This kind of effort is not new to AIIM, nor should it be in an industry that has been defined by such rapid change over the past few years.  A few years ago, we worked with Geoffrey Moore (of Crossing the Chasm fame) to build what became the defining document connecting the world of “ECM” with the world of social and mobile content.  Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT: A Sea Change in Enterprise IT is still one of our most popular downloads.

We followed that with an exploration of the intersection of social technologies with process.  It was the belief of the Task Force driving this work that deployment of “social for sake of social” was reaching the point of diminishing returns, and that the future of social was inextricably tied to business process. We teamed with the godfather of Enterprise 2.0, Andy McAfee, to create three white papers examining this intersection and documenting the potential for business value around the theme "When Social Meets Business Real Work Gets Done."  (Enterprise Q&A, Connecting Sales and Marketing, Fostering Innovation)

In 2012, we institutionalized this “visioning” capability with our Executive Leadership Council program, a “think tank” of industry visionaries, and commissioned noted futurist (and past AIIM chair) Thornton May to head the effort.  Two white papers were the result.  The first, C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT, made the case that the consumerization of enterprise IT gives IT a chance to redefine its role within the enterprise.  The second, The Big Data Balancing Act:  Too much yin and not enough yang?, contended that in the hype of Big Data, organizations were underestimating the need for “data entrepreneurs” to actually put all those potential “big data” insights to actual business use.

London, May 2012 European Council - Event Guide
Chicago, June 2012 American Council - Event Guide

Outcome of this Summit: C-Change: The Impact of Consumerization of IT

London, September 2012 European Council - Event Guide
Dallas, November 2012 American Council - Event Guide

Outcome of this Summit: The Big Data Balancing Act:  Too much yin and not enough yang?

So let me introduce a new topic – the future of ECM and how we talk about the industry – and the Board Task Force driving this work.  Four AIIM Board members – Martyn Christian from Kofax, Ken Bisconti from IBM, Robin Daniels from Box, and Lubor Ptacek from OpenText – teamed with AIIM staff to consider the future of ECM.  We were led in our efforts by well-known brand strategists Sasha Strauss and Kara Alter from the firm Innovation Protocol. We augmented the work of the Task Force by interviewing twenty executives from the ranks of the industry, from the user community, and from the broader ecosystem of the industry – analysts and consultants – to gain a picture of where the industry has been and where it is going.

Over the next few weeks, I’d like to report on the work of this Task Force and solicit your thoughts on the future of the industry.  More specifically, I’d like to talk through these questions in a series of posts:

1. How has the industry evolved over the past few decades?
2. How has AIIM evolved?
3. How have the needs and perspectives of the professionals responsible for managing content changed -- and continue to change?
4. How is the definition of the ECM industry itself changing?

Let’s start with #1 and #2.  For those with deep roots at AIIM, this will seem somewhat pedantic – and there will likely be some disagreement with the broad brush I will take.  That’s OK.  But given the relative newness of much of the AIIM community to AIIM, I think it important to understand where we have been in order to postulate on where we are going.

During the 50s, 60s, and 70s, it was all fairly clear – at least through the rear view mirror.  The industry was microfilm, and AIIM (then the National Microfilm Association) was its association.

The Microfilm Era:  During this period, the “industry” consisted of a relatively small number of vendors, and the relatively well-defined community of users and prospective users (often records managers) associated with those vendors.  NMA was all about a single, hardware-centric technology.  We conducted a relatively small conference focused on that technology and on educating those users, and most of the activities of the organization were associated in some way with that annual event.  And then during the early 1980s, the “Digital” guys came to town. 

The Imaging and Document Management Era:  The focus of AIIM expanded, and NMA became AIIM.  The vendor community was still largely hardware-centric, but more and more software companies started showing up at AIIM activities, and “The Show” entered its rapid growth stage.  Huge Show margins allowed for most AIIM products to be delivered to the membership below cost (great while it lasted; not so great later on).  INFORM magazine knit a growing – and increasingly diffuse -- community together. 

There was a huge demand for basic education and a huge desire to “see” the new technology.  This was reflected in a Conference that peaked at 2,500+ attendees in 1994 (at >$1,000 per attendee), and a Show that peaked at 30,000+ attendees at about the same time.  Sue Wolk and the Boards of this era should take enormous pride in this transformation; it was a transformation that could have easily missed AIIM if not for the collective insight that everyone was not, in fact, in the “microfilm” business, but in the “document” business.

At the tail end of this era, the Internet appeared on the scene to the initial dismissal of many of the established players.  At the 1996 Conference, only 2 out of 100+ sessions even mentioned the Internet.  The editorial from the 1996 Show issue of Inform noted, “until the webmeisters per­suade us otherwise, we'll hang onto our CDs and floppies, along with the aperture cards and other imaging artifacts that have served our corporate and personal purposes so cost-effectively in the past.”

As the 90s came to a close, an industry in a great deal of internet-driven transformation settled about the term “Enterprise Content Management” as a description of who we were and what we were trying to do.

The ECM Era:  After initial confusion, in the post Internet boom, the industry galvanized on the “ECM” term, never entirely comfortable with it, but nonetheless better than the alternatives.  Hardware began to disappear from the industry, software took over the driving role, and software in turn morphed into a focus on services.  There was a massive consolidation as the major vendors sought to create consolidated “ECM Suites” to lessen the pain of user integration.  The community became even more diffuse and even more difficult to define.  The AIIM Board came to the conclusion that “The Show” would ultimately become unsustainable given the maturation of the industry and its transition into services, and sold the Show in 2002.  Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) arrived on the scene in 2007, to the initial dismissal of many in the ECM Industry (“It’s not ‘real’ ECM.")

The post-ECM Era:  The past few years have brought about strains in the usefulness of ECM as a label for our industry, and processes and applications began to replace content as the “core” of the industry.  The AIIM SoR/SoE story was adopted widely by vendors, but difficult as a market definition.

To make matters even more complex, the lines began to blur between structured and unstructured information.  Traditionally a market space focused on Fortune 1000 scale companies and complex and expensive processes, the “industry” began to bleed over into the consumer world, as a result of the combination of cloud, social, and mobile forces. 

This transformation contains with it additional forces for change.  Let us begin the discussion of what comes next.

1. Organizations are increasingly realizing they need a different type of skill set to deal with the explosion of content volume, variety and velocity.  User roles and responsibilities are evolving.  As consumer technologies rip through the enterprise space, how and what buyers buy is changing.  In our 2nd post, we’ll explore these trends in “The Emergence of the Extreme Buyer.”
2. “ECM” as a market definition is becoming increasingly strained.  In our third post, “Living in the post-ECM World,” we’ll explore what comes next – both for the industry and for AIIM.

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A couple of recent presentations that might also be of interest...

1. Per AIIM -- 64% are using social but have no integration into their business processes.
2. Per Forrester -- 70 percent of organizations have adopted some form of BYOD program.
3. Per AIIM -- 32% have browser access for mobile and 3rd parties to content repositories…but only 11% have a mobile optimized browser interface and only 10% have apps.
4. Per Forrester -- 62 percent of people who use a smartphone for work and 56 percent of those who use a tablet for work purchased those devices themselves.
5. Per AIIM -- 22% experiencing unofficial mobile access to organizational content (or have no BYOD policy)…25% report use of “unofficial” file-sharing sites.

The workforce is becoming increasingly mobile - at home through teleworking, on business trips, and in the field selling, inspecting, and servicing. There is also an increasing expectation by customers, suppliers and partners that business be conducted in real time. As a result, 46% of users need to share documents and content with project groups inside and outside the firewall.

Has your organization responded to this demand? Is your business content available and accessible from anywhere, on any device, and at any time?  If not, why not?

Join Cengiz Satir from IBM and me next week for a live webinar, and learn the 3 key ingredients for any successful mobile content program:

• Seamless: the user experience out in the field should look and feel as close to the experience in the office.
• Smart: the mobile application should work the way the user works to emulate regular process flows; don’t make it more difficult to create and collaborate on content from afar. Mobile should enable productivity, not hinder it.
• Secure:  policies, procedures, and protections must be in place to protect sensitive and proprietary information; the collaborative outputs could be part of your competitive advantage.

Webinar = How Mobile is your ECM?

2 pm Eastern time, May 15

Registration HERE.

Let me start in reverse order:

Barry McGuire:   
“But you tell me
Over and over and over again, my friend
Ah, you don't believe
We're on the eve
of destruction.”

Joseph Schumpeter:

“As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is it merely expanding in a steady manner. It is incessantly being revolutionized from within by new enterprise, i.e., by the intrusion of new commodities or new methods of production or new commercial opportunities into the industrial structure as it exists at any moment.”

The intersection of these two strange bedfellows with the Fortune 100 is that in a very short period of time, technology-driven innovation and the radical opening of markets has created an unprecedented level of upheaval -- in Schumpeter’s terms, “Creative Destruction.”

Usually, the Fortune 100 is thought to be somewhat immune to rapid change.  And that was once the case.  In thinking about the current ranks of the Fortune 100, and looking ahead 7 years to 2020, about the only conclusion one can draw is that a minority of those currently in the Fortune 100 will be around the celebrate a ranking in 2020.

Consider the list of the Fortune 100 in the year in which I graduated from college, 1977.  The list was as follows, beginning with #1:

1. Exxon Mobil 
2. General Motors 
3. Ford Motor 
4. Texaco 
5. Mobil 
6. ChevronTexaco 
7. Gulf Oil 
8. Intl. Business Machines 
9. General Electric 
10. Chrysler 
11. ITT Industries 
12. Amoco 
13. Shell Oil 
14. U.S. Steel 
15. Atlantic Richfield 
16. DuPont 
17. Conoco 
18. AT&T Technologies 
19. Procter & Gamble 
20. Tenneco Automotive 
21. Union Carbide 
22. CBS 
23. Goodyear Tire & Rubber 
24. ConocoPhillips 
25. Dow Chemical 
26. Occidental Petroleum 
27. Navistar International 
28. Eastman Kodak 
29. Sunoco 
30. Unocal 
31. RCA 
32. Esmark 
33. Bethlehem Steel 
34. Rockwell Automation 
35. United Technologies 
36. Caterpillar 
37. Kraft 
38. Beatrice 
39. LTV 
40. Xerox 
41. Nabisco Group Holdings 
42. Monsanto 
43. Ashland 
44. General Foods 
45. Citgo Petroleum 
46. Firestone Tire & Rubber 
47. Boeing 
48. Amerada Hess 
49. Greyhound 
50. Sealed Air 
51. McDonnell Douglas 
52. International Paper 
53. 3M 
54. Colgate-Palmolive 
55. Marathon Oil 
56. Continental Group 
57. Gulf & Western Industries 
58. Ralston Purina 
59. Borden Chemical 
60. Litton Industries 
61. Lockheed Martin 
62. Sperry 
63. ARMCO 
64. American Can 
65. Altria Group 
66. Deere 
67. Getty Oil 
68. Georgia-Pacific 
69. Coca-Cola 
70. Bendix 
71. TRW 
72. Alcoa 
73. BP America 
74. Champion International 
75. Weyerhaeuser 
76. National Intergroup 
77. PepsiCo 
78. Sara Lee 
79. Bestfoods 
80. Fortune Brands 
81. General Mills 
82. Honeywell Intl. 
83. Textron 
84. Owens-Illinois 
85. General Dynamics 
86. Republic Steel 
87. Johnson & Johnson 
88. Honeywell 
89. Wyeth 
90. Raytheon 
91. Signal Companies 
92. Ryerson Tull 
93. Warner-Lambert 
94. American Motors 
95. Uniroyal 
96. NCR 
97. FMC 
98. Burlington Industries Equity 
99. Chiquita Brands Intl. 
100. PPG Industries 

Fast forward seven year to 1984, and there is a remarkable degree of stability.  79 of the Fortune 100 are still there, alive and kicking.  7 of the top 10 in 1977 carried over into the 1984 top 10, albeit shuffling spots a bit.

The past seven years have been a far different story.  Driven by the inexorable march of Moore’s law and the entry of billions of new customers and competitors, the only constant is the revolutionary change of Creative Destruction.

Consider the Fortune 100 in 2005:

1. Wal-Mart Stores 
2. BP 
3. Exxon Mobil 
4. Royal Dutch/Shell Group 
5. General Motors 
6. DaimlerChrysler 
7. Toyota Motor 
8. Ford Motor 
9. General Electric 
10. Total 
11. ChevronTexaco 
12. ConocoPhillips 
13. AXA 
14. Allianz 
15. Volkswagen 
16. Citigroup 
17. ING Group 
18. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone 
19. American Intl. Group 
20. Intl. Business Machines 
21. Siemens 
22. Carrefour 
23. Hitachi 
24. Assicurazioni Generali 
25. Matsushita Electric Industrial 
26. McKesson 
27. Honda Motor 
28. Hewlett-Packard 
29. Nissan Motor 
30. Fortis 
31. Sinopec 
32. Berkshire Hathaway 
33. ENI 
34. Home Depot 
35. Aviva 
36. HSBC Holdings 
37. Deutsche Telekom 
38. Verizon Communications 
39. Samsung Electronics 
40. State Grid 
41. Peugeot 
42. Metro 
43. Nestle 
44. U.S. Postal Service 
45. BNP Paribas 
46. China National Petroleum 
47. Sony 
48. Cardinal Health 
49. Royal Ahold 
50. Altria Group 
51. Pemex 
52. Bank of America Corp. 
53. Vodafone 
54. Tesco 
55. Munich Re Group 
56. Nippon Life Insurance 
57. Fiat 
58. Royal Bank of Scotland 
59. Zurich Financial Services 
60. Credit Agricole 
61. Credit Suisse 
62. State Farm Insurance Cos 
63. France Telecom 
64. Electricite De France 
65. J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. 
66. UBS 
67. Kroger 
68. Deutsche Bank 
69. E.ON 
70. Deutsche Post 
71. BMW 
72. Toshiba 
73. Valero Energy 
74. AmerisourceBergen 
75. Pfizer 
76. Boeing 
77. Procter & Gamble 
78. RWE 
79. Suez 
80. Renault 
81. Unilever 
82. Target 
83. Robert Bosch 
84. Dell 
85. ThyssenKrupp 
86. Costco Wholesale 
87. HBOS 
88. Johnson & Johnson 
89. Prudential 
90. Tokyo Electric Power 
91. BASF 
92. Hyundai Motor 
93. Enel 
94. Marathon Oil 
95. Statoil 
96. NEC 
97. Repsol YPF 
98. Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance 
99. Fujitsu 
100. Time Warner 

If we look at the 2012 list, we find the tables have been turned.  In 2012, there were 75 new members of the elite Fortune 100 club compared to the 2005 list.  Only 25 companies from the 2005 list survived on the list a mere seven years later.

So fasten your seat belts.  The radical redefinition of business models has only just begun.  We are on the Eve of Creative Destruction.

-----

A you prepared for the revolution?  Get prepared by becoming a Certified Information Professional.

If the following topic is of interest, you should attend our upcoming free seminar in these cities:

• May 1 - Toronto, ON
• May 7 - Anaheim, CA
• May 23 - Washington, DC

In many organizations, existing SharePoint deployments are broad, but not very deep when it comes to integration with core business processes, especially those that are transactional and complex. While most of those organizations have goals or formal plans to make additional investments in this direction, the entrance of SharePoint 2013 and Office365 into the mix have interrupted some of these plans. Companies now find themselves having to make even more complex and future-looking plans about moving to the cloud.

People want to know -- what should you do next if you already have a SharePoint 2003, 2007 or 2010 on-premises deployment? What are leading companies doing today? What are the mistakes to avoid? What issues should you be considering? How do you convince your manager to move forward?

All important questions to answer, and each deserving of a stand-alone article to walk you through them in detail. But in my conversations with experts and customers alike, there are several recurring themes that I think best encapsulate my thoughts on how to prepare for a move to the cloud:

1 -- Focus on the user experience.

There are fantastic new end user features in the UI of SharePoint 2013 and within Office365 that make it a compelling solution -- Microsoft Office integrations, drag-and-drop, content aggregation, personalization, and more. But end users are not your only users. Don't forget the administrator's experience. Talk with all users and stakeholders about how they use the platform today, and as you prototype and test the next version, get feedback from them as to what is working and what is missing, looking specifically at ways the UI can improve upon key business use cases. Understand how this change will affect productivity.

2 -- Understand what can be moved to the cloud.

If you begin your planning process by understanding the key use cases and business process scenarios, you will likely identify some areas that may not work in the cloud. The biggest impacts will come from areas of your current deployment where 3rd party tools or advanced customizations were used -- which tend to happen in the most business-critical aspects of your SharePoint deployment. Whether solutions, tools, or data, it is important to understand what you are technically able to move to the cloud. Sometimes it may require redesigning or re-architecting your solutions, other times it may require re-thinking (or re-prioritizing) your requirements.

3 -- Decide what should be moved to the cloud.

 Not every work load should be moved to the cloud. There are data sovereignty issues, complex business solutions, and transactional systems that should remain on premises. While maintaining hybrid environments (where some assets are in the cloud and others remain on prem) add complexity and additional management overhead, hybrid may make the most sense for your business. As you map out your use cases and prioritize them, decide which use cases make technical and fiscal sense to move to the cloud.

4 -- Figure out which flavor of cloud fits your business needs.

Office365 is not your only option for the cloud. There are numerous regional and global vendors offering hosted solutions for multi-tenant (shared hardware/platform between multiple customers) and dedicated SharePoint environments. Organizations wanting more flexibility in what they can configure may find Office365 to be too limiting, while others can fit their needs into Microsoft's packaged service. Determine your requirements first, and then figure out which vendor can best provide a hosted service to meet your requirements.

5 -- Understand how best to utilize your in-house skills.

One reason to seriously consider moving your systems to the cloud is the idea that you can reduce internal IT resource costs. While it is true that you will have less of a need for internal infrastructure people -- traditional IT roles -- the reality is that this cost moves rather than disappears. Instead of needing someone to maintain servers, what you will increasingly require  are people who understand and manage your business processes. With the cloud comes the rise of the Business Analyst, and an opportunity for various roles across your organization to step up and fill this need.

6 -- Plan for a more complex information architecture.

Here is one area that does not entirely translate from on-prem to online: maintaining a detailed information architecture. If you have spent time building out a complex metadata strategy, you will not, unfortunately, find much by way of tools to help you migrate your term sets and taxonomies over to the cloud, requiring you to rebuild. And as Microsoft slowly begins integrating Yammer social features into SharePoint 2013 on-prem and Office365, be aware that many of these features are disconnected (for the foreseeable future) from the newsfeed. What this means is that your plans to use the social interactions of your users to build out your folksonomy, and in turn improve your search results, will have to wait. And if you plan to maintain a hybrid model, you will need to plan for the overhead of manually maintaining your information architecture across two systems.

7 -- Use your upgrade/migration as an opportunity to clean house.

One benefit of moving to a new platform is the opportunity to clean up, reorganize, and restructure your sites, content, and processes. Not all content needs to be moved, not all customizations and features are driving the desired behaviors in your end user activities. As you prioritize the use cases which make sense to move into the cloud, determine what policies and procedures should also move, and establish healthy patterns at the start of your new deployment.

8 -- Create a consistent governance strategy across all systems.

Similarly, moving to a new system is an opportunity to re-think all of your governance activities -- or to establish a governance strategy where one was lacking. This might include guidelines for site creation, document lifecycle and retention, storage, reporting, and permissions. Key to successful governance planning is having a firm understanding of the data, metrics, and reporting available to you and your administrators so that you can monitor and manage the platform. This is especially important in a hybrid environment, where these outputs may differ widely.

In summary:  There is no easy button for moving to the cloud. And honestly, whatever your decision, the technical aspects of your plan are the probably going to be the easiest to figure out. Where the majority of projects fail -- especially when moving your SharePoint instances into the cloud -- are around the soft topics: people, planning, governance. One of my favorite one-liners that I use when presenting on these topics is "One of my goals is to have people leaving my session with more questions than answers." By that, I mean my goal is to get people asking questions about their plans, thinking through their stated (and unstated) goals and strategies, and working to ensure that all stakeholders have been heard.

In your efforts to simplify costs and processes by moving your work  into the cloud, you run the danger of making things much more complex. Don't chase after the cloud because it's the latest, greatest marketing pitch from every vendor chasing after new revenue models.  Move when it makes business sense to move -- and no sooner. Move when the benefits outweigh the costs. Move when your business-critical systems are ready to be moved.

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Check out our upcoming free seminar in these cities:

• May 1 - Toronto, ON
• May 7 - Anaheim, CA
• May 23 - Washington, DC

Yahoo, Best Buy and other innovation-hungry businesses are rethinking the value of remote work in their organizations. But everyone can’t work face-to-face all the time; social collaboration platforms are being called upon by a growing number of organizations to fill this gap.

But there’s a difference between having social tools in place and actually using them to accelerate innovation and change within an organization. Companies need to get their teams to move beyond “Facebook” social connections and get down to business with these investments. 

Here are eight ways to get your employees and other stakeholders to actually use your collaboration platform to move business forward.

1 -- Enlist collaboration champions.

The spirit of collaboration is not “top down”; relying solely on corporate encouragement (or worse yet management edicts) to spark adoption of collaboration tools day-to-day will not work. Identify natural leaders in the organization with energy for collaboration and enlist them as ambassadors. Provide extra training and put them in a position to model this for others in the organization.

Once these advocates start applying the tools to business processes in a way you want to encourage, communicate these success stories in company-wide channels. You can make their role unofficial or anoint them with a title – whatever works best for your culture.

2 -- Back up words with actions.

Changing behavior has to be supported from the top as well – but actions are more important than words. If company leadership isn’t present on SharePoint pages or actively messaging with the communication tool of choice, don’t expect the rest of the team to jump on board. 

One visible and effective way to do this is with executive webcasts. Live events streamed to employees using the company’s collaboration platform not only demonstrate that management supports the initiative; they are powerful communication tools that can engage employees instantly, and add valuable content to your knowledge repository that the team will use. 

3 -- Make sure there’s an app for that.

We now live in an app world. If you want employees to really use your social tools, they need to be available on the mobile devices that they use; moreover, they should run on native applications on those devices. 

This is much easier to accomplish if your company has standardized on a limited number of devices. This is less and less common, so a realistic long-term plan accounts for apps that will work on a variety of devices. Phase things if you have to, but don’t take short cuts that will inhibit usage.

This may seem like an optional capability, but social collaboration cannot be forced.  If it’s too hard or unnatural, your team will not change their behavior.

4 -- Implement video blogging.

Face-to-face collaboration is powerful. Giving employees the ability to send video messages – if easy to use – is a unique and powerful way to make collaboration real. This is especially helpful in situations where employees are collaborating across departments or offices. Putting a face to a name stimulates personal connections and fosters creative relationships.  Videos don’t have to be masterpieces; they can be simple narrated screen shares, reducing the fear factor and skill factor in recording them.

The best video blogs are not top down lectures or all-encompassing overviews; think Twitter (or email) with video. Addressing specific issues through video is quick and easy yet collectively these assets deliver a much deeper understanding for a broad set of employees.

Few companies have made the jump to a video blogging culture.  Those that have are improving the quality of interaction between their employees, but the benefits go beyond that.  They also get a free library of virtual training videos that are “evergreen”, remaining up to date and on message over time.

5 -- Make it fun with gamification.

Engage employees through scoring, awards and leader boards to encourage friendly competition through the collaborative platform. Ratings systems that are accessible by all users and that include “featured” and “highest rated” sections in the collaborative portal encourage users to upload quality content and facilitate sharing of ideas across departments. Similarity with social media platforms that your employees already use can ease the transition into using a collaborative enterprise system. The ability to rate or “like” posts and content provides a familiar structure to encourage higher adoption rates.

6 -- Integrate collaborative tools in everyday business processes.

Don’t limit your team’s collaboration to their desks. Using collaborative tools in the conference room will not only help to keep more detailed and diverse notes, but will also encourage others to participate in the experience by seeing it at work. Tablets and other mobile devices have made it easier for employees to take their collaborative platform with them. They can share notes, access content and integrate input from remote team members during meetings.

Another way to do this is to take advantage of your company’s existing conference room technology.  Video conference and tele-presence rooms can be integrated with collaboration solutions, turning these existing (and usually under-used) assets into distributed video studios. Record meetings and store them as enterprise content to be viewed on-demand.  Let employees use these rooms to record videos requiring more than a webcam.

7 -- Maximize content sharing from your collaborations platform.

Populate your collaborative framework with a rich content base of on-demand materials cutting across your content silos.  Easier said than done – but the more of your company content that can be accessed and searched from your portal, the more valuable the portal becomes.

Recent breakthroughs in search technology have made it easier to research not only text-based content but also the words spoken in audio and video content through speech recognition software. This enables employees to broaden their resource base and very efficiently find a relevant recording – or just a video clip.

Many companies are adding video content hubs as part of the collaboration platform – an in-house “Youtube” for their enterprise.  This builds viral energy for viewing and contributing content. 

8 -- Pick a “poster child” project for social collaboration.

Possibly the best way to increase adoption of your collaboration platforms in your business is to pilot its use on a real business project.  Choose an important initiative where social collaboration can enhance results, and drive usage as a priority for success. 

A national mobile phone retailer created a collaboration platform for hundreds of stores that enabled staff to be trained via short videos on whatever phone they owned.  Employees could also share their own videos for their phones on in-store product placement and other real-time topics using the same collaborative network.  This retailer promoted their training network throughout the business as an example of new social behavior that they wanted to encourage across the company.

Forcing adoption for a key project gives you more than a “poster child” example to demonstrate success to your team.  It also helps you identify issues and enhancements that only come to light from applying these tools in the real world of your business. 

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Are you…  

Struggling with how to maintain control of your business information in the era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device to Work)?

Wondering about how to use the capture capabilities of Smart Phones to bring capture closer to the point of document origination?  

Trying to figure out how to seamlessly connect with your employees and customers via mobile?

Well look no further.  AIIM's one-day "Putting Your Information in Motion" Seminar (free!) will give you the answer.  Coming in May to a city near you…

May 9 - San Francisco, CA

May 16 - Denver, CO

May 21 - New York, NY

It’s always been a given: the sooner you convert a paper document into an electronic image, the faster, more accurately, and less expensively you can process it.  Obvious though it may have been, over the 20+ years I’ve been in this business it’s not been an easy insight to act upon.

In the era of MFPs (multifunction peripherals), mobile phones and, more importantly, mobile data plans, it’s easy to forget how tentative data connectivity was even a short time ago.  Even in a commercial setting, banks with branches, insurers with independent brokers, in fact, any organization with far-flung activities, all had big concerns about wide-area bandwidth.  Scanning of documents and sending them “over the wire” from remote locations was seen as a luxury.

That perspective is changing – fast.

Converting a paper document into a digital image as soon as the document is received, or even created, is a strategy now within reach to most organizations, in most parts of the world. We call this distributed document capture. It’s different from the old model of centralized capture, where everything is sent to a central processing center.

The good news is that there are now low-cost desktop scanners, mobile scanners, multi-function peripherals (MFPs), and more than a billion smart phones worldwide that can operate as a capture device.  The bad news is that it’s not so simple as simply snapping a photo to be successful with distributed capture. Before you invest in a solution, be sure you have good answers to these questions:

 1 -- Is it “Usable?”

An intuitive user-interface is essential to facilitate distributed capture. Typically, the people receiving documents are customer-facing, not dedicated and trained capture operators. The solution should provide a clear and simple series of steps to that assure a legible document image… 

2 -- Can it be “Read?”

A poor image quality or, worse, partially-captured document, will quickly undermine the benefits of distributed capture, especially downstream when it comes time to extract data with optical character recognition (OCR). This is where most mobile telephone cameras struggle to create high enough quality images to avoid laborious manual effort later in the process.  For a step up in quality, select a portable scanner – some are no larger than a thick ruler – that attaches to a laptop or mobile device. 

3 -- What document is it?

The first, most important, piece of information about any scan, is the identity of the document itself.  Is it an application, a claim, a change-of-address, etc?  That question might be answered by manual input from the person who scanned or took the picture of the document, but it also might be automated through automatic document classification.  Remember, your mobile and distributed workforce are not trained capture professionals, so take a belt and braces strategy on this one…

4 -- Is it Accurate?

Determining the accuracy of content extracted from a document is of prime importance.  Whether the extraction is manual, or automated with OCR, you need a set of checks and balances to assure users that the solution can be relied upon.  For example, if the software is uncertain, how does it notify a user, and which user is it that gets notified?

5 -- Is it Safe?

The security of data is essential to consider, especially when handling customer or other sensitive data. Distributed capture must be considered moving capture into high-risk environments.  Make sure you understand what the risk exposure is if a mobile device is lost or stolen in the field.

6 -- Is it Faster?

The speed at which the captured document is transferred from the mobile device to your repository or LOB system determines the speed at which it can be processed by the application.  The old saying, “a chain is only as strong as its weakest link,” comes into play here.  If there is, in fact, a bandwidth limitation for remote users, then the advantages of capturing remotely may be lost in the transfer.

7 -- Is it Capable of Handling Anything a User Throws at it?

There are always exceptions and how you manage them is the test of a capture system. Can you add attachments? Can you add a new document you weren’t expecting? Can you annotate a document or route it to a supervisor for review? The closer you are to the customer, the more exceptions you will encounter, so make sure you have the flexibility to handle the unexpected.

8 -- Will it work for me?

In most cases, a mobile capture solution will both archive the document images, and route them into a line of business system – as fast as possible for customer satisfaction. For example, an invoice, resume, or contract will be sent to the ERP system. An insurance claim will be forwarded for adjudication. A loan application may link to a case management system, where underwriters will review. A medical document will be appended to the patient’s electronic health record. Make sure your distributed capture system can connect to your business systems and deliver image and data seamlessly.

In Summary… After all these years in the capture business, I thought things had settled down.  People have been saying that document capture is a “mature” technology.  And, of course, it is, but the world is changing around us, creating new opportunities.  So don’t be shy: if you see a way to shorten the cycles, to deliver better customer service, to improve vendor relations, or to change just about any existing process by capturing documents sooner at distributed/remote locations, then take advantage of the opportunity.  Just ask the right questions - and get credible answers – as you navigate to a successful implementation.

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Are you…  

Struggling with how to maintain control of your business information in the era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device to Work)?

Wondering about how to use the capture capabilities of Smart Phones to bring capture closer to the point of document origination?  

Trying to figure out how to seamlessly connect with your employees and customers via mobile?

Well look no further.  AIIM's one-day "Putting Your Information in Motion" Seminar (free!) will give you the answer.  Coming in May to a city near you…

May 9 - San Francisco, CA

May 16 - Denver, CO

May 21 - New York, NY

While document scanning and document management technologies and services successfully eliminate paper problems, it’s workflow automation that generates the greatest return on investment because this is where business processes are truly streamlined.

This is a guide for how to ease the pain of document-intensive business processes with workflow automation in a way that maximizes ROI, generates some quick wins and can lead to higher profitability and perhaps even competitive advantage.

1 -- Identify the Source of Your Pain

The first step to solving a problem is to admit that you have a problem by identifying critical business issues. Common business pain that can be addressed through workflow automation includes:

• High costs and error rates due to employee inefficiency and manual processes
• Duplicate or late payments, missing early pay discounts, and losing invoices
• Paying for goods and services not received
• High invoice aging and poor cash flow
• Fines for not having complete and proper documentation for employees, like I-9 forms
• Not being able to find documents quickly during an audit or lawsuit or not being able to find all documents
• Lengthy or incomplete new employee or new account on-boarding
• Hiring freezes while needing to get more done
• Lack of management visibility into business processes
• Poor customer service

Do any of these sound familiar? If so, then you’ve got some streamlining to do…

 2 -- Understand the Rules of Engagement

One of the most important steps in automating any business process is to understand the rules of engagement, which include following rules, adhering to regulations, and following document retention requirements. This governance is established by a combination of internal corporate policies, external industry regulations and local, state, and federal laws.  Regardless of the source, it’s important to be aware of their existence and how they affect the documents that drive your processes.

Of particular note, you need to understand the federally required retention schedule for employee records, which can range from 2-30 years—and indefinitely in some cases. Below are some retention schedule examples. Because they can change, this is not a comprehensive list and may be trumped by state or industry guidelines. We recommend consulting with a certified records manager before creating a records retention policy and specific guidelines. Usually your document management partner can help you or refer you to a specialist.  The industry trade groups ARMA and ICRM are both good resources for additional information on records management.

• FMLA records: three years
• INS I-9 forms: three years after date of hire or one year after date of termination (whichever is later) or indefinitely for foreign workers on visas
• Payroll records: three years
• Drug tests: five years (records pertaining to the process: only two years)
• OSHA forms 300, 300A & 301: five years
• Health records: six years
• Exposure to hazardous materials records: 30 years
• Benefits plans and pension documents: indefinitely

3 -- Document Your Process to Process Your Documents

The next step is to document where you are today. What documents need to be captured? Where do they come from and in what format are they? (i.e. paper, fax, email, PDF) Who needs to be involved in their processing? How do rules and regulations affect the process? How can this be done in a better way? What exceptions are there to the processes and how should they be handled?

Documenting your processes allows you to gain clarity and determine the sources of inefficiency, bottlenecks, and problems. You can then re-design the process to focus on the desired result with workflow automation. An easy way to do this is to sketch the processes on a piece of paper, possibly in a flowchart format.  Visio or even Word can be used to create flowcharts easily. 

The biggest mistake an organization can make is to replicate their manual, error-prone processes with technology. If you’re going to invest in hardware, workflow software, and professional services, you need to re-create the process by taking advantage of what this new technology allows, especially that which was not possible before with a manual  process.

4 -- Be SMART & Define Your Goals

After clarifying your critical business issues and fully understanding the external and internal rules governing your documents, you’ll want to determine the key objectives of your process improvement activities.

When determining goals, being bold is one thing, but being SMART is another; remember that goals need to be:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Attainable
• Relevant
• Timely

For example, you may want to determine which vendors offer early payment discounts, how much could be saved if they were taken advantage of, and if you’ve got the cash flow to do so —then you can also determine vendor priority for who gets paid sooner rather than later.

Another example is to determine average invoice aging per customer. You can set an overall average, say 45 days down from 60 days, as well as identify goals per key customers who tend to pay late. This alone can dramatically improve cash flow.

5 -- Find an Office Automation Partner

Utilizing document imaging and enterprise content management (ECM) technology to automate business processes is best accomplished by working with an experienced office automation provider. But how do you find a good one to partner with?

You will want to find a company that:

• Can objectively evaluate your situation
• Has a depth of experience with your business process and solving your critical business issue
• Is able to recommend and implement a combination of hardware, software and services
• Can clearly articulate the value of every part of the proposed solution

Added Bonus: find a partner that will work with you in presenting a proposed solution to all of the stakeholders; senior management, end-users and even C-level executive leadership to simultaneously get buy-in from all groups and avoid scope creep later on. 

6 -- Estimate ROI, Carefully

Unless they feel your pain directly, your superiors will likely be unmoved (and perhaps unimpressed) unless you present a compelling business case for moving forward with your workflow automation plans.

This business case needs to start with your partner’s proposal and include any other related internal costs. The trick is to identify how much money will be saved or made by implementing workflow and in what time frame. This may include:

Cost Savings

• Repurposing employees so new hires aren’t needed and FTE can be reduced
• Employee salary save by not having to replace those due to attrition
• The cost of space regained from paper, file cabinets, and bankers boxes
• Eliminating fines
• Reducing the cost of audits and lawsuits
• Taking advantage of early payment discounts and ending duplicate payments
• Ensuring complete documentation for a new account

Revenue Generation

• Collecting AR faster and improving cash flow
• On-boarding new accounts quicker
• Building business by providing superior levels of customer service
• Charging for instant access to records (e.g. public information, student transcripts, medical records)

Comparing solution costs with cost savings and revenues generated from workflow automation should lead to at least a conservative ROI.  Be sure to tread carefully here: this estimated ROI is how the success of the solution—and you—will be judged, which is another reason to use a seasoned office automation partner.

7 -- Test & Re-Test for a Quick Win

Once you’ve identified the best workflow automation solution, it will be up to your partner to implement it. The best advice we can give during this step: keep out creep and keep an eye out for “quick wins” in early phases of the project. Everyone has an example of how a project that was supposed to take two to three months really took two to three years because of scope creep.

Additionally, focus on one business process and get a “quick win.” This can help build confidence, erode resistance and can keep your team properly motivated to tackle future projects.

Once implemented, you’ll want to test the new process to determine how well it works and identify where additional “exception processing” steps need to be included—then re-test and test again. In some cases, you may have thought that daily notifications were a good idea, only to find out that they quickly fill up your inbox, becoming a nuisance. Testing allows for these adjustments to be made prior to the official launch of the new process, which increases user adoption and decreases resistance to change. Documenting the final version of the process will help capture all of this hard work, thinking and experience, and can be used to train new people.

8 -- One Bite at a Time

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. The same is true with business process automation. Start with one document intensive process, like accounts payable, then design, implement and test it successfully with your office automation partner. Make sure user acceptance is a high priority, as many technologies and new processes have failed due to employee resistance. Measure the resulting ROI. Then walk down the hall and implement in sales/customer service, HR, or any other area that could operate more efficiently.

Processing these documents with workflow automation represent the usual suspects:

To Summarize...

 Increasing efficiency, gaining visibility into your processes, and cutting costs starts with identifying your pain, then documenting your business processes, testing, and ends with a successful implementation of workflow automation. The Best Part: workflow solutions today are surprisingly affordable and offer very quick and measurable ROIs, particularly when coupled with document scanning services to handle capture and cloud document management.

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Are you…  

Struggling with how to maintain control of your business information in the era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device to Work)?

Wondering about how to use the capture capabilities of Smart Phones to bring capture closer to the point of document origination?  

Trying to figure out how to seamlessly connect with your employees and customers via mobile?

Well look no further.  AIIM's one-day "Putting Your Information in Motion" Seminar (free!) will give you the answer.  Coming in May to a city near you…

May 9 - San Francisco, CA

May 16 - Denver, CO

May 21 - New York, NY

8 Things to Consider in Pushing Capture to the Point of Content Origin

It’s no secret that the IT landscape continues to experience major shifts resulting from new and transformative technological advances in the mobile and cloud computing markets. The combination of mobile and cloud enables organizations to implement solutions based on their preferred and practical deployment model. Meaning, it’s no longer our way, it’s your way!

The mobile + cloud value proposition undoubtedly has already had a profound impact on Enterprise Content  Management (ECM) as it represents an opportunity for real time capture, real time delivery and real time access to content. In the area of capture, the critical on-ramp to ECM, mobile/cloud allows organizations to further capitalize on the trend of capturing content at the point of origin resulting in significant cost savings, faster access to actionable data, reducing latency, and enhancing customer service.  Capturing content at the point of mobile origin further extends these benefits as organizations are able to capture a broader range of critical content earlier in the business process.

A successful journey to remote capture requires careful planning and alignment with your organization’s business goals and objectives. Below are eight critical steps to consider as you embark on this important journey.

1 -- Assess the Business Need

There are a wide variety of applications that benefit from remote capture or capture at the point of origin including, but not limited to, accounts payable, contracts, lending documents, order processing, on-boarding, and expenses. Identify a single critical business process that originates in the virtual world. That virtual world can be remote offices, branch offices as well as virtual offices. Do a thorough assessment and identify the strategic imperatives required to support your business objectives such as cost savings, increased efficiencies, add value, reduce risks and improve customer service, to name a few.

2 -- Seek Expert Advice

You do not need to do this alone. Seek the assistance of knowledgeable system integrators who can assist in assessing, designing, implementing, training and supporting your remote capture initiative. The information technology professional you select should have vast experience in content management integration and should be able to assist you with all your ECM project initiatives.

3 -- Infrastructure Evaluation

Capture from the point of content origin needs to fuel other line of business applications such as Human Resource, Accounting, Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning. In conjunction with your selected IT professional, identify the vendors who have the tools that can support the integration with your backend applications.  Clearly identify both the functional requirements such as recognition, workflow and image enhancement as well as the non-functional requirements such as ease of use and technical support that you will require.

4 -- Capture Device Assessment

Just as critical as the infrastructure are the devices that will be used to capture the content. Capture at the point of origin can be done using MFPs, smart phones, tablets or document scanners. Identify what devices are currently available and can be leveraged or what devices can be deployed to meet the need. There is no one device that fits all needs, so select the device or devices that will meet both your performance and quality standards. Keep in mind, with this deployment model the knowledge worker is facilitating capture and ease of use is critical. Equally important is the need to have ongoing support for future capture devices as they become available.

5 -- Careful Vendor Analysis

Again, working with your selected IT professional, carefully analyze a number of potential options for your remote capture project. The options should be compared across a number of different criteria such as their fit with strategic objectives, cost-benefit result, non-financial benefits, scalability, ongoing support for future technologies, ease of use, and implementation risks. Require a demonstration of your content being handled by the considered hardware and software solutions and then select the solution that best meets your requirements.

6 -- Phased Approach

A phased approach is often recommended when implementing ECM initiatives. This will enable your organization to find quick wins, which will help prove the concept and are essential to justify the continued investment and support for this project, as well as any future projects.

7 -- Benefit Realization

At the end of each phase of deployment, it is important to thoroughly measure the benefits realized to prove that all expectations from the project have been met. Measure both return on the investment and value on the investment.  ROI is a tangible benefit that can be translated into quantifiable financial savings. Some examples would be reducing staff and reducing reliance on courier services. Value add on the investment would be enhancing customer service and faster access to content to support better decision making.

8 -- Leverage the Investment

Finally, organizations should always look for ways to leverage their IT investments. For most organizations when deploying ECM, there will be a beginning, middle, but no end. Organizations should constantly be evaluating the next content-centric project to embrace and identify the expected benefits from that project. This will enable ECM to evolve throughout the enterprise. Think big. Start small. Grow steadily.

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Are you…  

Struggling with how to maintain control of your business information in the era of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device to Work)?

Wondering about how to use the capture capabilities of Smart Phones to bring capture closer to the point of document origination?  

Trying to figure out how to seamlessly connect with your employees and customers via mobile?

Well look no further.  AIIM's one-day "Putting Your Information in Motion" Seminar (free!) will give you the answer.  Coming in May to a city near you…

May 9 - San Francisco, CA

May 16 - Denver, CO

May 21 - New York, NY