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Managing unstructured information

Enterprise Content Management helps streamline processes for managing an organization's unstructured information, writes Nivedan Prakash

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) helps companies transform their workflows, across segments. Any company that relies heavily on paper or even electronic documents and has a complex workflow related to customer information (Insurance is an excellent example) needs this technology. Before we go deep into understanding this platform and its functionalities, let’s take a sneak peek into the ECM platform and what it is all about.

ECM basically means organizing all the important and confidential documents in a more structured format so that these can be easily identified down the line and used to produce meaningful information. This information can be used for timely decision-making. It is a set of technologies used to capture, store, preserve and deliver content and documents, and content related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information.

We can also define ECM as the concept and technology that help an organization achieve maximum productivity by organizing the contents of various types and business process. This concept ensures interoperability and extensibility. Effective ECM evolves into Enterprise Information Management (EIM).

For many organizations today, ECM remains more of a strategic and an architectural vision than an installed reality. Most companies still have multiple content management products, often divided into the traditional domains of document management, Web content management, records management and so forth. At the same time, the high cost of implementing ECM suites and the complexity of the user interfaces and applications have prevented true enterprise deployment. Organizations want to get content functionality from fewer vendors, but most recognize that their multiple functional requirements and different categories of users make this goal challenging.

Today the ECM platform has been implemented by many organizations, including LG Electronics and Hindustan Construction Company (HCC), which are taking this platform in use in their line of business. Satish Pendse, CIO, HCC, said, “We use three critical components—the Document Management System of SAP that seamlessly integrates with our SAP ERP system; components of workflow with linkage to ERP; and Live Communication Server (LCS).”

Adding to it, Daya Prakash, IT Head, LG Electronics, said, “We have a good ECM system in place in our organization in various areas like documentation, department approvals, employee information data, compliance data, e-mail and for some business processes. The rise in day to day document transactions has a significant impact on cost and management and we realize that some fundamental solution should be in place to minimize cost and improve manageability to create systems that can handle paper and electronic documents together. For example, we have the following systems to manage ECM—approval system, compliance system, email archival systems, customer content database, and departmental fileservers with authenticated access.”

Meanwhile, to an extent we can say that the ECM platform has become a basic requirement for all organizations using it because nowadays in almost all the companies the majority of content or documents, which employees either create on their PCs or on a local file system, remain unmanaged. Documents are even disseminated and accessed in an ad hoc manner through network file shares and e-mail attachments.

On the other hand, ECM brings together business process, compliance and the content/information tying them into a single entity. It is a more structured approach to content management. Documents are centralized in a repository where they may be formally checked in and out. Revisions are controlled and tracked. The centralized nature of an ECM system enables security, archiving, and auditing to be applied consistently. In addition, ECM promotes the use of metadata. Users are often required to describe and categorize each document. This helps to speed searching and sorting. In a nutshell, it’s organizational information collaboration along with compliance.

From a strategic view point, ECM is a necessity for today’s enterprise. However, ECM is a concept which should be evaluated as a solution and not as a technology. Unstructured content at most organizations is increasing at a phenomenal rate and is resulting in information that is lost, repeated and out of date. This uncontrolled growth undermines organizations’ business ability to achieve the compliance, collaboration, consolidation, and content ROI.

Investment in technology for ECM shall follow once the strategy is defined. For companies like LG, it does fall in their priority list of investment, and at the same time for a company like HCC, ECM would go for its priority list of investment towards end 2008.

Streamlining workflow

Here we will have to take note of the fact that an ECM platform helps streamline complex workflows like data administration, records, contract and case management; regulatory compliance and other information-intensive tasks. ECM helps organizations categorize and publish information making it more discoverable so that user can quickly find the information they are looking for to get their jobs done. It can also manage and control all of their records/classes to support compliance efforts.

Pendse added, “ECM takes the assistance of emerging technologies not only in core business software but also in fields such as imaging and scanning, enterprise search, OCR, speech recognition. ECM stands as strong application to streamline all the areas which are not covered in ERP systems or similar implementations.”

Moreover, ECM is increasingly becoming critical for companies to optimally manage and use information. It is an ongoing and evolving strategy for maximizing how an organization uses its content. ECM software uses the information coming from all the ways as a starting point to review a common content lifecycle. It also analyzes the current processes to see where organizations can find overlaps and room for improvement for the applications and strategies that the business is developing. The information only hints at the complexity inherent in any process that deals with managing an organization’s content. As always, these organizations must match up the technology tools to address their businesses needs. Technology can enable streamlined management of content, but the underlying strategy must come first.

“In this technology-oriented world everyone uses some part of technology to store the data and reuse it. Different departments within the organization use different type of information or content which is stored in the system. The content may be organized at enterprise level (e.g. ERP, employee portals), or at the departmental level (workflow management, drawings, project management plans), or at employee level (MS Office files, work specific software), or not organized at all (scanned images, e-mail and attachments, videos/audio files, photographs). Though managing critical data such as finance, HR, material, etc., are important and taken care of in almost all organizations, there is still a major chunk of important and critical content lying in various storage devices which are important to the organization and is not used effectively,” added Pendse.

Solving business problems

Implementing ECM helps an organization solve the most complex and challenging business problems including complying with standards and regulations, maximizing productivity, and surmounting challenges to optimize competitive advantage.

ECM can be deployed in various fashions such as ECM as integrated middleware, as a standalone system, and as a repository of all the information of any organization. Based on an enterprise’s requirements, ECM helps streamline various compliance requirements which otherwise shall take more time.

“ECM helps solve business problems, including cost reduction initiatives that involve reduction in head count by automating and streamlining manual processes; reduction in cycle times for new customer applications or processing invoices that leads to increase in revenue; and faster and better access to documents and content, by both external and internal users, resulting in improved customer satisfaction,” commented Prakash.

Here it will be right to say that with the implementation of ECM platform, an organization’s customers can achieve potentially significant cost and time savings and reduce risk.

Prakash pointed out, “ECM has tremendous benefits in terms of significant cost and time savings and reducing risk by implementing key initiatives like improved customer service and satisfaction; better response time; simplifies and streamlines online publishing processes; ability to consolidate document content and collaboration about that content in one place. This provides a more efficient and less confusing user experience by providing a unified view of information and preserving the context of interactions; and ability to have structured and unstructured information in the same system. This makes it possible to automate more business processes and workflows.”

Meanwhile, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) play an important role in the implementation and use of ECM. As the applications are going Web-centric, EAI and SOA are playing strong roles in enterprise automation. ECM is strong middleware and is used to overcome the restrictions of conventional methods such as client/server, etc. EAI and SOA play major roles in ECM deployments.

Trends in this space

Some of the current as well as latest trends in the ECM space include records management, business process management or workflow, content integration, collaboration, document management, Web content management, document capture and document image management, integrated document archive and retrieval systems, e-forms, digital asset management, and e-mail archiving and e-mail management.

Pendse concluded, “In any technology space, we find multiple solutions by multiple providers such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, amongst others. Every product promises everything but the concepts still do not reach the customer or the user. Most of the time, the ECM implementation becomes an implementation of Document Management or Workflow Management or Employee Self Service Portal and rest of the features of ECM do not get noticed.”

At the enterprise level, it’s necessary to create awareness and organize content, which is lying in various forms and formats. From the solution side, it’s important that they sell the concept and technology and not the product. A positive top level involvement is key growth driver.

Today, it’s necessity which is driving implementation of ECM in insurance, banking, etc. However, other verticals also gradually understand the need for ECM.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com