THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ECM AND DMS

Enterprise Content Management is much more than just a means for storing and managing an organization’s documents. ECM also includes the tools, strategies, and processes used to capture, store, retain, and manage content. ECM appeals to those looking to manage and configure large volumes of structured and unstructured data, including:
- Images - Web content - Email - Video - Electronic documents - Other media
With its superior security features, ECM systems tend to appeal towards risk-driven consumers – such as healthcare professionals, universities, lawyers, etc.

Common ECM Features: - Digital asset management - Indexing - Document collaboration - Workflows - Audit trails - Business process management - Email management - Imaging In order to visualize ECM – image it as an Office Assistant, able to automatically recognize the content within a document and know who, where, and when to send it.

Document Management Systems are designed to control the life cycle of documents. This includes document creation, retention, and accessibility. Whereas an ECM system is your “Office Assistant”, a DMS is your digital “filing cabinet”. A DMS is at its core a simplified ECM system as it focuses on managing entities as a whole rather than the extensive functionality of content management.
Document management systems are technically a sub-category of ECM – as ECM could not exist without its ability to manage documents (the core function of a DMS).
Common DMS Features: - Workflows - Audit trails - Indexing - Versioning

STOP!

Stop ...

1. Wasting time and staff resources on endless “document quests”
2. Struggling to make one team member’s documents available to another
3. Recreating important content because you can’t find it
4. Fixing problems caused by overlooking crucial information in files or email messages
5. Opening documents simply to understand what they contain
6. Struggling to interpret obscure file names or to understand which client a document is associated with
7. Losing documents because they’re not labeled consistently or physically stored together
8. Misplacing important email correspondence
9. Navigating multiple applications, drives, and folders simply to view all the content associated with a project, client, or matter
10. Deploying unnecessary software to client desktops – or performing time-consuming conversions – simply to permit document viewing
11. Struggling to control who can see or edit your documents
12. Spending hours trying to track who viewed or edited a document
13. Wasting money and time backing up obsolete files
14. Reconciling inconsistent concurrent changes made by document reviewers
15. Using Windows’ slow and ineffective document search tools
16. Trying to figure out which version of a document is authoritative, or who owns it

With document management system in place, you can get more done, more effectively, at lower cost, in less time. You can stop wasting time or money on manually finding and managing your documents, and reinvest those resources in becoming more profitable!

Call today us today and give it a trial for document management feasibility study and consultancy

CHOOSING THE WRONG VENDOR TO DEPLOY DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SOLUTION

Why do document management implementations go wrong? Ever asked yourself as a CTO, CIO, CMO, C-Suite. As almost everyone would want to believe it or not, document management has come to stay. Either you adopt it now or you end up paying the huge cost of having to do a catch-up. From the big names to the small and unknown (SharePoint, Alfresco, Documentum, Filenet, Hyland, Laserfiche, OpenText, Pinpoint, Paperport, gDoc, etc), these solutions have come to stay.

My story goes…
A client hires a (wrong) vendor (padi padi or for kick backs) and says, “We want a like-to-like migration from paper document to electronic document management solution (EDMS) or enterprise content management (ECM).” The vendor says “Okay” and does it.
Now, I don’t know about you, but when I hear “like-for-like” I think I am not adding functionality, but just following the charade. It may just be taking advantage of new out-of-the-box features, available to make information governance and management easier. This is a no no.
The wrong vendor interprets “like-for-like” literally, and end up creating a mess from paper document into EDMS/ECM making the deployment a failure..

...the back-story goes like this ...

1. An organization decides to convert from paper to electronic document management solution (good start).
   
2. They take the decision to implement any of the above listed EDMS or ECM (reasonable decision).
   
3. The vendor deploys the solution and copies (not moved) some content from the network drives into DMS solution (making progress, except…)
   
4. They did not …
   
   • Take a content inventory.
     
   • Develop a taxonomy or metadata model.
     
   • Account for other stakeholders that may need access to the content.
     
   • Provide context / role specific views to the users.
     
   • Put any rules around site provisioning and what to do with them when no longer needed.
     
   • Do ANY of the things needing to be done prior to implementing an ECM solution and migrating content, regardless of what the platform is. In short, they moved whatever was in those network folders right into the EDMS, effectively creating two messes instead of one.
5. So the advocated solution starts to collapse under its own weight (because they miss the parts about capacity planning, scaling, and disposing of content).
   
6. Nobody uses the solution even after millions of naira have been spent making the software a failure.

>>> and fast forward.
The right vendor should spend some days talking with stakeholders to figure out what’s needed and the end users of their expectations. Get into people’s heads about their thoughts, fears, and attitudes around how they view information management as an enabler for them to do their jobs.

1. Define the Scope – The scope shouldn’t be limited to a specific group, bother anyone and everyone concerned from stakeholders to end users. Most vendors cut out this stage and talk mainly with IT staff. Although they own the business unit, the content applies to a business process that involves all and non-technical units in the organization.
   
2. Fundamentals – By fundamentals I am referring to items such as file plans, retention & disposition schedules, archiving strategies, metadata model, user profiles (personas), security, etc.
   
3. Content Migration – Content migration is not just simply forklifting content from one repository to another. There has to be some serious thought put into it. Decisions about what content goes, where does it go, what gets archived, day forward or legacy, all have to be asked and answered.
   
4. Search – Absent of metadata and taxonomy makes search difficult and concise result a fantasy.
5. Other considerations – Infrastructure planning or architecture, capacity planning, business continuity planning, backup/restore planning, storage management, integration, enterprise search, etc. There is a long list of things that should be done.

Any one of the above could cause the best EDMS or ECM implementation to be a spectacular failure. One small mistake can spell doom and this has nothing to do with technology selection. The mistake is even more critical when the wrong vendor is picked. It’s really that simple.

Regardless of what solutions you’re deploying, selecting the right partner is critical. Go back to square one and do the right things in the right order. Involve the right stakeholders in the discussions, stop the client from making quick decisions and get them to make correct decisions.
The point of my little story is that you need to do your homework before you choose a partner no matter what you need them for. The wrong partner can kill a project; the right partner will help you succeed.
At TECRES Consult, we help organizations select the right partners and ideal solution.

Julius Macaulay is the Principal Consultant at TECRES Consult (www.tecres.com.ng) providing ICT training and document management consultancy services for organizations. He holds a Masters degree in Information Technology with special interest in "the paperless office".

SHOULD AN ORGANIZATION DECLINE ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

While most organizations are considering Electronic Document Management System, some decisions makers still reject the need to convert their paper documents to digital copies. Consider the following fact in the UK.

Up to £15 billion wasted every year in the UK looking for 'lost' documents at work.
A survey of over 1,000 office workers in the UK has found that over two thirds of desk-based employees spend up to an hour a day looking for 'lost' documents. This wasted time is costing British businesses up to a staggering £15 billion (£15,388,652,760) every year, according to research from infoMENTUM, carried out by independent research agency Censuswide. The research found that employees are getting increasingly frustrated at not being able to locate the documents they need; nearly 20% of respondents had to waste additional time recreating documents from scratch, as a result.

Over 93% of UK office workers believe that access to the files and documentation they need is important and helps them to do their job more efficiently and effectively.

ISO GUIDELINES AND DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Integral to an organization’s content environment, document management involves the acquisition, storage and recovery of information pertinent to operations.
A well-functioning document management system (DMS) generates agile document-modification while improving records' retention, security, auditing and summarization.
Regulations and quality standards developed by professional agencies for maintaining operational/performance criterion across a wide range of enterprise/business processes motivate DMS-integrity.

ISO Guidelines
The International Organization for Standardization generates ISO-guidelines to provide best-practice principles/procedures for quality assurance, environmental management and information security. Several ISO pertinent standards are:

• ISO-9001 Quality Standard regulates workflows producing goods and services. The benchmark for quality enterprise management, it fulfills the rigours of independent, external audits. ISO9001 applies to similar products/services of the same relative class/function, globally controlling these processes to guarantee consumer needs and expectations are satisfied.

• ISO-14001 offers worldwide standards for appropriate and safe control of enterprise processes that may negatively affect the environment through wasteful/dangerous acquisition of natural resources or excessive energy consumption. Internal audits maintain 14001-certification, ensuring these standards are upheld.

• ISO-27001 standardizes practices for security of organizational information. Systematic evaluation of security risks identifies administrative priorities for managing threats to information security. The objective is assure confidentiality, integrity, and safe-access to information. The three guidelines generate enterprise cost savings through improved efficiency, productivity, and market-expansion, caused by reliable measures of quality-assurance, environmental-protection and data-security.

Julius Macaulay is the Principal Consultant at TECRES Consult (www.tecres.com.ng) providing ICT training and document management consultancy services for organizations. He holds a masters degree in Information Technology with special interest in "the paperless office".
Contact us today

• by email: info@tecres.com.ng
• follow us on twitter.com: @TECRES_CONSULT
• like us on facebook: facebook.com/tecresconsult
• visit our website: www.tecres.com.ng

THE TOP 10 MISTAKES COMPANIES MAKE WHEN DEPLOYING A DOCUMENT SCANNING SOLUTION

Recent studies have shown that document scanning remains one of the top technology priorities of organizations, regardless of their size or their vertical market. Little wonder: when properly deployed, document scanning solutions deliver a tremendous payback – in terms of cost savings, faster turnaround, better quality, streamlined compliance and more. But mistakes during system implementation can undermine even the strongest business case for a document scanning solution. To help keep your document scanning project on the right track, here are the 10 most common mistakes that organizations make when deploying the technology – and how to avoid them.

1. Not buying enough scanning capacity
Too often, organizations use their average document processing volumes when determining scanning capacity. But organizations must also consider variables such as peak daily volume, required or contracted deadlines for completing work, and the effective throughput (not the advertised speeds) of the scanners that they are considering buying.

2. Not including all stakeholders both business and IT in the requirements definition
In some cases, the IT department will unilaterally choose the organization’s scanners, in turn, saddling operations with scanners that don’t meet their requirements or are not easy for operators to use. In other cases, an operations team will select scanners without the IT department’s involvement only to discover that the organization’s legacy systems and/or infrastructure can’t support the scanners.

3. Buying a solution without conducting a proof of concept
Organizations should never purchase a scanner without first seeing how it processes their documents. Too many organizations buy document scanning technology based on what they read in a brochure or see on a trade show. They need to test whether the scanner fits their business requirements and processing environment. Organizations also want to have some of their operators run the scanner to test usability.

4. Making decisions on front-end and back-end systems separately
An organization’s front-end scanning and capture solution must work in concert with its back-end workflow technology. For instance, organizations must ensure that their document scanning and capture solution can output images and data in the format required for back-end systems, whether it’s flat files, XML files, Excel spreadsheets or database output. In one case, a BPO purchased a scanning and capture solution that could only output images and data in one format. This resulted in the BPO spending a lot of time and money reconfiguring the output to the various formats that its customers required. Organizations also need to ensure that their back-end systems are fast enough to keep up with their front-end solutions otherwise they will experience bottlenecks in the “hand-off” of images and data. We’ve seen delays as much as 35 to 40 percent between front-end and back-end systems.

5. Not coordinating software and hardware vendors during system deployment
No one wins in this scenario. A lack of coordination typically results in wasted effort, finger pointing and delayed implementations. We have seen many cases where front-end and back-end solutions providers get their systems up and running at a customer site, but there is no integration because the vendors and the customer never discussed critical issues such as: what data needs to be passed from one system to another, the image formats required for back-end systems, and how data should be routed.

6. Not using a phased implementation approach
In their drive for fast results, too many organizations bite off more than they can chew when implementing a scanning solution. Trying to deploy an entire system at once can overwhelm internal resources, and draw out the deployment, in turn, putting the entire project at risk of getting shut down. Instead, organizations should determine where they can have the biggest impact on their operations with the least amount of change; they shouldn’t break a process that isn’t broken. With an initial success under their belts, users should similarly prioritize the next phases of their implementation based on their potential benefits.

7. Letting fear of change take over
Too many organizations are close minded when it comes to re-engineering their processes, falling back on the way they’ve done things for the past five or 10 years. For instance, some organizations manually count every document that they scan, and write a number on the first page of each batch. This process was necessitated by older technology that was prone to double-feeds or didn’t have automatic document counters. However, there is no need to do this with today’s scanning technology, and continuing to do so, creates needless, not to mention costly, work. The best strategy for helping your staff overcome their fear of change is to let them see the technology run firsthand. Once they see that the scanner detects double-feeds and counts documents, as examples, they’ll recognize the impact it will have on document preparation.

8. Not thinking LEAN
Organizations should always be looking for ways to do more with less. For instance, organizations shouldn’t automatically purchase more of their legacy scanners as their volume grows; there may be other scanners available that enable them to consolidate hardware. Similarly, most organizations can do a more efficient job of document preparation; there’s no need to tape small documents to 8 ½ x 11-inch paper, or to use multiple separator sheets for scanning.

9. Not cutting the paper cord
Many organizations use unique transaction separator sheets for each type of work that they process, creating an enormous breadth and volume of paper. Today’s document scanning solutions are an opportunity for organizations to rid themselves of this paper, automatically separating transactions based on documents (e.g. checks or envelopes) within a batch. The technology also allows organizations to insert generic separator sheets that can be re-used; one company has re-used its generic separator sheets for the past five years, saving significant money.

10. Not sharing as in shared services
With the economy still struggling, and capital budgets tight, organizations should look to consolidate multiple scanning functions on a single platform.

Properly deployed, document scanning solutions deliver tremendous results. But mistakes during implementation can undermine even the strongest business case for the technology. Avoiding the 10 mistakes described above will help ensure the success of your organization’s scanning project.

Excerpt from www.ibml.com

THE TOP TEN STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGY TRENDS FOR 2014. Vol IV

9. Smart Machines Through 2020, the smart machine era will blossom with a proliferation of contextually aware, intelligent personal assistants, smart advisors (such as IBM Watson), advanced global industrial systems and public availability of early examples of autonomous vehicles. The smart machine era will be the most disruptive in the history of IT. New systems that begin to fulfill some of the earliest visions for what information technologies might accomplish — doing what we thought only people could do and machines could not —are now finally emerging. Gartner expects individuals will invest in, control and use their own smart machines to become more successful. Enterprises will similarly invest in smart machines. Consumerization versus central control tensions will not abate in the era of smart-machine-driven disruption. If anything, smart machines will strengthen the forces of consumerization after the first surge of enterprise buying commences.

10. 3-D Printing Worldwide shipments of 3D printers are expected to grow 75 percent in 2014 followed by a near doubling of unit shipments in 2015. While very expensive “additive manufacturing” devices have been around for 20 years, the market for devices ranging from $50,000 to $500, and with commensurate material and build capabilities, is nascent yet growing rapidly. The consumer market hype has made organizations aware of the fact 3D printing is a real, viable and cost-effective means to reduce costs through improved designs, streamlined prototyping and short-run manufacturing.

About Gartner Symposium/ITxpo
Gartner Symposium/ITxpo is the world's most important gathering of CIOs and senior IT executives. This event delivers independent and objective content with the authority and weight of the world's leading IT research and advisory organization, and provides access to the latest solutions from key technology providers.

Julius Macaulay is the Principal Consultant at TECRES Consult - www.tecres.com.ng providing ICT Training and document management consultancy services for schools and organizations. He holds a Masters degree in Information Technology with special interest in the paperless office.

THE TOP TEN STRATEGIC TECHNOLOGY TRENDS FOR 2014. Vol III

5. Cloud/Client Architecture
Cloud/client computing models are shifting. In the cloud/client architecture, the client is a rich application running on an Internet-connected device, and the server is a set of application services hosted in an increasingly elastically scalable cloud computing platform. The cloud is the control point and system or record and applications can span multiple client devices. The client environment may be a native application or browser-based; the increasing power of the browser is available to many client devices, mobile and desktop alike. Robust capabilities in many mobile devices, the increased demand on networks, the cost of networks and the need to manage bandwidth use creates incentives, in some cases, to minimize the cloud application computing and storage footprint, and to exploit the intelligence and storage of the client device. However, the increasingly complex demands of mobile users will drive apps to demand increasing amounts of server-side computing and storage capacity.

6. The Era of Personal Cloud
The personal cloud era will mark a power shift away from devices toward services. In this new world, the specifics of devices will become less important for the organization to worry about, although the devices will still be necessary. Users will use a collection of devices, with the PC remaining one of many options, but no one device will be the primary hub. Rather, the personal cloud will take on that role. Access to the cloud and the content stored or shared from the cloud will be managed and secured, rather than solely focusing on the device itself.

7. Software Defined Anything
Software-defined anything (SDx) is a collective term that encapsulates the growing market momentum for improved standards for infrastructure programmability and data center inter-operability driven by automation inherent to cloud computing, DevOps and fast infrastructure provisioning. As a collective, SDx also incorporates various initiatives like OpenStack, OpenFlow, the Open Compute Project and Open Rack, which share similar visions. As individual SDx technology silos evolve and consortiums arise, look for emerging standards and bridging capabilities to benefit portfolios, but challenge individual technology suppliers to demonstrate their commitment to true inter-operability standards within their specific domains. While openness will always be a claimed vendor objective, different interpretations of SDx definitions may be anything but open. Vendors of SDN (network), SDDC (data center), SDS (storage), and SDI (infrastructure) technologies are all trying to maintain leadership in their respective domains, while deploying SDx initiatives to aid market adjacency plays. So vendors who dominate a sector of the infrastructure may only reluctantly want to abide by standards that have the potential to lower margins and open broader competitive opportunities, even when the consumer will benefit by simplicity, cost reduction and consolidation efficiency.