Effective Enterprise Content Management
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