Digital Landfill

Call for Presentations - New #AIIM Conference 2012 – Managing Information in a Social, Local, and Mobile Era

AIIM is introducing a new and unique annual conference in San Francisco, March 20-22, 2012, and is looking for forward-looking and engaging presentations. Use this opportunity to share and discuss your strategy and lessons learned for using content to engage customers or staff; automate the processing of content; and controlling content in a social, local, and mobile era.

Attendees will learn from thought-leaders and early adopters, while networking and connecting with their peers. Plan the future of content management in an era of social, local, and mobile technologies.

The 2.5 day conference program will consist of a series of entertaining and thought-provoking 20 minute presentations by business and IT executives.

• Learn about opportunities, challenges, and possible solutions
• Get ideas and strategies from industry rock stars and early adopters

Choose between 3 tracks covering content management strategies in an era of social, local, and mobile technologies:

1. Engage: Use enterprise content to engage customer, partners, or staff
2. Process: Automate the processing of enterprise content to improve business operations
3. Control: Managing enterprise content and records to meet regulatory compliance

Note that our goal is to have many presentations that will require participation by the attendees; e.g., the speaker shares a problem that the attendees have to suggest solutions to by text voting, tweets, and/or through conversation and answering questions. Or conversely, focused panel discussions fueled by audience questions.

Please submit the following information to aiimconference@aiim.org by September 25, 2011 to be considered for the conference program:

1. Your name, employer, title, and contact information
2. Link to LinkedIn profile
3. Presentation title
4. Presentation for track A (Engage), B (Process), or C (Control)
5. Description of presentation (300 words max)
6. Description of format: lecture, workshop, discussion
7. Describe three things that attendees will learn from your presentation
8. Links to any previous presentations or speaking engagements

Untraditional and engaging presentations by buyers and users of information technologies will be prioritized, but AIIM also welcomes issue-focused presentation ideas from consultants and solution providers.

The conference program will be available by the end of October 2011, and all speakers will receive a full complimentary conference pass worth $795.

Speakers will be notified of acceptance or rejection by October 31, 2011.

 

Back of the napkin noodle-ings on the lifecycle of #ECM

A few of us were playing around the other night with a new conceptual framework for talking about the lifecycle of ECM. (Hey, once you went past the 24th hour of hurricane pre-coverage, we had to do something!)  

I've literally attached our back of the napkin thoughts, along with a bit of explanation for the layers. 

What do you think?

 

The Top Layer: Manage – Content and Process

Focuses on the fundamental purpose of making an investment in ECM – practice and technologies. How do you meet your core business goals of enhancing productivity, reducing risk and cost, and encouraging innovation, when these are often in conflict with each other?

The Middle Layer: What the end user does

A user centric overview of the fundamental capabilities of ECM. These are the tasks and activities most business users will perform. All other elements are/should be background services to deliver the automation, compliance, process efficiencies behind the scenes.

• Create/Capture – The intake of enterprise content regardless of the format. From traditional paper scanning, to email filing, integration with office suites, to capture of rich media or graphics, and social media content created for business purpose.
• Organize – End users will categorize, add metadata or tags, drag into folders – this organization feeds the background processes or retention & disposition rules. Identification of content types, topics, subjects may kick off automated workflows or processes, invoke lifecycle rules, inherit security controls, and will form a strong foundation for findability via search, indexing and recommendation/personalization engines.
• Collaborate – Share content and work interactively with peers. Annotate or markup work-in-progress content, create new versions, track edits and activity, comment and discuss issues, create shared team workspaces and interactive forums, share experiences or information and build shared knowledge bases.
• Search and Retrieve – Query the repository by using key words or phrases, use metadata or tags, share search results, store routine queries for later use, navigate virtual folders, create relationships between documents, discover relevant content from experts
• Publish and Deliver – Push finalized content to interested users by publishing to intranet, extranet or public web sites, render content into standard formats for exchange or preservation, aggregate or export related content into folders, workspaces, external locations, create compound documents out of assembled individual items.

The Bottom Layer – Information Architecture

The technical expression of an organization's information management strategy. Technologies deployed to automate, streamline, and accelerate the management of enterprise content, the processes it supports by providing rules, security controls and repository services.

• Metadata – System generated and organization-define identifiers and tags to organize, categorize content, and trigger processes and business rules.
• Taxonomy – A structure for an enterprise's information, gives shape to the metadata, provide consistency for users and administrators to define and describe information regardless of the format or source
• Retention, Preservation, Disposal – essential final phases of content lifecycle, allowing businesses to establish consistent rules for the destruction, long-term preservation or handling of content regardless of format.

What do you think? 

 

 

 

Sign. Up. Now. Social Business: New Rules for Information Governance and the Pursuit of Operational Excellence

Don't miss the AIIM Social Business Virtual Conference on September 8th, 2011.  

Get answers to these questions:

• What types of business processes can benefit from using social technologies?
• Are records and information managers able to achieve meaningful governance in a social world, or are they just getting in the way?
• Will conventional content and process management applications be able to adapt to a new generation of always on, always connected information workers?
• How can you develop an effective social business strategy?

Registration

More than 30 sessions to choose from. Pick the tracks that fit you the best:

strategies -- Get strategies for engaging customers and empowering staff.

View list of sessions >

use cases -- Learn from the experience of early adopters and visionaries.

View list of sessions >

governance -- Learn how to manage social processes and technologies.

View list of sessions >

 

Five Myths about Taxonomy and SharePoint

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Jeff Carr, Senior Consultant and Information Architect, and Seth Earley, CEO of  Earley & Associates, Inc.  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Many organizations are finding that leveraging the full suite of capabilities SharePoint offers requires introduction of a new requirement – that of dealing with, managing and exploiting taxonomies.  Of course taxonomies are not new, but there is some confusion about where managed metadata services and the term store end and true taxonomy management begins.  There are also some misconceptions about the process of deriving and applying taxonomies in SharePoint.  The following are five areas of confusion that we have seen in our engagements and research. 

Myth #1: SharePoint now has taxonomy management

Reality -- The term store management tool is not a taxonomy management system.  It is called a term store and not the taxonomy manager for a reason.  True taxonomy management allows for various types of relationships beyond the parent child (kudos to the SharePoint product team for addressing the lack of hierarchy in 2007). It does handle what are referred to as equivalence terms or synonyms.  These are called “other labels”, which are used to guide content contributors to selection of a preferred term, or “default label” - and hold little inherent value beyond display in auto-suggest). But a real limitation is the ability to handle different types of equivalence terms.  One might want to manage misspellings, acronyms, technical terms, internal terms, etc in different lists and expose them to users in different contexts.  For example, one can do term substitution with more sophisticated taxonomy systems and show one term to a medical specialist and another term to a layperson.  There is also no capability to manage associative relationships in SharePoint.  These are the relationships that show how something can be conceptually related but is not necessarily a parent child relationship.

It’s important to note the lack of workflow associated with term addition, modification and deletion. Changes to taxonomy in the term store can occur without review or approval, which can lead to repercussions like downstream processes becoming out of alignment.  If someone changes the name of a marketing campaign or a solution without correct input and approval, people may not know where to find the correct document or inconsistent terms may be used in other applications which can affect the brand.  There is no audit trail that tracks term history and insight into changes over time can’t be understood. Also absent is the ability to easily define custom attributes for terms and term sets, essentially the metadata on the metadata.    

Myth #2: Taxonomy is used as metadata and metadata is an IT problem.  Therefore taxonomy is best left to the project’s technical resources.

Reality -- The common wisdom is if it is data related or metadata, then it’s in the IT realm. In fact, IT can own some metadata but the business users need to own and manage business language.  Taxonomies are expressed in content models and have technical implementation considerations.  However, terms are used to communicate business concepts and business concepts are the realm of business specialists.  The language that is used to describe solutions, markets, offerings, risks, products, features, etc is business in context, perspective and usage. A balanced approach requires enrollment of business stakeholders in taxonomy development and management in a way that is derived with business users and then translated into technical elements. This means establishing content types that are reflective of content itself which include unique metadata schemas, templates, workflow and document retention schedules.

Myth #3:  Librarians are the best people to handle SharePoint taxonomies.

Reality -- SharePoint is a complex platform and handing this task off to a library science specialist who does not have the appropriate expertise would not yield optimum results.  While good at what they do, taxonomists and library science people tend to want to build comprehensive and exhaustive taxonomies but in some cases all you need is a way to simply navigate information using a broader classification.  SharePoint has limitations from both a taxonomy and IA perspective and it needs to be considered as more than just terminology but also application in lists and libraries, navigation and search. Therefore, it is important to have someone with library science understanding but not exclusive of SharePoint development or IA.  

Myth #4:  SharePoint taxonomies need to be comprehensive and finely grained.

Reality -- Taking too narrow or too broad a perspective can lead to problems. Just because you are able to create a seven level hierarchy with thirty-thousand terms doesn’t mean that you should. Taxonomies should not, as a rule, be very deep (no more than a few levels) but this also depends on how the taxonomy is exposed to the user.  Other questions to consider - how many term sets are needed? How will they be managed? Can we make use of a single managed metadata service or do we need to leverage multiple? Which site collections will consume which services? Not only do we need to be cognizant of how we model our taxonomies, but in the SharePoint perspective we need to now pay closer attention to how we model the constructs that consume and manage them. The best way to determine optimum depth and breadth is to test based on user scenarios and use cases.  The question is what to test.  In some cases one can test the taxonomy by itself, in others we need to test the taxonomy in the application such as in search refinement or tagging processes.

Myth #5: Taxonomies managed in the in the term store can be used everywhere in the SharePoint application. 

Reality -- here are some interesting nuances to this “myth."  The reality is that we can manage terms in the term store and leverage in many places however terms in the term store do not influence all places where the taxonomy can be exposed.  There is a complex relationship between taxonomies, navigation, search refinement, enhancement and content object models.  Taxonomy labels can be applied at any level – site collection, site, library, list, content type, view or term itself.  In each case, the meaning of the term needs to be understandable to the user in the context of where they are in the application and what task they are executing.  Terms however are managed in the term store for application as metadata to content.  So the taxonomy is used throughout the site but terms are managed in the term store for specific usage in content. 

Summary:  Succeeding with Taxonomy

In summary, managing a controlled vocabulary is critical to effective use of SharePoint.  Business-ownership of terminology is mandatory for effective results.   It’s important to understand the limits of the SharePoint term store in order to properly evaluate the role of other tools for taxonomy management and search optimization.

SharePoint can be the catalyst for a serious look at enterprise taxonomy.  In the end, however, effort on an enterprise taxonomy should be more than a SharePoint initiative. It needs to be part of enterprise architecture that spans many systems and processes.   A governance body for managing controlled vocabularies needs representation from across the business with an eye to leveraging taxonomy to meet overall enterprise findability goals, whether content emanates from SharePoint, other ECM programs, business intelligence applications, ERP and transaction-based systems, and social media. 

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About the Authors -- Jeff Carr is a Senior Consultant and Information Architect and Seth Earley is CEO of  Earley & Associates, Inc. The company has been advising enterprises on taxonomy and metadata management strategy and implementation for the past 17 years. Earley & Associates serves a broad range of industries including retail, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, media and entertainment, non-profit and government. Additional articles and a listing of services can be found at www.earley.com 

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Other guest posts in this series...

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

5 myths about the CMIS standard

5 myths about SharePoint

 

 

5 myths about SharePoint

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Northern Light's CEO C. David Seuss.  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1 -- SharePoint was not developed by a secret team of Microsoft Tribbles.

Reality -- Actually, I believe it was.  Many companies today are discovering that SharePoint has led to a rapid and uncontrolled spawning of user-created portals, just like that cute but pesky first pair of tribbles that spawned so many offspring so quickly that they almost overwhelmed the starship Enterprise.  I have heard many companies report to their astonishment that after deploying SharePoint they had thousands of SharePoint sites thrown up by employees.  One company recently told me, as they tried to work through a degree of shock that suggested the need for professional therapeutic intervention, that they had determined just that morning that there were 30,000 SharePoint sites on their network.  Surely a team of programming tribbles produced such an application.

Myth #2 -- You can share stuff with SharePoint.

Reality -- You cry out, “How can this be a myth?”  Before SharePoint, there was the option of central document repositories focused on tasks like market research, competitive intelligence, or technology research.  Everyone would know where to go to find the company's material in the relevant domain.  Now, with SharePoint sites being created by every department, geographic division, functional area, project team, committee, brand team, company softball team, and even individual staff members worldwide, there might be scores, hundreds, or thousands of places on the company intranet with just a little bitty piece of the puzzle.  The easiest way to not share something is to obscure its location from people that might want it by scattering it against a giant backdrop of other material.  Presto, hidden in "plain site!"

Myth #3 -- You can find the stuff you need with SharePoint Search.

Reality -- Who thought of this one?  Once again, the easiest way to keep people from finding what they need is to put it in the middle of a lot of stuff they don't.  If there are hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of sites posting content mentioning products, organizational units, competitors, marketing programs, development projects, employees, job titles, and everything else with no versioning, aging, quality control, strategic focus, or semblance of overall organization, the high quality material fades to obscurity on search results, diluted way down by the mass of material, no matter how good the search technology.

Myth #4 -- SharePoint won't share inappropriately.

Reality -- Yes, dear reader, SharePoint can implement traditional enterprise security models that are often effective for securing file directories, applications, and entire document repositories.   But there are whole categories of content that do not easily fit into standard enterprise security constructs.  For example, consider licensed external research reports from industry experts and analysts.  Such reports and content feeds often carry severe restrictions on who can seem them.  For example, a particular Gartner research report might be licensed only to one person, while another report from Gartner might have been purchased with the rights to share it internally.  Or one Forrester content collection might be restricted to a department, while another is enterprise wide.   SharePoint is totally uninformed on third-party licensed and purchased content usage restrictions.  Make SharePoint your collaboration platform for licensed external content and kiss your business rules goodbye on who can see what.  I have been told of multiple cases of invoices for hundreds of thousands of dollars being delivered to companies by third-party information providers for single reports purchased with seat restrictions and then posted by well meaning but clueless employees on generally-available internal SharePoint sites.

Myth #5 -- SharePoint is a user-level tool, so it won't break the IT department.

Reality -- This is my favorite myth about SharePoint.   SharePoint is supposedly easy enough to use that anyone can create a personal, team, or department portal.   And that is maybe true for a rudimentary portal that posts some documents and does light-weight RSS reading.  But if a user with average computer skills decides to do anything more -- like install a Web Part, create a vertical content feed, or set security levels for documents -- the likelihood of success drops to roughly the equivalent of trying to hike Death Valley in the summer without a map.  Rescue by experts will be required.   So get yourself 5,000 SharePoint installations on your intranet and you also get yourself 5,000 new applications that need IT support.   But since IT budgets are unlimited and IT staff is sitting around all day reading gear-head magazines because there is no IT backlog to work on, that shouldn't be a problem.

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About the Author - C. David Seuss joined Northern Light in July of 1996, as employee number 18. He describes that time period as when “there were 17 engineers and me in a basement.” Several years later, it was David who led an employee group in purchasing Northern Light from its corporate parent in 2003. David is the inventor of Northern Light’s technology for the automated extraction of meaning from research documents, for which Northern Light received a patent in January 2011. He is the author of “Teaching Search Engines To Interpret Meaning,” Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in April 2011.  David has an industrial engineering degree from Georgia Tech (from which he received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2002) and an MBA with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School. Check out David’s blog, In-Depth Understanding. 

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Other guest posts in the "5 myths" series...

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

5 myths about the CMIS standard

 

5 myths about the CMIS standard

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Stefan Waldhauser, the founder and CEO of WeWebU Software.  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1 – The big ECM software vendors are pushing CMIS.

Reality – Back in 2008 Microsoft, IBM and EMC drafted an initial proposal for an ECM interface specification. This proposed draft specification was shared with Alfresco, Open Text, Oracle and SAP, later refined by the CMIS TC (Technical Committee) and became an official OASIS standard in May 2010. Now the leading ECM vendors face a difficult situation: the point of no return is passed; now they have to support the new open standard although they know that the usage of CMIS will weaken their relationship with existing enterprise customers. CMIS helps customers to avoid vendor lock-in and give them independency from a single ECM infrastructure vendor. With CMIS the ECM repositories will become more and more a commodity and it will be much harder to successfully monetize a proprietary ECM platform. That’s the reason why the big vendors will not really push the broad and fast adoption of CMIS. They will not spend their marketing-dollars to speed up the necessary customer education. This task has to be done by independent analysts, consultants, ISV’s, and the systems integrators who will see the chance to generate new business based on the upcoming changes in the marketplace.

Myth #2 – The adoption of CMIS in the marketplace is slow.

Reality – Some people believed that CMIS would change the ECM world overnight and are now disappointed that one year after the release of the standard most solutions are still working based on the native interfaces of the different ECM vendors. The reality is that only 12 months after the initial release of the CMIS standard there are more than 50 CMIS implementations available in the marketplace. However, it is more important that every single major player not only announced but also delivered a CMIS-compliant version of its ECM repository. This is a huge success and was never achieved by any other attempt of standardization in the ECM world in the past. But most customers can only move slowly to new CMIS-compliant versions of their mission critical ECM platform. So it will take yet another two years until the majority of customers is in the position to implement CMIS-compliant business applications. This will be the starting-point for a new industry and we see already today that many systems integrators and ISVs prepare for their move into the fast growing space of vendor-independent composite content applications that can run on any CMIS-compliant ECM repository.

Myth #3 – CMIS is SQL for Content Management.

Reality – The functional approach of CMIS is indeed similar to SQL and I love the vision that CMIS would change the ECM market in a way similar to the one SQL transformed the database market rapidly 30 years ago. But the situation we face today in the ECM market is quite different: when IBM invented SQL, this was really disruptive and created a whole new industry for RDBMS-technology. This was possible only because at that time there were not so many database management systems widely deployed. The ECM industry today isn’t that lucky since over the years customers have been investing billions of dollars in the deployment of ECM repositories and content centric applications supporting their mission-critical business operations. There is no reset button that we could press for the ECM industry. So a primary goal in the specification of CMIS is to protect past investments of both customers and software vendors. This will not lead to technological perfection but will help customers to unlock the hidden value of information by breaking down the information silos.

Myth #4 – CMIS is a lowest common denominator and therefore not suitable for comprehensive business applications.

Reality – It’s true that especially the large ECM platforms of leading vendors like IBM, OpenText or EMC Documentum deliver a lot of functionality in their native API’s which is not covered by the actual CMIS 1.0 specification. But all the core features needed for comprehensive document management solutions are already included. Take a look at the AIIM CMIS products guide with applications like ZIA Freshdocs or WeWebU OpenWorkdesk to see what is possible already today based on the open standard. And if your use-case needs more than what CMIS 1.0 has to offer today you can easily create a CMIS extension for inclusion in your application. Many systems integrators have experience creating this type of extension and consider it a best practice. Over the next years the CMIS standard will further evolve and will reduce the needs for such individual extensions. The CMIS Technical Committee at OASIS is working heavily on the upcoming versions 1.1. as well as 2.0 of the standard. But there’s no need to wait – even an 80% standard would be much better than a proprietary solution. Don’t you agree?

Myth #5 – The performance of CMIS based solutions is bad.

Reality – So far some repository vendors did a poor job in implementing the CMIS standard. Imagine that somebody was just bolting together a CMIS-provider as a wrapper around a JCR-interface which a few years ago was build as a wrapper for a native API to an ECM-repository. What do you think how fast this solution would be? But fortunately most vendors (like IBM and Alfresco) did a much better job implementing the CMIS specification than a few others. We tested CMIS-compliant business applications against many different CMIS repositories and found big differences in performance. If the CMIS API of a repository is well designed and implemented, than you will not face any performance issues with your CMIS based business application. But don’t just trust all the repository vendors claiming to be CMIS-compliant. Test your applications carefully against your repository of choice and don’t blame the CMIS standard but the vendors if you experience suboptimal results.

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About the Author -- Stefan Waldhauser is the founder and CEO of WeWebU Software, an internationally operating ISV dedicated to open standards and member of the CMIS TC at OASIS. WeWebU cooperates with leading ECM manufacturers and consulting firms and is an IBM Advanced Business Partner as well as Alfresco Solutions Partner. With the WeWebU OpenWorkdesk product suite customers can realize content centric business applications that can run independent from the underlying ECM infrastructure. He can be reached on Twitter (@WeWebU) or via LinkedIn http://de.linkedin.com/in/stefanwaldhauser

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Some other posts in this series...

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

 

Five Myths about Document Management

While document management solutions on the market today deliver a host of benefits related to efficiency and productivity to businesses of all sizes and in all industries, many misconceptions about the technology still remain. Below are five document management myths, along with some helpful insight to help dispel these common misunderstandings.

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Greg Milliken, president of M-Files.  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1:   Companies must choose either a cloud-based OR an on-premise document management deployment.

Reality:  The cloud offers businesses new options and flexibility related to deploying technology, but on-premise software solutions are still the dominant deployment model and continue to offer important benefits. However, it’s possible to get the best of both worlds. Organizations can leverage their existing on-premise technology investments AND take advantage of cloud-based solutions that augment current systems, and do so without significant capital investment and incremental resources to support it. In fact, GigaOM notes that 60% of businesses plan to implement a hybrid cloud model, combining cloud and on-premise deployments. 

Myth #2:  Companies in regulated industries require expensive and complex solutions to ensure compliance.

Reality:   Highly-configurable and affordable document management solutions exist that can be easily and quickly customized to meet legislative mandates and regulatory requirements. This is particularly important for organizations that must manage documents and records in a specific manner to ensure compliance with regulations and standards such as ISO for Quality Management Systems in manufacturing and other industries, FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and EU GMP Annex 11 related to electronic records and signatures in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries (i.e., medical devices, biotechnology, etc.), HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) in the medical/healthcare sector, and Sarbanes-Oxley in the accounting and financial services space.

By maintaining a detailed audit trail of all document activity, securely tracking activity by individual, and supporting electronic signatures, a configurable and easy-to-use document management solution can provide the controls necessary for companies to ensure compliance with industry standards and regulations, while simplifying the implementation and ongoing administration of the solution and saving a lot of money.

Myth #3:  Document management systems are designed for large companies -- not small businesses.

Reality:  Document management systems have historically been expensive, complicated products that require extensive IT services and support, which generally made them inaccessible to small businesses. As a result, many smaller companies still employ archaic processes for managing their documentation and related processes, which inevitably leads to loss of data, productivity, and most importantly, money. 

However, document management offerings designed specifically for small-to-mid-sized companies are now available. These solutions provide fast and easy access to crucial information and empowers small businesses to promptly address the needs of demanding customers. With a reasonable price point and straightforward implementation, especially when considering cloud-based options, small businesses can now reap the same benefits associated with professional document management that used to be only reserved for larger organizations. 

Myth #4:  Implementing a document management system requires a significant investment in new user training.

Reality:  The successful adoption of ANY new system is largely based on how easy or difficult it is for users to learn it and incorporate it into how they already work on a daily basis. If new users must spend significant amounts of time learning a complex new system, or even one that forces them to change the way they work, they will perceive it as hindering rather than improving productivity and they will go out of their way to find a way to work around the system. Document management implementations with the highest user adoption and satisfaction rates are those that do not require workers to significantly change how they already work. A recent AIIM blog post also touches on this issue: It’s the Users … An Old Story Repeated Many Times. Like the New York Yankee great, Yogi Berra, said, “It’s Déjà vu all over again.”

The good news is that there are document management solutions on the market today that are easy to deploy, easy to use, and easy to train new users on because they are based on familiar interfaces and platforms that many employees already use.

Myth #5:   Document management systems are difficult to integrate with other core business applications.

Reality:  Most companies utilize accounting/financial management, CRM and/or ERP systems to help them manage financial, operational, sales & marketing and other administrative tasks and activities. Despite the fact that documents are a critical component of most business processes, these systems are not designed to manage documents. As a result, document management inefficiencies significantly limit the effectiveness of these systems and their resulting ROI.

A bi-directional connection between a core business application and a document management system enables fast access to related documents directly from within that application, and is actually quite straightforward to implement if the document management system provides the necessary interfaces. In this case, it can be easily implemented with simple SQL statements or web services in a couple of hours. When integrated with ERP, CRM, accounting, etc. applications – and accessible across the company, including sales, HR, marketing, accounting and more – organizations can reach their full business productivity potential by linking important documents to associated records within each application, dramatically increasing the ROI of all systems.

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About the Author:  Greg Milliken is the president of M-Files Inc., the developer of M-Files professional document management software and the cloud-based document management service M-Files Cloud Vault. For more information, visit www.m-files.com.

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Also check out...

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

 

5 Myths About ECM ROI

[Note: The opinions expressed in our 5 myths columns are those of the author.]

Myth # 1 – We won’t save that much time or money if we cut paper out of our business processes.

Reality:  Time is money! Organizations that effectively use their workforce, technology and innovation can improve customer service, decision making and quality of goods and service. Leveraging an ECM solution can drastically cut the time it takes to get work done, freeing employees to focus on more important, revenue-generating or core organizational activities. 

In addition, hundreds of filing cabinets and offsite document storage make finding a specific document more difficult than it should be. White Memorial Medical Center in Los Angeles is saving approximately $100,000 in offsite document storage costs per year with an ECM solution. The cost of transferring paper files to and from the storage facility, and of moving hard copy charts throughout the hospital, has been reduced by nearly $20,000 per year.

Myth #2 – The ROI for ECM systems is mostly about reducing paper consumption.

Reality: Many ECM implementations get their initial ROI from paper reduction.  But, ongoing savings related to automating processes, resulting in reduced labor costs, and improved efficiency and customer service, lead to far greater returns.

Insurance administrator, OwnerGUARD, stores and shares claims electronically, significantly reducing paper use. But more importantly, it has cut turnaround times by 47 percent to provide quicker customer services, increased satisfaction rates and savings of more than $8,000 monthly on printing and toner costs.

Myth # 3 – Total ROI for an ECM implementation can be identified up front and accounted for in advance.

Reality: ROI for an ECM application can be partially identified before the system is implemented.  However, ECM is a tool that enables ongoing process improvements and once successfully adopted, breeds further expansion throughout an organization, with numerous new opportunities for ROI that couldn’t have been identified at the beginning. The total ROI for ECM over a one-to-five year period is usually substantially higher than initially planned.

Tulane University’s ECM solution delivered initial cost savings of $80,000 in its Accounts Payable department. After Hurricane Katrina, the ECM system was expanded for additional functionality. For example, by managing disaster recovery documentation, Tulane was able to help guarantee timely FEMA payments. The University is also building on its ECM system to add electronic forms that make form processing an intelligent, easy workflow rather than a bottleneck.

 

Myth # 4 – My office multifunction printer (MFP) is only good for copying and printing documents.

Reality:  Transform MFPs into a cornerstone of business processes. MFPs can be a costly investment for any business, but by better using this office technology, you can get your money’s worth.  MFPs automate office activities, such as invoice handling, by scanning documents directly to an ECM workflow that routes the document to specific departments or colleagues.

The Love to Swim and Tumble School in San Antonio, Texas, electronically organizes and processes student payment and registration forms, safety waivers and contact sheets using an ECM solution. The school has replaced the need to store thousands of printed pages by using their MFP to scan documents to an ECM workflow, saving time on the registration process and thousands of dollars in materials and labor.

Myth # 5 – Our document process is already meeting compliance regulations, why change?

Reality:  In regulated industries, staying compliant is a cost of doing business even if it can’t be directly measured. ECM solutions that help meet this requirement through features like permissions, digital signatures and auditable workflows make annual audits easier and help companies avoid the risk of potential fines.

The Copernicus Group Independent Review Board (CGIRB) is using an ECM solution to share and store critical biomedical research documents for the Food and Drug Administration. The review board stays compliant while gaining further efficiency and control from their ECM solution that generates a complete audit trail of edits made to each document, including when and by whom. It also offers e-signature capabilities that comply with pharmaceutical industry regulation FDA 21 CFR Part 11, and eliminates the need for written signatures. 

Conclusion --- As you can see, there are many myths about calculating the expected ROI of implementing an ECM solution. By taking a deeper look at where you’re cutting costs, saving on supplies and gaining back employee time - it’s easy to determine if making the move to an ECM system is right for your business.

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About the Author...Brian Lincoln is the senior product line manager for the DocuShare Platform with Xerox’s DocuShare Business Unit, based in Palo Alto, California. Brian has over 14 years of experience as a Content Management professional, including previous positions at Documentum and then EMC, Inc. where he specialized in launching vertical applications into government, and related regulated industries. He has performed roles spanning the entire product development lifecycle, evolving from engineering and consulting leadership positions into senior product management, where he also managed OEM relationships. Brian holds a bachelors degree in economics from California State University, Sacramento.

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Recap of my SharePoint Saturday presentation here 

Other "5 myths" guest posts...

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myth about document automation and electronic document creation

 

 

6 Great #SharePoint posts - #spstcdc

More SharePoint expert blog posts here...

SharePoint Surveys - Design for Analysis by Daniel Antion Vice President Information Services for American Nuclear Insurers

Last week, I spent a good deal of time wiring up Data View Web Parts to display survey results. If you want some background on that, see SharePoint vs. Excel, Round 2, but the background isn’t i... read more

A Steaming Pile of SharePoint by Michael Doyle SharePoint Architect for Waggener Edstrom Worldwide

SharePoint 2010 has greatly increased its scalability. We can now add millions of documents and create content databases in the terabyte range. Storage is cheap with everyone seeming to have vir... read more

It's about business productivity, not server maintenance by Christian Buckley Director, Product Evangelism for Axceler

When I moved my family from Northern California (born and raised in the east bay), the first comment my older kids made was "Dad, there aren't any baseball fields!" Both passionate about basebal... read more

Two by Two by Daniel Antion Vice President Information Services for American Nuclear Insurers

This is the first part of a 2-part post on how we are making SharePoint work on iOS devices. The second part will be a cross-posted between this and my SharePointStories blog, since I will be on... read more

When should you bring in end users? by Christian Buckley Director, Product Evangelism for Axceler

There are many topics that can act as a lightning rod in a conversation. Religion. Politics. Tastes great, less filling. People dig in, want to be heard, and can talk on and on for hours. The sa... read more

I am Dedicated to SharePoint, so why am I only getting Standard love? by Dave Martin Director | Microsoft Solutions Group for Open Text Inc.

Sadly, and I sincerely apologize to the three people who follow my AIIM Blog, my last post was about six months ago and discussed a now old (comparatively and when measured in Web time) technolo...read more

More SharePoint expert blog posts here...

 

 

 

SharePoint Saturday "The Conference" quick recap - #spstcdc

Part conference. Part networking opportunity. Part selling space. Part tribal gathering. Part evangelical tent meeting. With a liberal dose of serendipity. And a talent show.

That was SharePoint Saturday The Conference on Thursday through Saturday at the Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, VA. Who knows exactly how many people there were, but I am told the pre-reg was about 1800.  At a sub-$100 price point for a 3 day event with 250+ presentations, the price was certainly right. For those used to more "formal" events, the ever changing room assignments and last-minute changes could be a bit overwhelming. But this chaos was balanced by an awesome volunteer commitment.

Founder and Chief Organizer Michael Lottner is to be applauded for this gathering of the tribe. It is really fun to see so many focused -- and young! -- people gathered in one place and talking about, of all things, content management!

Thanks to Dux Raymond Sy (@meetdux) for inviting me to speak; it was a lot of fun and inspiring. Here's a link to my presentation, and for those who can view active content, have also embedded my presentation.  The presentation focuses on the need to be clear on exactly what you are trying to do with SharePoint and why, and the changing nature of enterprise IT.

If SharePoint is your answer, do you know what your question is?

View more presentations from John Mancini