Product category:
Document and workflow management software
News Release from: Documation | Subject: Enterprise content management
Edited by the Manufacturingtalk Editorial
Team on 16 October 2006
Enterprise content management software
favoured
To meet the challenges of records management and other regulatory and internal process requirements, organisations have turned to enterprise content management.
Take a look at any knowledge worker job description and you are likely to find, "Familiarity with Microsoft Office System" in the competency requirements section What you are not likely to find are elements like, "Familiarity with complex regulatory compliance legislature," or "Intimate knowledge of which email messages constitute business records"
This article was originally published on Manufacturingtalk on 10 Jul 2006 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories
End-to-end enterprise content management event
Documation UK, in partnership with AIIM (the leading ECM Association), is the only dedicated event of its kind in the UK covering end-to-end enterprise content management.
How many Vendors provide true ECM solutions?
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has finally maturated and become an essential tool for business today which in turn has attracted many IT suppliers to promote themselves as ECM Vendors
Despite the absence of these elements in modern day role profiles, organisations are beginning to expect it from their staff.
Given the deluge of compliance-related mandates as well as organisational goals of cost reduction, legal and business risk mitigation, and increased worker productivity, the demand for a combination of productivity tool savvy and familiarity with compliance-related business processes and worker roles within those processes is becoming the norm.
So how do organisations satisfy both regulatory compliance requirements and the objectives of cost reduction and productivity increase without burdening knowledge workers or the bottom line? To many progressive organisations, the answer is as simple as this: "Let users work the way they want to work".
Further reading
Content Integration: Simplifying Your Environment
There are very few large organisations that start with a blank canvass when looking at Enterprise Content Management (ECM).
Automation of accounts payable for Sea containers
Robustness and flexibility win Sea Container deal for Documation
More than Just invoice processing
To fully automate the non-merchandise AP department, Marks andSpencers decided to employ a document management and workflow solution from Documation
Today, organisations need to not only ensure that knowledge workers are maintaining the highest levels of productivity and carrying out the jobs they were hired to do as efficiently as possible, but also that users are contributing to regulatory and business regulations.
A good number of knowledge workers use Microsoft Office almost exclusively.
Gartner estimates that many knowledge workers spend as much as 80% of their workday in Microsoft Outlook.
However, in order to meet the challenges of records management, email management, privacy of information, and other regulatory and internal process requirements, organisations have turned to enterprise content management (ECM) solutions.
The trouble is that as these solutions evolved companies needed to spend money on training knowledge workers and users needed to learn new systems and were forced to leave the comfort of Office and Outlook environments to work across the various business systems and user environments.
In short, a combination of Microsoft and ECM tools have resulted in an effective but only adequate solution to the dual requirement for today's knowledge worker productive employee and contributor to compliance and business process efficiency.
For organisations, the term transparency primarily targets the realm of financial reporting and shareholder and investment relations.
With the latest wave of packaged ECM solutions, transparency takes on a new meaning.
Transparency to the end user means making it as seamless as possible to do their part.
Contributing to organisational compliance requirements is now as effortless as clicking the familiar "Ctrl +S" to save a document in Word, but rather than saving to the user desktop it is being saved to a highly secure, centralised content repository.
Another example is in email management.
Numerous lawsuits relating to electronic discovery failures or breaches of compliance are spotlighted in the media.
At the root is a need to treat email messages as the business records they often are.
Training users on what constitutes a business record is time-consuming and costly.
With some ECM email management solutions, the process is automated users never have to leave Outlook and, because the solution is largely automated, never really need to be aware that their email is being stored in proper repositories for goals of sound records management and compliance efforts.
What is really required, quite simply, is a best of both worlds solution.
The next generation ECM solutions will satisfy the need to mitigate business and legal risk, ensure compliance, and reduce costs for the organisation while not sacrificing the familiarity and comfort of the Microsoft environment for knowledge workers, burdening them with having to learn obscure regulatory legislation issues, or forcing them to change the way they want to work.
In other words, the ideal knowledge worker environment is one that transparently integrates the power and benefits of complex content and compliance-related solutions of ECM within the intuitive and familiar Microsoft Office system workspace.
ECM vendors have begun to integrate complex content lifecycle solutions into Microsoft Office.
Automation, mapping of functionality, and other user-friendly enhancements have been made available to blend powerful content-based solutions into the Microsoft suite.
In short, ECM and the complex content-based solutions it establishes and controls is becoming transparent to knowledge workers without sacrificing effectiveness for the organisation.
In other words, working across such content intensive solutions as email management, compliance assurance, anti-money laundering, contract management, and correspondence tracking is increasingly becoming invisible to the user.
The goal is ideally to have knowledge workers maintain the highest level of productivity and work within the environment most familiar to them without jeopardizing compliance efforts, cost reduction goals, or initiatives to generate competitive advantage.
With ECM solutions that address critical content lifecycle challenges rapidly being integrated within the Microsoft Office System, reaching that goal is becoming not only easier but also more cost effective than ever.
Hummingbird is exhibiting at Documation UK in partnership with AIIM.
It is the largest dedicated exhibition of its kind in the UK covering end-to-end enterprise content management.
It will address the latest issues in information management, including web content, email and fax management, document management, records management, storage, business processes and compliance.
Olympia 2, London, 18-19 October 2006.
• Documation: contact details and other news
• Email this article to a colleague
• Register for the free Manufacturingtalk email newsletter
• Manufacturingtalk Home Page
Search the Pro-Talk network of sites
