Document Management, Content Management & BPM
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Strategy choices for the future: Doug Miles, AIIM (December 2011)
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Over the last few years, ECM (enterprise content management) has been one of the fastest
growing areas of IT, outstripping traditional enterprise applications with its double-digit growth
(Gartner). Driven partly by the need to contain content chaos, but more positively by the need to
maximise employee productivity, improve knowledge sharing and reduce fixed costs, ECM has
taken its place at the IT top table, both as a concept and as a product.
There is no doubt that some organisations have struggled to achieve the vision of a single ECM
system – one that manages all types of content, across the whole enterprise. However, as
shown in a recent AIIM survey of 650 ECM users, the vision of ‘a single source of information
for all’ can be achieved through many different strategies. It may involve linking repositories,
integrating applications and implementing search portals. For many organisations, SharePoint
plays its part in this ECM infrastructure, but it is by no means an exclusive part.
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Feeling the benefit of DM: Richard Archer, Bramble.cc (October 2011)
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Today there is pressure on all companies and organisations to cut costs by 10-20% over the
next year or two. The question is where are those savings going to come from? Answer:
through implementing a common and controlled information management environment.
The fact is, in the information age, most organisations spend an inordinate amount of time
creating, reading, manipulating, storing and sharing documents and other data. They are
knowledge-based or, to be more accurate, information-based.
You would think, therefore, that they would regard information as their most important asset.
Wrong. Instead the focus is on other resources, such as people or equipment, information
technology and possibly individual items of information.
People are often left to their own devices, teams don’t collaborate effectively and information is simply not managed on an
enterprise-wide bas
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Go with the flow: Cliff Mills, NCC Research (October 2011)
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Poor information management increases an organisation’s costs by reducing the productivity of its employees through
inefficient business processes and the inability to access relevant information when it is needed. The increasing proliferation of
information exacerbates this problem, and without the necessary policies and procedures in place to control it, the situation can
quickly spiral out of control.
While structured information presents few problems, unstructured data is still the main cause of concern, and locating,
classifying and storing it becomes more and more critical. By implementing document and records management technology,
the aim is to increase the value of information by making it readily available to satisfy business needs as well as any regulatory
or compliance requirements. But managing information and the flow of information around an organisation is not an easy task.
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From discovery to destruction: Richard Jeffrey-Cook, In-Form Consult (Sep 2011)
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Information is an organisation’s second most valuable asset after people – yet too often
companies pay little regard to data management and governance.
Organisations are realising that they are sitting on a toxic information mountain that has serious
corporate ramifications, both from a legal and corporate reputational risk perspective. Some
have discovered this too late, with numerous examples of mislaid tapes and vital records lost or
destroyed, resulting in fines, legal action or lost customers.
The total amount of information in the world is doubling every three years, according to US
research, with most of this information created and stored electronically. But organisations are
inadvertently tackling this expansion in a cavalier manner by increasing their computer storage
– solving the short-term operational issue but ‘storing’ up a multitude of serious compliance,
operational and effectiveness issues.
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Can you get a single version of the truth?: I Skidmore, Thorneycreek (Aug 11)
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Enterprise content management (ECM) systems are intended to integrate all of an
organisation’s corporate – and most critically customer – information together. Clearly, the
maximum return on investment will occur when all relevant information is linked together to give
the fabled 360-degree view of the customer.
But how realistic is it to expect an ECM architect to deliver this: what’s the best way to
consolidate and integrate all your different types of customer information together?
Here’s a suggested practical approach, covering customer addresses, names and general
information. How many different versions of a customer’s address are there in your organisation? I would suggest at least two, and
potentially many more, depending on the number of touchpoints you have with your customers.
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The trouble with paper: Bud Porter-Roth (July 2011)
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After over 20 years of document imaging, document management and workflow, it seems that
we have not rid ourselves of paper and have in fact continued to increase the use of paper in
almost all industries, departments and personal usage.
In some cases, document management systems have actually increased the use of paper
instead of decreasing it.
Before, we simply stored the original paper (and many of the distributed copies) in office file
rooms or personal filing cabinets, eventually boxing the paper and shipping it offsite for storage.
Today, we not only store the original paper and copies, but we also scan and store it on our
servers, ensuring that we now have at least three paper copies and several imaged copies. And
not only are we uncertain about destroying the paper, we also have a growing accumulation of
digital documents that we do not destroy.
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BPM: selection of the fittest: Bruce Spicer, Keystar (June 2011)
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Before considering how to buy, it’s best to define BPM. Probably the best description is that coined by Gartner’s David McCoy
in the Gartner research report Business Process Management. Preparing for the Process-Managed Organisation: “BPM is a
management practice that provides for governance of a business’ process environment toward the goal of improving agility and
operational performance. BPM is a structured approach employing methods, policies and software tools to manage and
continuously optimise an organisation’s activities and processes.”
This article focuses on helping you find the suppliers and their software tools which enable this holistic definition to be
achieved in the real world. It is axiomatic that in 21st century business operations, customer expectations and demands are increasing, and companies
must continually operate at low(er) cost while maintaining/improving quality in order to stave off competition.
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Getting the knowledge: John Abram, Monetical (May 2011)
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The growth in social networking offers small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) access to
the kind of knowledge and skills that have, until now, been the exclusive domain of large
organisations and system integrators.
For example, when it comes to project management, social networking characteristics are
enabling SMEs to form communities that capture, structure and share project best practices,
solve performance challenges, and manage their staffing requirements.
Against this background, content management systems (CMS) can play a key role in bringing
project teams together. One of the core characteristics of a successful content management
system is that it enables a given CMS (or knowledge) community of people to capture and
exploit project experience.
However, the current inability of CMS users to share such experience means that each CMS implementation is often executed
as one-of-a-kind.
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The human dimension: Tom Stewart, System Concepts (April 2011)
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‘Content is king’ or so many people believe. It is certainly becoming true in knowledge-based
industries, where there is now a bewildering array of channels to use. Traditional industries like
newspaper and magazine publishing are ‘re-purposing’ their content for digital channels from
regular websites to mobile web, and now apps for smartphones and tablets.
Many publishers separate the creation of content, whether from original sources or from
agencies and wire services, from the communication channel. However, many content
management systems (CMS) struggle to handle the different delivery channels properly – or to
be more accurate, their users struggle to make such systems efficient and effective.
Ideally, CMS (and indeed other systems) are developed or procured with the users’ requirements central to the design or
procurement process.
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Mastering process management: Simon Holloway, Bloor Research (March 2011)
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What is a process? We give a lot of different names to represent the same concept, so you will hear people refer to it as a
business process, an action or a task, among other aliases. Dictionaries give some slight variations in the meaning of these
terms, but the underlying concept is something that someone or something does.
Bloor’s definition of ‘process’ is: “Any activity in an organisation or between organisations that: takes an input; performs some
action on the input; produces an output; and provides value to the parties taking part. Some of these activities will differentiate
the organisation from its competitors. Others will provide support for regulations and governance, whilst others are necessary
to run the organisation, but provide no differentiation.”
In essence, processes describe how tasks are structured, who performs them, their sequencing, how long they take and what
information is required to complete them.
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Getting maxed out: David Hughes, Malachi Consulting (February 2011)
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All organisations have an investment in documents commensurate with the size and type of the
business. This is irrespective of the methods they use to capture and store data – manual,
email, fax or web. Yet too few organisations maximise the return they achieve from this
investment. That’s the case whether the documents are stored in their original form or as
images in a document management system.
So why is this? Investing in an electronic document & records management (EDRM) or
enterprise content management (ECM) system will almost certainly deliver a commercially
sound business case – yet many organisations have still not made that investment.
The return on investment can be immediate and generally arises from lowering costs, particularly
in terms of office premises, and through staff redeployment. After all, manual filing is expensive
in terms of office space.
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Better connected?: Nathan Marke, 2e2 (January 2011)
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In times of austerity, organisations should try to minimise overheads by implementing
supportive information and communications infrastructures to maximise employee collaboration,
whilst achieving efficiency savings.
However, many businesses often make the mistake of encouraging longer working hours,
leading to more stressful working environments, when they should be equipping employees with
the tools to work remotely and flexibly. This allows them to provide the best possible experience
for their employees, whilst reducing overall IT spend.
With public sector budgets being cut extensively until 2013, ‘increasing workforce effectiveness’
was highlighted as a top priority by Gartner in December 2009. More imminently, the new
coalition Government has agreed that £6 billion of savings to non-front line public services
should be made, putting pressure on public sector IT departments to actively demonstrate costsaving
initiatives.
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No escaping the paper-full office: Cliff Mills, NCC Research (November 2010)
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In the 1980s the ‘paperless office’ was trumpeted as being an achievable objective that was only just around the corner. This
has turned out to be highly wishful thinking, with paper documents still playing a big part in our lives, yet we have progressed
to creating vast amounts of information in digital format.
But are we any better off? Storing information digitally does offer many competitive advantages and efficiencies but it also
presents companies with major information management challenges.
Organisations need to be sure that the data they use is consistent, complete and can be accessed and disseminated rapidly to
the people who need it. But with the huge increase in the volume of both structured and unstructured data, not to mention
email, this has developed into an increasingly complex process.
As information becomes more critical to the success of an organisation, it is essential that companies have an effective plan in
place to manage it successfully.
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Stemming data losses: Bob Tarzey, Quocirca (October 2010)
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There is a clear case for using data loss prevention (DLP) technology. Recent Quocirca research shows that about a quarter of
respondents had implemented DLP technology of some sort – and those with DLP in place were far more
confident about their ability to protect data and intellectual property. Overall, around 70% of respondents with DLP technology
were confident they could protect their IP and personal data, compared to less than 10% of those without DLP systems.
But if DLP can make such a difference, why aren’t more organisations using it?
Certainly, there is no lack of awareness of the problems DLP sets out to solve. Our research shows that the safe use of data is
a major concern for IT managers when it comes to IT security (see Figure 2, next page). After malware, which tops the list, the
next four issues all relate to data use: they are the internet, managing sensitive data and the activities of both internal and
external users.
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Waking up to web analytics: Linus Gregoriadis, Econsultancy (September 2010)
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For many years, organisations seeking to measure their online footprint have typically thought it
was enough to plug in a web analytics software package and circulate a few charts showing the
number of ‘hits’ they received. These chunky reports with sometimes flaky data usually sat on
shelves caked in dust and largely unread.
Now, as companies have become more reliant on their web-related revenue streams, online
measurement has become a much more strategic concern.
Difficult economic circumstances have concentrated business minds on understanding how
resources and budgets can be allocated most efficiently. ROI (return on investment) is every
marketer’s favourite acronym and web analytics has moved to centre stage.
Crucially, organisations of different shapes and sizes seem finally to have got the message that they have to invest more in
people as well as technology in order to get the sort of web data they need to drive important business decisions.
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Darwin's theory of content management: Noz Urbina & Marc Speyer, Mekon (July 10)
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Modern organisations face a major challenge of multiplicity – multiple content sources funnelling
into multiple content deliverables for multiple audiences in multiple languages, geographies and
formats.
This content will typically be sourced from engineers and subject matter experts who feed
information to publishing teams to place in deliverables like technical manuals, product
datasheets, online help, training material, websites or packaging. These are often tailored for
audiences with different skillsets, interests or user roles.
For example, say a company manufactures two main products and has four variants of those
products – lite vs pro, Windows vs Mac, EU vs USA, or other types of variation. For each variant, it might easily have around five related documents – the packaging, a
brochure, administration documents, training materials and user manuals.
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ECM: escaping content chaos: Doug Miles, AIIM (June 2010)
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Productivity savings may be the main business driver for ECM but content chaos is the final trigger, according to AIIM’s latest
survey.
The State of the Industry report, based on responses from 751 organisations, shows that enterprise content management
(ECM) is at something of a tipping point.
Driven by the need to control the content that pervades file shares, email systems and legacy document stores, organisations
are looking to impose order through an ECM project.
Alongside this, the positive benefits of information sharing and improved collaboration are resonating with decision makers,
pushing forward projects to join up repositories and provide enterprise-wide electronic access.
Compliance is seen as an added benefit – but the prime driver is the need to maximise the productivity of employees and
enhance their engagement with each other.
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New technologies, new risks: Tracey Stretton, Kroll Ontrack (April 2010)
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Information can now be created and distributed in so many different ways that it is becoming
increasingly complex to separate business records that need to be retained from other
information that can and should be deleted.
The constantly evolving data landscape, growing volumes of data and the hundreds of statutes
and regulations that affect companies’ document retention requirements means that
implementing and maintaining an up-to-date and compliant retention policy is much easier said
than done.
And now that most companies have complex networks and systems that store information in
different locations, it’s equally challenging to maintain a well-organised information store. New
storage options like cloud computing add to the complexity as data regularly moves dynamically
between external data centres located in many countries.
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Secrets of search: Ted Carroll (March 2010)
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Search is an essential component of most document management, collaboration or intranet
solutions. But while search usually does at least produce a set of results, in many organisations
the quality of results often leaves a lot to be desired. This is a missed opportunity, because there
can be significant benefits delivered from a good search capability providing high-quality results.
So how can search quality be improved? The proportion of users who find information through
search varies widely across the range of possible document-based applications; however, there
are clearly many situations where the file plan/folder-based approach to finding a document is
not effective.
When search is selected, the expectations from users are that an intranet site or document
management site search will work as fast, and find as high-quality content, as Google, Bing,
Ask or Yahoo appear to do.
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Watch this space: Mark Whitehouse, SolutionChannels (February 2010)
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Whether we like it or not, we live in the TV generation where multimedia-based communication
– rather than the written word – is the preferred means of receiving, accessing, reviewing and
absorbing information. As a result, the use of video and multimedia communications is
exploding within enterprises.
The idea is that because multimedia communication stimulates more senses (ie, hearing and
sight) simultaneously, it helps people to accelerate and improve their understanding, increase
their productivity, make faster decisions, absorb and retail more information and generally keep
up-to-speed more effectively.
Of course, multimedia was originally the domain of mainly the largest companies with the
biggest marketing budgets. But with advances in digital technology and the wide choice of
multimedia-enabled devices now available, companies of all sizes and budgets have the
opportunity to create and distribute messages using this medium.
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Collaboration challenge: James Robertson, Step Two Designs (January 2010)
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Collaboration tools have been used in organisations for some time now, and the new generation
of tools is spreading at an incredible rate. However, collaboration tools are generally being
deployed in parallel across many different business units, irrespective of any organisation-wide
strategy or support.
Companies therefore need to take a planned approach to the management of collaboration
tools across their organisation. There are three main issues to face:
1. Collaboration tools are great for meeting local and individual needs, but they can be
detrimental to organisation-wide knowledge sharing – locking up all the content into small
collaboration spaces can make it harder to find key information.
2. Companies need to establish a central team to guide and ‘mentor’ the organisation in adopting and using collaboration tools.
3. Companies should develop a range of resources to help its staff pick the right tools and make the best use of them.
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Paper patches?: Deirdre O'Neill, Kainos (November 2009)
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There was a time – and many die-hard environmentalists still cling to it – when the vision of a
paperless office seemed an easy and not-too-outlandish one to fulfil. And in some ways, we
have come close.
Many invoices are now sent and settled electronically, printing out emails is socially frowned
upon, and all the major service providers, from banks and travel companies to utilities and
phone companies, enthusiastically encourage consumers to manage their accounts online,
switching off the option of paper statements.
In this sense, office and home life is gradually becoming much greener in the way it consumes
paper.
But will the original goal of the paperless office ever be practical or achievable? The statistics
suggest not. As much as staff and customers may try to cut back on unnecessary paper use –
therein lies the rub: ‘unnecessary’ doesn’t and can’t always apply. Just as there are always going
to be people (young as well as old) who prefer to handle a proper newspaper or book on the
train rather than an electronic gadget or laptop computer – the same holds true for the office.
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Smashing records: Justin Waters, Serco (October 2009)
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To maximise the ultimate success of an electronic document and records management (EDRM) or electronic content management (ECM) system, here is my top 10 checklist of areas to consider… 1. Fileplan – Where to store information. Fileplans, if well-conceived and intuitive, are essential when storing information. In an ideal world, the structure of a fileplan will reflect the functions of an organisation, and each folder or class will have associated and inheritable metadata and access permissions. I have come across very few methodologies to develop fileplans, although there are plenty of common-sense rules (how broad and how deep, structuring breakdown by functions, activities and transactions). The Records Management Society has developed the Local Government Classification and Retention Scheme (LGCRS). Navigating through the fileplan is not always as easy as you would like – a fileplan must support record disposition. Producing an appropriate right fileplan from day one is essential, and it must be intuitive, easy to navigate, not too complex, maintainable and future-proof.
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Paper view: Martin Waldron, In-Form Consult (July 2009)
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Organisations in all industries are under pressure to improve their operational efficiency and
productivity. At the same time, they must address regulatory requirements and properly control
information used within the organisation to reduce their risk.
To achieve these twin goals, companies are increasingly deploying enterprise content
management (ECM) and electronic workflow systems. But this route requires more than just
building a central information repository – companies also need to effectively capture and
distribute all types of content.
Document capture is therefore becoming a key area as businesses seek to better manage the
information they generate themselves, as well as information received from their customers and
partners, whether in electronic or paper format.
However, capturing paper documents is only part of the equation; companies must also bridge the gap between the
management of paper-based and electronically produced documents, and combine them into a common workflow.
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Strategy for stewardship: Chris Saunders, Detica (June 2009)
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Information is now widely acknowledged to be an organisation’s ‘lifeblood’, a precious asset which must be protected against
threats to its confidentiality, integrity and availability.
However, many organisations fail to protect their data adequately or to make the most of its value. This is because the function
of data stewardship is often under-prioritised by organisations and there is a lack of senior commitment to the task, along with
a failure to recognise the relevant skills needed in the various data stewardship roles.
Yet data stewardship is one of the most important issues that companies and governments need to consider. Failure to
respond effectively to the data management challenge can mean security risks, regulatory breaches, increased cost and lost
profits. With the explosive growth in data that all organisations face, the problem is heightened because data is becoming
increasingly complex and difficult to manage.
When data quality isn’t up to scratch, organisations often struggle to put together a convincing business case to address the
issues. However, there has never been a greater need to implement a well-planned strategy for managing information so that it
can be converted into actionable intelligence.
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Paper tigers?: David Martin, Ether Solutions (May 2009)
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During the 1980s recession there was a pop group called ‘UB40’ which was named after the
unemployment form used by the UK Government. And while many things have changed since
then, in the current recession there remain a large number of paper forms in use by both
government and commercial organisations. As a result, companies looking to become more
efficient still have the opportunity to target the area of forms processing.
So what options are available? There are currently three types of processes for completing
forms – paper, electronic files and web pages – and each type has its particular strengths and
weaknesses. Paper forms still dominate a lot of business processes; and for many organisations the recession
means the same work needs to be performed by fewer staff, so productivity has to be improved.
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Right data, right place, right time: Dennis Tsang, Hitachi Consulting (April 09)
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Organisations often struggle with ‘silos of information’, which affects their business decision making and operational efficiency.
A number of common and perennial challenges exist – and they’re getting more difficult to deal with due to changing business
and technology trends: searching within the ever-growing information pool. As data and content volumes grow rapidly, it is getting more difficult to
search for accurate and relevant information. Information overload (too much detail to turn into meaningful information) and
duplication (the same version of information in multiple locations) have become a growing problem for organisations; multiple information access points. Over time, information has been stored in multiple new and legacy systems, such as
databases, shared drives and content management systems. This not only increases overhead and maintenance costs, it also
reduces the usability and efficiency of all information systems. Information consistency and security become more difficult to
manage as well – more and varied controls are required.
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So you think you're doing ECM?: Ben Richmond, The Content Group (March 2009)
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How many organisations truly maximise content use across the business? How many
documents are written from scratch when they could have been drafted from a pre-existing
document? How much time and how many opportunities are wasted as staff are forced to
spend their time writing proposals, presentations and reports ‘long-hand’ – instead of working
smarter from existing material, freeing up time to spend on their core role?
For companies battling the recession, working to maximum capacity has never been more
crucial. And enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, such as document
management and web content management, maximise business efficiency and reduce costs –
vital considerations for organisations in the current economic climate.
Yet despite huge investment in ECM, few organisations are realising quantifiable benefit.
ECM addresses problems ranging from compliance, risk mitigation and improving efficiency to reducing the carbon footprint. It
addresses the issue of managing the vast amount of unstructured information now prevalent in all organisations and it offers
the potential to fundamentally transform the way organisations operate.
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Pandora's box?: Paul Phillips (February 2009)
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Businesses today face an explosion of unstructured content. As the volume of documents,
images, email, web, audio and video content continues to grow, enterprises have moved from
standalone systems that address specific business needs, to a consolidation of content
solutions under the holistic banner of enterprise content management (ECM).
The consequence? Buyers may underestimate the amount of work required to successfully
install an ECM system.
Specifically, ECM cannot be deployed like any other ‘out-of-the-box’ system. Instead, with
content management fast becoming a core element of the IT infrastructure, effective change
management is key to its successful delivery.
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Search for a solution: Charlie Hull, Lemur Consulting (January 2009)
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Everyone’s talking about recession. Everywhere we read stories telling us the economic outlook
is bleak and that companies must tighten their belts. We’ve already seen City banks and house
builders making redundancies on a significant scale.
Of course a savvy company sees a negative economic climate as an opportunity to make its
business more efficient. ‘Recession’ forces businesses to trim the fat.
There are many ways a company can slim down – reducing supplier expenditure, renegotiating
overheads or cutting staff numbers. But to increase productivity, a major area for businesses to
focus on is the speed with which staff can locate information within the company, or customers
can find data on a website.
This is a huge area of almost intangible spend. According to IDC, 90% of the time that
knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other documents is actually spent recreating
information that already exists.
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Battling email overload: Chris Reid, Morse (November/December 2008)
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It’s no secret that the amount of email being sent and received is growing fast. According to
research from Gartner, business email will increase by 25-30% through to 2009, as more
businesses depend on it as their main method of external communication.
However, this dependence comes at a price. For many companies, a large proportion of their
confidential information and intellectual property is held in the corporate email system, making it
difficult to locate when needed. The Enterprise Strategy Group has found that 75% of corporate
intellectual property is now trapped in email systems.
The solution to this is to create a comprehensive, long-term email management strategy –
and to do that businesses need to take account of the major factors affecting their email
systems.
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Key to collaboration: Andrew Watson, WTG (October 2008)
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People are at the heart of every business. And access to information allows them to do their
work better and faster. But this information needs to be shared, collaborated on and enriched to
ensure organisations gain efficiencies, effectiveness and new capabilities.
Collaboration technology can change the way a company works, by using web-based systems to
connect the extended enterprise and provide a secure infrastructure for all business information.
Collaboration technology is having a direct impact on the way people work,
how they interact with IT and how they are trained.
For example, a company can enhance its productivity using a collaborative platform that
facilitates more effective communication and information sharing between workers. This enables
users to go beyond documents and across repositories to unlock information, making it easier
to find people and locate expertise both within and outside the organisation.
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Collaboration is key: David Haynes, Atkins (September 2008)
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Is your organisation involved in project work, either as a client or as a supplier of services? If you are responsible for
commissioning, managing or controlling projects, you may have faced problems including skill shortages, proliferation of
information systems, project teams that are not in one place, participation of several organisations, or large volumes of
information and data that needs to be managed and retrieved.
Collaborative working environments (CWEs) could help you address these kinds of issues. You should consider using CWEs if
you recognise any of the following demands on your organisation, project or programme.
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Is EDRM mainstream?: Malcolm Beach, AMTEC Consulting (June 2008)
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The electronic document and records management (EDRM) market has continued to grow over
the last few years. Awareness of EDRM is increasing and many technology implementations
have taken place.
Within the public sector, much of this increased interest has resulted from initiatives such as
Modernising Government, which focused government organisations on electronic records
management. The private sector has also had regulations and compliance requirements
imposed on it. And all organisations have had to address the growth of information.
So has EDRM come of age? Is the implementation of systems to support EDRM commonplace
enough for them not to be seen as unique projects? Is introducing EDRM a standard
consideration for organisations across all sectors, just like implementing an email solution? In
short, is EDRM mainstream?
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Challenge of Web 2.0: Jeremy Miles, PICS (May 2008)
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One of the biggest IT revolutions in recent years has been in the area of web-based
collaboration – and the first adopters of this Web 2.0 phenomenon are today’s teenagers.
The business community have been slower to embrace the potential benefits offered by this
development in the use of the web, partly because it challenges some of the fundamental
principles of information management and partly because it takes control away from arguably a
monopolistic IT community.
However, advocates would argue that unless the concepts of collaborative working are fully
embraced, large organisations will lose out to the smaller, more agile organisations – both in
terms of IP leakage and talent migration.
Despite this, a recent survey commissioned by the National Computing Centre found that less that 30% of the companies
surveyed had identified a role for Web 2.0, or shown any inclination to adopt the technologies as core to their business
architecture.
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Print's charming: Louella Fernandes, Quocirca (April 2008)
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As IT environments continue to grow in complexity, many organisations are focusing on
managing and rationalising a diverse infrastructure of applications, hardware and storage
across many locations and an increasing number of users. The rising threats associated
with network and software security, along with managing the growth of networked and
mobile devices, make the task of managing a distributed and multi-faceted IT
infrastructure ever more challenging.
However, although organisations are concentrating on these core elements of the IT
environment, few give the same strategic focus to the printing and imaging environment,
which is an essential component in most organisations’ document workflow process.
With printing and imaging costs reckoned to equate to 1-3% of an organisation’s total revenue, organisations simply
cannot afford to ignore the potential savings that can be achieved through a managed and optimised print environment.
The benefits are manifold – including productivity improvements, financial savings and the ability to boost environmental
credentials through more efficient printing practices.
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After MoReq2: Europe at a crossroads?: Rory Staunton, Strategy Partners (Mar 08)
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The recent completion of the records management standard MoReq2 and its acceptance by the
EU is a step forward for records management in Europe.
If users and vendors can pick up from the work carried out on this standard by archivists and
consultants, new simpler standards for records management could emerge. This could
stimulate the market for software, solutions and services that meet current and future
regulatory compliance for specific markets in government, finance, life sciences and
environment.
But if we do nothing, MoReq2 could be a lame duck and the costs of future systems will
increase. MoReq2 was developed to provide a simple specification for buying records management across Europe. The final
specification is huge (over 200 pages). The timetable for delivery was six years since the initial MoReq1 specification was conceived.
In comparison, MoReq2 is complex and enormous and late – but at least it is here and we can build upon it.
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Coming to terms with compliance: Cliff Mills, PMP Research (February 2008)
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Businesses face a data management double whammy: they are creating more information today than ever before, yet they
have more compliance and regulatory legislation than ever before. The upshot is that companies need to manage their
information more effectively to satisfy compliance requirements.
PMP Research has surveyed a cross-section of leading organisations to find out how they are progressing.
The results show that legislation has indeed provided a key driver for organisations to improve the management of their
corporate information. Over one-third (36%) of respondents say legislation has had a ‘great effect’ on their implementation of
information management technology, a further 19% a ‘significant effect’ and 23% a ‘moderate effect’. Only 20% of companies
feel that it is not a consideration.
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Information intelligence: Martin Waldron, In-Form Consult (January 2008)
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In many organisations, there is no clear understanding at Board level of the business drivers for corporate records
management. This results in companies making a commitment to manage records properly – but not knowing how to do it to
meet their corporate business drivers.
Without realising it, many organisations have implemented systems that are deficient in what might be called ‘intellectual
information architecture’. IIA is the tools and rules that govern how records are managed and how users interact with
information management and record-keeping systems.
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Search continues: Justin Waters, Serco Consulting (December 2007)
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We have a major problem when it comes to corporate information – it is difficult to get people to
store information in a way that allows other people to find it.
The root of this issue goes back to the time when companies used paper-based registries – a
centralised storage area for paper records where important information was stored, ordered and
archived, and from where information could be quickly retrieved.
But when people began using PCs, rather than a typewriter, secretary or typing pool, to
generate documents and records, they started storing information on their own hard drives – an
individual filing system, with or without structure, and inaccessible to all.
Next, people began using emails to communicate information. But this meant corporate
information was stored in people’s in-boxes, again inaccessible to everyone.
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Shooting for the moon: Paul Phillips, CSC (November 2007)
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Information is important to companies and individuals throughout every stage of the working day
and in every decision they make.
Everyone knows that incomplete, late and incorrect information hampers their work and reflects
poorly on their organisation. And while your company has probably already tried to develop a
more strategic approach to managing its information services and technology, in reality it could
well have reached its current state as a consequence of short-term tactics, reflecting a lessthan-
strategic IT approach.
Of course, there is no simple way to relate disparate sources of information for analytical or
comparative work, or guarantee the accuracy of information. But by developing an information
strategy, your company can start the process of tackling many of the root causes of poor-quality
and silo-based information.
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Connected, but not collaborating: Richard Hall, Avanade (October 2007)
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As commerce has become global, so the need to communicate with the extended supply chain
has increased. Major corporations now compete not just locally but on an international scale,
and have to regularly communicate with a wide variety of divisions, business partners,
regulatory bodies and customers.
The result is that the need for regular and controlled communication has never been greater.
Luckily, there is an abundance of technology available to all organisations to facilitate better
productivity and communications and reduce the cost of the communications explosion. These
technologies work to connect businesses (and are partially responsible for the non-stop
comments that ‘the world is getting smaller’). Improving quality and speed of decision making is
the key goal.
Larger firms are now moving towards enhanced collaboration to reduce costs and time to market and improve customer
experience. And on the surface, the use of digital technology for improved collaboration seems to be key to organisations
generating the productivity and cost reduction necessary to meet the competition head on.
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Mastering the content revolution: Joe Gollner, Stilo International (Sept 2007)
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After decades of evolution, the technology for managing and publishing organisational
content has reached the threshold of being a core enabler for the way business is
conducted.
But while content management moves centre stage, the problem user organisations face is that
the technologies involved continually change and develop. So not only have companies been
forced to come to terms with the emergence of web content management, now they face other
innovations such as ‘Web 2.0’ and the ‘semantic web’.
What do these trends mean? What direction is content management heading in, and how can
organisations exploit the technologies involved? To answer this, it is worth examining how
content management has evolved since the web first arrived.
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Why BPM products suck: Jon Pyke, The Process Factory (June 2007)
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Business process management (BPM) is starting to look as though it sucks. Now what on earth
could lead me to such a conclusion?
First, you need to take a look at the product market and the associated messages. At a recent
Gartner BPM event in London (March 07), I took some time to visit all the ‘BPM’ vendors to
see what’s happening and assess how the product side is evolving. On the face of it, it all
seems very encouraging. There are some fantastic-looking, seemingly well-engineered
products that appear to do everything one would expect from a good, robust process support
system.
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What's new about BPM?: Janelle Hill, Gartner (May 2007)
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Business market dynamics have changed with the rise of the internet and the forces of globalisation. These trends echo the
arguments presented In ‘The World is Flat’ by Tom Friedman. He describes how business has become ‘frictionless’ as
boundaries that existed for years between countries, geographies, people and businesses have fallen, with many ‘flatteners’
being technological innovation.
Historically, whenever the global economy turns downward, companies explore process thinking and look internally for
opportunities to either reduce waste (cutting costs) or increase productivity. Yet nearly seven years after the dotcom bubble
burst, the focus on operational excellence – or at least operational accountability – continues and is accelerating.
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Infrastructure ECM: Nick Millman, Accenture (April 2007)
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The explosion of unstructured data is one of the biggest challenges facing business today. The quantities of documents,
images, email, web content, audio and video are all growing at an astonishing rate. Within corporations, unstructured
data currently accounts for an estimated 80% of a company’s overall data, and the amount of unstructured data in a
company is doubling every two years.
Effective information management is key for an organisation to achieve high performance – and yet the sheer
abundance of unstructured data causes a number of challenges. For example, the cost of data management has
increased; finding the right information is difficult; information is not well leveraged among partners; and it is not coming
together in ways that would yield useful new insights about employees, customers or market opportunities.
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Email: kill or keep?: John Hookham, Adrelia (March 2007)
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Over the last decade the internet has moved from being a closed tool for the university boffins
to become ubiquitous. Email and the world wide web are available to the masses and for many
organisations digital media is now the preferred method of communication.
However, the web was initially seen by many as the new electronic ‘wild west’; governments
and lawyers had no jurisdiction; you could say and publish anything you wanted on a website;
you could send scurrilous emails; and you could not be sued or even be identified.
Today, we have an information-based economy, and email has evolved to become the
preferred method of communication for business and increasingly for personal use. Most
companies no longer have a post room or individually named racks of trays to receive the
incoming mail. If you do receive a ‘real’ letter, it will probably be given to you directly by
reception and become a talking point during the coffee break.
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Busting a glut: Richard Edwards, Butler Group (February 2007)
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There is a perennial discussion about the ‘information glut’ or overload. Whilst precise figures
are difficult to pin down, a number of surveys have concluded that an information-based worker
spends between one and 20 hours each week searching for information. This act of searching
is non-productive time – time wasted that could be spent more effectively putting the information
into use.
It is also estimated that about 60% of labour spend is related to ‘information work’ – and this is
no longer the sole domain of the so-called white-collar worker, with many blue-collar workers
also handling and processing information. Field workers, and those employees whose jobs
bring then into direct contact with customers and the general public, regularly have to answer
queries and obtain information.
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Going live: Malcolm Beach, AMTEC Consulting (January 2007)
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An electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) implementation can only
be deemed successful when it is being used as intended and the organisation is receiving the
full benefit of its investment.
There have been many EDRMS projects over the past few years, especially in the public sector.
Other areas, including pharmaceutical and legal, also have years of experience in implementing
such systems. So given this reasonably wide set of experience, can we guarantee that
implementing an EDRMS will be easy and successful?
Well, no. Just because there are a number of successful EDRMS implementations does not
guarantee success in every case. Even now there are cases of unsuccessful projects, and
some have even been cancelled before completion.
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Portals for pragmatists: John Horton, Getronics (December 2006)
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Merely launching an information portal is not too complicated. However, deploying a portal in such a way that it delivers
tangible benefits is no mean feat. Portal implementations are sometimes referred to as never-ending – but the fact that the
project is always ongoing, should not stop it from attaining its objectives.
This article describes a simple and pragmatic way to implement and deploy a portal, while simultaneously guaranteeing the
tangible benefits you expect. Companies implement portals because they add value, both to the enterprise itself and the users who utilise them.
Organisations sometimes expect their portal to generate hard ROI figures. But quantifying the ROI for an internal portal is often
a complex exercise, and simply running data through ROI calculation sheets often leads to conclusions that can hardly be
considered meaningful.
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Why integrate when you can aggregate?: Lisa Hammond, Centrix (November 2006)
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Every medium and large-sized company has many organisational and technological silos –
product development units, customer-facing business units, sales and distribution channels,
geographies and information technology.
These silos are separated by well-defined and often rigid boundaries, which diminishes the
company’s ability to build strong brands and broad customer relationships. The more decentralised the business, the greater the transaction costs of such fragmentation;
and in many cases over-engineered enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and IT
silos can actually increase those transaction costs. As the number and rigidity of silos increase,
a company will tend to miss more and more market opportunities.
Because the boundaries tend to obstruct the flow of information, different parts of the company
can end up selling to the same customers, sometimes even competing for the same business
without knowing it.
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Insight not hindsight: Eddie Short and Ramesh Harji, Capgemini (October 2006)
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Organisations continue to invest millions of pounds in technology to create, manage and store business data. Yet the volume
of data in all its forms being generated is accelerating at an unprecedented level – and consequently most organisations are
finding it harder to harness this data so that staff can act on it to generate real business value.
Without successfully harnessing the information in their data, organisations fail to realise opportunities for generating
competitive advantage, and critical decisions are often made on the basis of historical and often inaccurate data stored in
innumerable spreadsheets and documents.
As a result, organisations are failing to get a return from the investment that they have made in the generation of this data. Too
many people in the organisation are holding up their hands and saying: “We are getting it wrong. We’ve got too much data, but
not enough information.”
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Putting people first: James Gunn (August 2006)
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Over the last 25 years, various approaches have been taken to improving or re-engineering business processes – Work study,
Method study, TQM, BPR, etc. And as process managers become increasingly sophisticated in their approach, organisations
are now deploying combinations of Six Sigma, Lean and JIT, similar to the legendary Toyota Production System.
IT support to business processes has also evolved from several directions, principally workflow/document imaging and
enterprise application integration – but it has also been influenced by artificial intelligence, simulation and modelling elements.
The IT picture has also been clouded by a range of different standards and prevailing technologies, while the implementation
of supporting IT systems is being automated to a greater extent every day.
So, given that organisations are continually striving to do ‘more with less’ and meet new regulations, and many organisations
have some sort of BPM project underway, why don’t we hear more success stories? Why are so many process improvement
programmes struggling? Is this only another technology-led fad or is there something more substantial waiting to be
unearthed? And if so, how do we dig it out?
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BPM: show me the money: Rory Staunton, Strategy Partners (June 2006)
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The BPM market is a set of technically advanced components, middleware, applications and
services that are all growing – but at different rates. Strategy Partners has been tracking BPM
since 1997, and our research shows that the different elements have grown steadily, but
numerous approaches are confusing buyers.
There is an over-supply of products and a lack of skills to exploit them. The vendors could
almost be called victims of their own success, as many organisations have many non-standard
approaches to describing processes that are preventing company-wide initiatives superseding
old approaches.
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Are some processes more equal than others?: Julian Benson (May 2006)
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Effectively managing business processes requires significant investment in time, effort and resource. So should
organisations manage all their business processes using a ‘one size fits all’ approach – or should they scale their effort
in a measured way? Should you manage business processes within the context of business strategy, or simply manage
them reactively?
Clearly, all organisations possess their own discrete business processes. However, relatively few would claim that they
succeed in fully controlling them. Instead, business process management often falls to practitioners within IT teams,
often in a pretty reactive way. The question of which strategy to adopt goes to the heart of the challenge to manage
processes more effectively – and the dilemma that all organisations face in matching the expectations of their
customers, with the planned fulfilment of a particular good or service.
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ABC of e-workflow: Adrian Boucher, 1nfometrics Consulting (April 2006)
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At its most basic workflow is, to quote the Workflow Portal: “The automation of a
business process during which information or tasks are passed from one participant to
another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.” This is predominantly an
activity-based view of workflow, emphasising the quantity of work or tasks that flow
through the various stages in an organisation to achieve a satisfactory outcome.
Naturally, what counts as ‘satisfactory’ depends on an individual perspective; it could
vary from the number of items processed to an improvement in customer service and
support, and all points between.
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Push and pull: David Martin, Ether Solutions (March 2006)
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There are a number of emerging trends in the world of content and document
management – and like many trends they obey the laws of physics. Sir Isaac Newton
defined some of these basics truths, one of which is often paraphrased as “for every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. I am sure Newton was not thinking about
content management when he was doing his research, but the reality is certainly with us
today.
One key trend is the need for compliance driven by some high-profile incidents where
content, often in the form of documents, has not been properly controlled and in some
cases deliberately destroyed. This is leading to the requirement for enterprise-level
systems to control and enforce appropriate retention management disciplines on all
documents.
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Taking the open road?: Finbarr Joy, UPCO (January 2006)
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The selection, implementation and maintenance of an enterprise workflow or business process management (BPM)
solution can be a significant exercise – not least because for many organisations, the workflow solution pervades many
business systems and represents a significant enterprise-scale cost. The level of investment demanded can expand
further if you need customisation or onsite specialist vendor consulting for protracted periods of time.
In this light, organisations should be considering whether the time is right to add open source solutions in this mix. This
article helps answer this question by highlighting the characteristics of current open source workflow solutions.
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