an exit on a tollway, and waiting for the next one.
Sprints around the racetrack. In the 1970's, the automotive industry introduced the concept of "simultaneous engineering", where design engineers, manufacturing engineers, and quality control worked together in teams. As opposed to the linear, "throw it over the transom" model, this engendered both speed and sharing of ideas. That germ of an idea made its way into software as Agile Development. While there are many agile methodologies, the general concept is that specifiers, programmers, and testers work together in short, iterative, "sprints" to produce executable software. Over multiple sprints, complete, ready-to-release applications can be built.
Lost in translation. While agile development has made it possible to release software more frequently, a few challenges have appeared on the way to nirvana. To the agile purists, I will grant that many of these have to do with incorrect interpretation and implementation, and perhaps not because of fundamental drawbacks in the methodologies. The challenges are amplified when you add offshore development where the advantage of co-located teams disappears. They are also most acute when software is developed for General Availability to a large and varied customer base, as opposed to internal use within an enterprise. Here are some of the pitfalls I have observed over the years:
What we have here is a failure to communicate. With apologies to "Cool Hand Luke", one of the main complaints I have seen is, "We don't know what is coming, and when!" We have moved from exhaustive, written requirements to writing nothing down. The refrain is that the sprint teams communicate with each other, and are on top of release content. Some will add that everything can be discerned from documentation within the code. The problem is that there are many stakeholders outside the sprint team, such as sales, marketing, professional services, and support. These people are not adept at reading code, and think in terms of functions and applications, as opposed to individual features. The result often is that market facing groups either oversell or undersell the product (more often the former!).
Who's on first? While sprint teams are cohesive and democratic, the flip side is that it can result in no one at the helm. While the methodologies call for a "function customer" who signs off on software content and quality, this role is often missing in action. Either the role is completely absent, or it is relegated to a Product Manager who is more of a Product Marketer than someone who can go head-to-head with a technician. In the absence of this key role, many cooks jump in to influence the software broth in one direction or the other, resulting in content churn. The process is agile yes, but highly unstable.
Tried and tested. Agile methodologies like test driven development put testing and quality at the center of the process. In practice, however, quality often ends up getting the short end of the stick. The very expectation of agility can compress timelines due to unrealistic promises made to customers. In the rush to "get it out of the door", thorough testing is skipped, and some vendors essentially do their quality assurance on the customer's dime, by continuously band-aiding software at the customer site until it works. In extreme cases, this becomes a license to hack with little regard to version control, belying the very concept of "General Availability". While poor quality is not limited to agile methods, the less rigid process restrictions can exacerbate the tendency in organizations that already have a culture of treating quality lightly.
Customs and traditions. In organizations that cater to customers of varied sizes, the concept of General Availability can be turned on its head. There is often the case of a large customer that wants software customized to meet a unique need. There are very few vendors that have the discipline to examine whether that particular capability warrants inclusion in the software delivered to the general marketplace. The path of least resistance is to include it as a base capability that is "configurable". Over time, the preponderance of configurable customizations makes the software incredibly difficult to implement and support. Again, the lack of a process to adjudicate the "base versus custom" question can result in a multi-headed Hydra, with hidden heads that can appear to bite you when you least expect it.
Distant shores. Every one of the problems discussed explode in complexity when offshore development is involved. The communication challenge now includes time zones, national cultures, and language. The concept of sprint teams working in iterations is predicated on the concept of co-located personnel who can discuss, white-board, and resolve questions face-to-face. Getting this done with people somewhere else on the planet is very difficult, and contributes to hidden costs in offshore development that can obliterate the wage differential in the early stages of the offshore journey. The challenge can be overcome, but it takes special focus and attention to drive out the inefficiencies.
Brave new world. The benefits of agile development have ensured that it is here to stay in most environments. The word to the wise is that getting it to work right involves recognizing the pitfalls, and addressing them involving the right stakeholders. I would not be surprised if many of you recognized your organizations in some of the challenges I have outlined. It is important to recognize that getting software development to work is not just the purview of the programmers alone. Someone said, "War is too important to be left to the generals". If you'll allow the stretch, let me end by saying, "Software is too important to be left to programmers, and methodologies."
What do you think?
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?
The buck stops here: the role of CEOs in data security
Ray Bryant, CEO of idappcom explains why the big chair in most organizations can carry a lot more responsibility than you might think:
You would never consider purchasing an inferior accounting system that opens your organization up to financial loss through bad record keeping - potentially putting it out of business and generating the wrath of shareholders and other stakeholders this would cause.
Yet many managers will cheerfully purchase an inferior, but lower-cost, IT security defense system for their company, and later regret that purchase when hackers successfully compromise their firm's data, ruining the firm's reputation and opening it up to financial penalties that could well put it out of business.
Welcome to the business horror that is a data breach.
As with all technology-driven issues, to make a decision on which IT security system to go with, the CEO (and his team) must first understand where the problem is - in this case, where a data breach originates.
While the popular media perception is that IT security defenses are there to protect an organization's digital assets from external attack, the reality is that a large number of incidents are the result of internal threats compromising the firm's data. However, a quick scan through the constant stream of media reports about the unfortunate companies - and their equally unfortunate senior managers - who are put through the data breach wringer, will frequently reveal that the data breach was due to an internal hack.
Beware, internal does NOT always mean the person is physically in your premises. It just means they are internal to your systems. More and more cases revolve around a hacker gaining entry through ‘back doors’ into your computer, they could be anywhere on the net certainly outside your jurisdiction even if you ‘caught’ them.
But it gets worse, as an increasingly common hacker methodology is to crack the security of one company and use that system as a launch pad to hack into other systems. Ever had an email returned “undeliverable” and you did not send it? You’ve been hacked and probably been sending emails with attacks/backdoors in them to your entire contact list, and a list the attacker wanted to send to. You may now be a spammer as well.
The liability for all attacks including ‘secondary’ attacks lies with the CEO who has allowed - either directly or indirectly - his/her company systems to be misused in this manner.
The problem of inter-linked computer systems is a growing one, as the larger the company, the more reliance it places on computers and connections. These connections are the lifeblood of the cybercriminals, who tap into the fact that the privilege levels of user IDs that interconnect with third-party systems invariably tend to be higher than direct external accounts. Put simply, this means that an internal account from company A will have a much greater degree of access to company B's computer systems than an individual’s external account to company B's systems.
It's all about trust - as today's IT professionals will confirm, the interconnectivity between companies is now so pervasive it increases the risk profile of inter-system IDs to much higher levels than most people are aware of. This is the stuff that lawsuits are made of and can you guess who carries the can for these problems? That's right - the CEO and his/her senior management.
In many `hacked' systems, a risk analysis/penetration test - no matter what the size of company concerned - would normally have revealed the weaknesses in its security that the hacker(s) exploited. Questions that are asked by a risk assessor include what are the system's entry points and what data is accessible, and, of course, whether fraudulent transactions can be originated.
Issues addressed by the risk assessor include whether the data is classified, and what levels of protection are used in which areas of the system. Other topics up for discussion include whether the organisation has the level of expertise available, internally or externally, that understands the security requirements, and whether the security devices are configured to meet the organizational needs.
We often find that following a data breach, it becomes apparent that not only was the organisation's security lacking and poorly configured, but there is often a lack of understanding amongst senior management as to what the role of IT security is within the business. This brings us back to the popular misconception that IT security systems are there to protect the company IT resources against external attacks, ranging from fraudsters all the way to cybercriminal phishing attack vectors.
The reality, as our research team has discovered, is that fraud normally comes from the inside - either a rogue employee generates the fraud or, increasingly, a hacker who has got through a security device and installed a backdoor on the system that now allows them to freely move around, monitor and appear to be an internal person. You don’t know they are there until it’s too late.
One of the most interesting aspects of dissecting a given security breach is how often, apart from the breach itself, the hacker has been able to get inside the company's IT systems. This has the potential to be even more damaging than it may at first appear because in the build up to the fraud and subsequent data breach, most cybercriminals operate in `stealth mode' and can therefore milk the company's finances for a lengthy period before they are rumbled by conventional IT audit methodologies. This means that, for almost all organizations, enhancing the IT security of the company - by ensuring it is maintained as up to date as automatically possible - is an absolute necessity, and not the IT luxury that many senior managers perceive it to be.
Put simply, this means that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, pounds or Euros on a security system, plugging it in and switching it on - then presuming your company is secure - is a totally inadequate approach, because it usually results in relatively poor levels of protection for your organisation as the threats from criminals are constantly changing. Configuration, constant evaluation and constant updating of security rules are essential to the IT security of a business. Of course, the degree to which protection is needed is a matter of balancing risk and cost, and this equation is a unique business decision as with any other senior management process.
Assuming that the ROI charts have been prepared and the risk analysis process completed, the next step on the road to deploying effective IT security is to ensure it is working properly, and stays that way. This is a stumbling block that many companies fall at, as frequent verification checks on the efficiency - and efficacy - of an IT security platform need to be made. Whatever the system - and whatever the smoke and mirrors from the 'theory' sellers - there is only one way to validate against KNOWN threats, and that is to play those threats in a controlled way, through the company's actual live prevention set-up. Test, review, and test again - not in the lab, but in a real business environment, where actual threats exist and can be tested against. It's my supposition that a good CEO should also look for the IT teams ability to not only define the threat but also have a solution that can be deployed to meet that threat in as short a timeframe as possible.
Our own tests suggest, in fact, that one of the most popular (free) security systems will spot very few threats without the necessary configuration, and new security rules issued by the vendor each month represent about 10% of the actual new, very relevant, threats that appear each month. This issue arises because configuration needs a method of evaluation to ensure its efficacy and, in the event that faults are discovered during the review process, to allow the configuration to be revised and new rules introduced to remediate the problem; immediately not months later.
In an ideal world, it would be possible to remediate all threats, but in the real world, this would significantly slow the IT system down, meaning that a compromise between threat checking and system performance is usually required. By using an optimum configuration validation system, you can get the best of both worlds. The amount of IT security your organisation actually needs can only be judged by an effective risk analysis process, followed by a cost/benefit exercise.
It's also worth noting that in most countries - particularly the US and member states of Europe - there is now clear legislation and/or good corporate governance requirements that make the CEO clearly responsible for any security breaches.
CEOs are not only responsible for the effect of attacks to their own IT systems, but they are responsible for hackers who use their system to attack others. The growing trend for major corporations systems - particularly in manufacturing and distribution - to link their computers together using electronic data interchange (EDI) systems, with very little manual intervention, opens yet another `backdoor' for hackers to spread their activities. As with any pain, it comes after the attack. Your defences need to be up at all times, not just when audited or it will be the audit that shows you where you may have been slowly bleeding to death.
What do you think?
You would never consider purchasing an inferior accounting system that opens your organization up to financial loss through bad record keeping - potentially putting it out of business and generating the wrath of shareholders and other stakeholders this would cause.
Yet many managers will cheerfully purchase an inferior, but lower-cost, IT security defense system for their company, and later regret that purchase when hackers successfully compromise their firm's data, ruining the firm's reputation and opening it up to financial penalties that could well put it out of business.
Welcome to the business horror that is a data breach.
As with all technology-driven issues, to make a decision on which IT security system to go with, the CEO (and his team) must first understand where the problem is - in this case, where a data breach originates.
While the popular media perception is that IT security defenses are there to protect an organization's digital assets from external attack, the reality is that a large number of incidents are the result of internal threats compromising the firm's data. However, a quick scan through the constant stream of media reports about the unfortunate companies - and their equally unfortunate senior managers - who are put through the data breach wringer, will frequently reveal that the data breach was due to an internal hack.
Beware, internal does NOT always mean the person is physically in your premises. It just means they are internal to your systems. More and more cases revolve around a hacker gaining entry through ‘back doors’ into your computer, they could be anywhere on the net certainly outside your jurisdiction even if you ‘caught’ them.
But it gets worse, as an increasingly common hacker methodology is to crack the security of one company and use that system as a launch pad to hack into other systems. Ever had an email returned “undeliverable” and you did not send it? You’ve been hacked and probably been sending emails with attacks/backdoors in them to your entire contact list, and a list the attacker wanted to send to. You may now be a spammer as well.
The liability for all attacks including ‘secondary’ attacks lies with the CEO who has allowed - either directly or indirectly - his/her company systems to be misused in this manner.
The problem of inter-linked computer systems is a growing one, as the larger the company, the more reliance it places on computers and connections. These connections are the lifeblood of the cybercriminals, who tap into the fact that the privilege levels of user IDs that interconnect with third-party systems invariably tend to be higher than direct external accounts. Put simply, this means that an internal account from company A will have a much greater degree of access to company B's computer systems than an individual’s external account to company B's systems.
It's all about trust - as today's IT professionals will confirm, the interconnectivity between companies is now so pervasive it increases the risk profile of inter-system IDs to much higher levels than most people are aware of. This is the stuff that lawsuits are made of and can you guess who carries the can for these problems? That's right - the CEO and his/her senior management.
In many `hacked' systems, a risk analysis/penetration test - no matter what the size of company concerned - would normally have revealed the weaknesses in its security that the hacker(s) exploited. Questions that are asked by a risk assessor include what are the system's entry points and what data is accessible, and, of course, whether fraudulent transactions can be originated.
Issues addressed by the risk assessor include whether the data is classified, and what levels of protection are used in which areas of the system. Other topics up for discussion include whether the organisation has the level of expertise available, internally or externally, that understands the security requirements, and whether the security devices are configured to meet the organizational needs.
We often find that following a data breach, it becomes apparent that not only was the organisation's security lacking and poorly configured, but there is often a lack of understanding amongst senior management as to what the role of IT security is within the business. This brings us back to the popular misconception that IT security systems are there to protect the company IT resources against external attacks, ranging from fraudsters all the way to cybercriminal phishing attack vectors.
The reality, as our research team has discovered, is that fraud normally comes from the inside - either a rogue employee generates the fraud or, increasingly, a hacker who has got through a security device and installed a backdoor on the system that now allows them to freely move around, monitor and appear to be an internal person. You don’t know they are there until it’s too late.
One of the most interesting aspects of dissecting a given security breach is how often, apart from the breach itself, the hacker has been able to get inside the company's IT systems. This has the potential to be even more damaging than it may at first appear because in the build up to the fraud and subsequent data breach, most cybercriminals operate in `stealth mode' and can therefore milk the company's finances for a lengthy period before they are rumbled by conventional IT audit methodologies. This means that, for almost all organizations, enhancing the IT security of the company - by ensuring it is maintained as up to date as automatically possible - is an absolute necessity, and not the IT luxury that many senior managers perceive it to be.
Put simply, this means that spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, pounds or Euros on a security system, plugging it in and switching it on - then presuming your company is secure - is a totally inadequate approach, because it usually results in relatively poor levels of protection for your organisation as the threats from criminals are constantly changing. Configuration, constant evaluation and constant updating of security rules are essential to the IT security of a business. Of course, the degree to which protection is needed is a matter of balancing risk and cost, and this equation is a unique business decision as with any other senior management process.
Assuming that the ROI charts have been prepared and the risk analysis process completed, the next step on the road to deploying effective IT security is to ensure it is working properly, and stays that way. This is a stumbling block that many companies fall at, as frequent verification checks on the efficiency - and efficacy - of an IT security platform need to be made. Whatever the system - and whatever the smoke and mirrors from the 'theory' sellers - there is only one way to validate against KNOWN threats, and that is to play those threats in a controlled way, through the company's actual live prevention set-up. Test, review, and test again - not in the lab, but in a real business environment, where actual threats exist and can be tested against. It's my supposition that a good CEO should also look for the IT teams ability to not only define the threat but also have a solution that can be deployed to meet that threat in as short a timeframe as possible.
Our own tests suggest, in fact, that one of the most popular (free) security systems will spot very few threats without the necessary configuration, and new security rules issued by the vendor each month represent about 10% of the actual new, very relevant, threats that appear each month. This issue arises because configuration needs a method of evaluation to ensure its efficacy and, in the event that faults are discovered during the review process, to allow the configuration to be revised and new rules introduced to remediate the problem; immediately not months later.
In an ideal world, it would be possible to remediate all threats, but in the real world, this would significantly slow the IT system down, meaning that a compromise between threat checking and system performance is usually required. By using an optimum configuration validation system, you can get the best of both worlds. The amount of IT security your organisation actually needs can only be judged by an effective risk analysis process, followed by a cost/benefit exercise.
It's also worth noting that in most countries - particularly the US and member states of Europe - there is now clear legislation and/or good corporate governance requirements that make the CEO clearly responsible for any security breaches.
CEOs are not only responsible for the effect of attacks to their own IT systems, but they are responsible for hackers who use their system to attack others. The growing trend for major corporations systems - particularly in manufacturing and distribution - to link their computers together using electronic data interchange (EDI) systems, with very little manual intervention, opens yet another `backdoor' for hackers to spread their activities. As with any pain, it comes after the attack. Your defences need to be up at all times, not just when audited or it will be the audit that shows you where you may have been slowly bleeding to death.
What do you think?
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Waiting for the LightSwitch to Go On
By Roy Chomko, President, Adage Technologies
Microsoft’s VSLive2010 event was recently held in Orlando, FL. This yearly developer’s event is all about development in the Visual Studio environment, and one of the big announcements this year was the launch date for Visual Studio LightSwitch. LightSwitch is a Rapid Development environment that will allow technical and somewhat-technical people the ability to create light weight Line of Business applications. While many developers don’t think LightSwitch will be useful for creating apps, we think it can be very beneficial to use in the right circumstances. Here are some reasons why.
Right-Sized vs Enterprise Ready
In recent years there has been a growing philosophy that everything needs to be enterprise ready. The prevailing thought is all solutions need to be scalable, flexible, anything-able. While that is true for anything that really does need to be enterprise ready, there are situations where enterprise ready is TOO much. Imagine you are a small start up. You are not focused on enterprise ready. You are focused on getting through your first year. Alternately, you might be an established organization that is considering getting into a new line of business.
Focusing on getting something up and running to let your employees share information in a cost effective way would ensure you are not risking valuable resources (i.e., capital). In today’s economy capital budgets are limited, and in some companies non-existent.
Best of Both Worlds
Traditionally, we have seen tools such as Access, Excel, and more recently SharePoint act as a useful starting point for a low cost prototype. The best thing that can be said of those initial forays in developing Line of Business applications is that usually all of the necessary data points have been identified and that there is a working prototype. We find that having a working prototype when starting an enterprise application development effort is immeasurably helpful.
While Access and Excel solutions do provide value when moving to the next level of maturation, LightSwitch can provide even more. Since LightSwitch can connect to Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases, the application can utilize either of those databases during the initial development. LightSwitch also generates an ADO.Net EntityFramework class structure that can be used in the next iteration of development. Finally, the interface is rendered to a Silverlight application.
Recently, we had a customer request a simple application for generating quotes for customers and tracking them in a web format. Taking this use case, we decided to give LightSwitch a go. We were able to build a working prototype for the need within 4 hours, complete with the database tables, class structure, and Silverlight interface. Normally this would have taken close to 40 hours to get to the same point in a traditional web development environment.
Efficiency vs. Maturation
Some people point out that if this right-Sized application is successful that it will need to be rebuilt, usually from the ground up. While this is mostly true, it’s relevant to restate that having a working prototype does reduce the risk (risk = time + money) in starting a new application.
So would it be more efficient to build the enterprise ready version of the application first? The assumption there is that you are going to get the application right the first time. Or that the application will be used for a period of time to recover its ROI. But aren’t those two very big assumptions?
Furthermore, aren’t those two very expensive assumptions?
Also, it’s relevant to say that enterprise software endeavors are never guaranteed successes. We all know the high rate of failure for traditional development, whether it is done using an agile or waterfall approach. As noted in a recent Gartner report, approximately 50% of all features are either never used or rarely used. Why not develop those features inexpensively first and then decide what needs to be in your final application? These are the types of benefits Microsoft’s LightSwitch can provide, making it something to consider moving forward.
Adage Technologies is a Chicago-based web and software development company. In 2001, Roy co-founded Adage Technologies combining a passion for technology and the desire to build a company focused on driving business value through web technology. As President, Roy's energy and customer centric approach have helped to grow Adage to a well respected web and software development firm.
Roy has over 20 years of experience in technology sales, consulting, and development. Prior to founding Adage, Roy was a principle of a Cisco VAR and a web development firm in the late 1990s. Roy has also held business development positions with Wolfram Research and GE Capital.
Microsoft’s VSLive2010 event was recently held in Orlando, FL. This yearly developer’s event is all about development in the Visual Studio environment, and one of the big announcements this year was the launch date for Visual Studio LightSwitch. LightSwitch is a Rapid Development environment that will allow technical and somewhat-technical people the ability to create light weight Line of Business applications. While many developers don’t think LightSwitch will be useful for creating apps, we think it can be very beneficial to use in the right circumstances. Here are some reasons why.
Right-Sized vs Enterprise Ready
In recent years there has been a growing philosophy that everything needs to be enterprise ready. The prevailing thought is all solutions need to be scalable, flexible, anything-able. While that is true for anything that really does need to be enterprise ready, there are situations where enterprise ready is TOO much. Imagine you are a small start up. You are not focused on enterprise ready. You are focused on getting through your first year. Alternately, you might be an established organization that is considering getting into a new line of business.
Focusing on getting something up and running to let your employees share information in a cost effective way would ensure you are not risking valuable resources (i.e., capital). In today’s economy capital budgets are limited, and in some companies non-existent.
Best of Both Worlds
Traditionally, we have seen tools such as Access, Excel, and more recently SharePoint act as a useful starting point for a low cost prototype. The best thing that can be said of those initial forays in developing Line of Business applications is that usually all of the necessary data points have been identified and that there is a working prototype. We find that having a working prototype when starting an enterprise application development effort is immeasurably helpful.
While Access and Excel solutions do provide value when moving to the next level of maturation, LightSwitch can provide even more. Since LightSwitch can connect to Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle databases, the application can utilize either of those databases during the initial development. LightSwitch also generates an ADO.Net EntityFramework class structure that can be used in the next iteration of development. Finally, the interface is rendered to a Silverlight application.
Recently, we had a customer request a simple application for generating quotes for customers and tracking them in a web format. Taking this use case, we decided to give LightSwitch a go. We were able to build a working prototype for the need within 4 hours, complete with the database tables, class structure, and Silverlight interface. Normally this would have taken close to 40 hours to get to the same point in a traditional web development environment.
Efficiency vs. Maturation
Some people point out that if this right-Sized application is successful that it will need to be rebuilt, usually from the ground up. While this is mostly true, it’s relevant to restate that having a working prototype does reduce the risk (risk = time + money) in starting a new application.
So would it be more efficient to build the enterprise ready version of the application first? The assumption there is that you are going to get the application right the first time. Or that the application will be used for a period of time to recover its ROI. But aren’t those two very big assumptions?
Furthermore, aren’t those two very expensive assumptions?
Also, it’s relevant to say that enterprise software endeavors are never guaranteed successes. We all know the high rate of failure for traditional development, whether it is done using an agile or waterfall approach. As noted in a recent Gartner report, approximately 50% of all features are either never used or rarely used. Why not develop those features inexpensively first and then decide what needs to be in your final application? These are the types of benefits Microsoft’s LightSwitch can provide, making it something to consider moving forward.
Adage Technologies is a Chicago-based web and software development company. In 2001, Roy co-founded Adage Technologies combining a passion for technology and the desire to build a company focused on driving business value through web technology. As President, Roy's energy and customer centric approach have helped to grow Adage to a well respected web and software development firm.
Roy has over 20 years of experience in technology sales, consulting, and development. Prior to founding Adage, Roy was a principle of a Cisco VAR and a web development firm in the late 1990s. Roy has also held business development positions with Wolfram Research and GE Capital.
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.
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