I had a chance last week to moderate a lively and informative panel on enterprise content management at the CIO Forum and Executive IT Summit in Cleveland. The one key message that panelists drove home was that effective enterprise content management has to be about more than just installing software on a server and putting together a technology workflow.

There has to be organizational change and a commitment to optimizing the productivity of the assets of the enterprise in order to accomplish key objectives such as speeding time to revenue and rapidly managing costly corporate issues such as litigation risk. Effective ECM solutions start with understanding the needs of the business and how ECM technologies can enable or improve critical business processes. EMC solutions can help health insurance providers improve membership enrollment, can help financial institutions process and fund mortgages more quickly, can help companies manage and adhere to employment laws, or can help global manufacturing companies bring products to market more quickly. Today’s collaborative business environments are also requiring ECM solutions to extend out beyond our own firewalls to include our customers, suppliers and business or trading partners.

For example, one Xerox customer was able to change its culture from relying on snail mail to using Xerox Distributed Capture Service to submit account-related documents. Now more than 90 percent of its volume it submitted through devices with XDCS, improving time to revenue by taking a 3-5 day process down to just a couple of hours. The solution also significantly reduced expenses related to overnight shipping and long-term archival storage costs.

A second discussed example was how a large, global manufacturing company leverages document and content management technologies to better enable and support their legal discovery and litigation management requirements. This solution has created a more efficient process for their legal staff and outside counsel and has significantly reduced their costs.

So when your organization starts to think about ECM, think beyond a single hardware and software decision, and think about starting the journey with a single business application that has high-payback rather than trying to change the entire infrastructure, which for most companies is very difficult to do. Today’s solutions often include multiple technologies and integrate with the line-of-business applications. The key messages from the session were that successful solutions involve joint ownership and leadership from a business and I/T perspectives and that engaging outside partners can bring some of the best practices from the industry.

For open commentary and industry perspectives, visit http://www.xerox.com/blogs, http://www.xerox.com/podcasts or http://www.consulting.xerox.com/flash/thoughtleaders/index.html.

Rich Baily
Vice President, Business Process Services, Xerox Global Services

Posted by Big I, little t at 09:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the last few months, mortgage lenders’ interest in electronic mortgages (“e-mortgage”), especially the ability to electronically sign via an e-signature process, has been rising significantly. Mortgage lenders are keenly aware that they must become leaner and more efficient in their processes. In fact, a recent blog by Mortgage Technology Magazine describes this rapid rise.

The current state of the mortgage industry has contributed to the uptick in interest. Paper has always been considered a limiting factor. Over time, the industry has moved towards paperless with imaged-based documents. The issue with paper to imaged documents is that the data was separate from the document. Validation required a person to “stare and compare” the image with the data in a data system, like a loan origination system. The promise of e-mortgage documents is to bring data and documents together making documents machine readable and enabling “lights out” processing.

Now, as has been promised for many years, the industry is beginning to implement e-mortgage initiatives. An e-mortgage is where loan documentation is created electronically, executed electronically, transferred electronically and stored electronically. At a minimum, an e-mortgage is an e-note that is created, signed and delivered to the secondary market electronically. However, an e-mortgage can also span into origination with e-signed disclosure documents

With today’s announcement of e-signature capabilities, Xerox Mortgage Services has entered the e-mortgage arena. This solution builds upon the award-winning BlitzDocs® solution for mortgage document collaboration and extends the BlitzDocs network of lending institutions and service providers. Even though we are rapidly moving to an “e” world, lenders are still dealing with paper, paper to images and existing electronic documents. Using our document expertise, Xerox is uniquely positioned to help support mortgage lenders with the dual processes they must support.

Interested in further commentary on industry trends and technology? Click here to listen to a podcast featuring my colleague Greg Smith, vice president, Xerox Mortgage Services.

Judson Phillips
Vice President, Marketing
Xerox Mortgage Services

Posted by Big I, little t at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Even with new laws requiring the timely turn around of documents that could be used as evidence in a trial, studies regarding e-discovery preparedness continue to show that legal professionals are struggling with the demands of the process. Xerox Litigation Services recently sponsored a survey that polled more than 200 legal professionals to understand if the buzz around litigation had companies ready to produce a year’s worth of e-mails and other documents with little notice. Here are just some of the results:

Among the 81 percent of legal professionals involved in reviewing documents for litigation purposes, the survey uncovered concerns about current in-house review systems. Some of the issues noted were:
• slow turnaround (42 percent of respondents)
• inadequate system support (41 percent) from sources like software licensing companies
• lack of important features (41 percent), which may include expanded search options and software updates
• IT department could not support the in-house document review system (38 percent)

These findings spoke volumes to me – e-discovery readiness is not something that is easily achieved nor should it be taken lightly. When in doubt, outsourcing these requirements to experienced and skilled consultants makes good business sense. It’s tough to handle the full range of e-discovery requirements in-house -- from assessing and collecting the relevant data, to processing and extracting the metadata, to reviewing and coding the information, to producing documents quickly and accurately – done incorrectly or incompletely, your company’s brand value and corporate financial standing could be compromised.

I welcome your thoughts on these findings and how you think businesses are stacking up to the e-discovery process.

Ken Reiff
Manager, Business Development
Xerox Litigation Services

Posted by Big I, little t at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)