Enterprising ideas

Business Management grills the experts on the need for implementing a successful and effective Enterprise Content Management system

“It is important to ensure that the information organisations use daily is trusted information.”
-Luciano Balzarini

What factors are driving the need for effective Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategies for organisations today?

Paul Thompson. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) offers the capabilities to efficiently and effectively manage the challenges imposed by the demanding business requirements of the modern world. Availability of information, agility of business process, interoperability of diverse business functions and conformity to legal requirements are a few of the critical success factors for enterprises to survive in the modern and competing global market space. Enterprises, while striving to achieve these critical success factors, are further exposed to the complexity of massive volumes of variant data and information, which exists in a broad array of formats. Complex and extended business processes spanning across the business functions and partners around the globe, need integration and interoperability, and fulfilment of compliance to legal and regulatory requirements.

Luciano Balzarini. In times of downturn and shrinking budgets, companies try to find the right combination between cost containment and increase of operational and organisational efficiency. Organisations have already made strong cost-cuts so now the need is to find the right direction to increase profits.

The automation and optimisation of processes is one of the areas that can help achieve a proper balance. Through a correct definition of company processes and business entities, we can automate flows to increase efficiency. The result is a completely integrated process at the functional level and not at the architectural level.

47 percent of users don’t have confidence in their information, according to the AIIM survey State of the ECM Industry.  And a recent CEO study by IBM found that more than 60 percent of CEOs agree that businesses need to do a better job of leveraging their information. Therefore it is important to ensure that the information organisations use daily is trusted information. With trusted information a company can reduce costs and optimise ROI, operate efficiently, drive more innovation, control and minimise risk and make better decisions faster.
To achieve these goals a company has to digitalise and classify paper documents, analyse processes and optimise them by automating and monitoring the entire workflow.
        
Can you outline some of the most common mistakes that can undermine the success of an ECM implementation?

LB. During an ECM implementation, the most common mistakes can be a lack of customer’s requirements or a lack of goal/KPI (ROI, costs, efficiency, etc.) and so analyses are not effective and cannot satisfy customer’s expectations. Sometimes analyses are very poor both for operational and technological aspects and they don’t underline actual needs.
Another problem can be finding a proper balance for too specific analysis and an exception management too detailed; these factors could generate an extension of project time.
Moreover, one of the most important elements before implementing a BPM project is to conduct a Business Process Analysis and a Business Process Reengineering to minimise or eliminate problems. Finally, for a successful ECM implementation, companies have to develop a long-term vision and an enterprise strategy to analyse elements according to a global perspective.

PT. At PFIKS we emphasise to our clients that the groundwork for successful ECM implementation starts well before the project kicks off. A successful ECM implementation requires equal consideration of the challenges from technology, to organisation, governance and processes. As a component of IT infrastructure, ECM inevitably involves changes to the organisation, people and business processes. A failure to address these issues in a coordinated way will lead directly to a failed ECM implementation ¬– like building a new house with a terrific design but no occupants. To avoid this pitfall, organisational and process issues must be addressed at the same time – perhaps even before the technical challenges – and the business and organisational needs must be treated with the same level of importance as the technical and IT requirements. It is also critical to engage key stakeholders from the impacted business divisions early in the project, ensuring the end product fits into the business processes. ECM implementation efforts often reveal great opportunities to streamline business processes and open up long-overdue communication channels between organisations. At the same time, engaging resources from both the business and technology groups can stimulate ideas for innovative process improvements, and help reduce the effort involved in change management and training. In the end, this joint effort will enable implementation of a successful ECM system that business users and technology resources design, build and operate together.

Can you give us an example of how your products and services aided an organisation with its ECM needs?

PT. The American Society of Materials (ASM) is a customer who relies on our expertise for supporting and maintaining their enterprise content management infrastructure. As Stan Theobald, the CEO of ASM, says in their Strategic Plan: “Content is everything material”.
ASM’s business is all about bringing 775,000 content items to their members. To help them do that they use PFIKS to implement and support their ECM infrastructure (Vignette/OpenText V8 ECM and Autonomy Meaning-based Search). PFIKS has worked in partnership with ASM and has brought its specialist skills to bear on this key business programme.
 
LB. A good partner for ECM has to support its customers throughout the entire project lifecycle, providing services such as: analysis, BPA/BPR, architectural design, system installation and configuration, system development and customising, system testing and roll-out, training services and project management.

A good partner also has to provide a real solution to a business problem. This means vertical and technological competencies, to provide a complete application (both in-house or software as a service) that adds value to organisations (ROI optimisation, operational efficiency, innovation, risk control, etc.)

The organisational impact of a good solution must be minimised. In fact, a business solution has to fit the way a company usually operates, without changing internal processes. A good solution has to be modular (to support functional evolutions) and scalable (to follow the customer growth).

What developments or trends do you predict might take place in the ECM industry in the future?

LB. When content management becomes a commodity, organisations will focus on business process management (paperless company), and business intelligence/performance management (BI&PM). A complete BI&PM approach means to realise forecasts and budgets (the classic planning, control and analysis cycle), but also to perform real-time analysis on core business processes and contents. This helps enterprises to understand in real terms where and why certain processes don’t work and how to “fix” them. In short, reporting, analysis, dash boarding and scorecards have to be implemented not only for data, but also for content and workflows.

PT. The future for enterprise content management is becoming clearer and it is fuelled by networked communities, adaptive work processes, pervasive collaboration, self-describing information sources, and the ability to leverage intelligence captured in a flexible content infrastructure. By linking people, processes and information, it will allow us to work more efficiently, reduce the cost of operations and capture new opportunities through innovative business processes. It will enable us to transform the content and repositories from records of past activities into valuable resources that proactively drive business management, insights and decision-making.

The real growth for the ECM industry may be in new ASP applications that suddenly become viable and cost effective. PFIKS is already offering complete ECM system functionality for processing, decision-making, validating, and approving a transaction. These systems can substantially reduce transaction costs for business and provide real flexibility for businesses that need an agile approach to changing business circumstances.

Biographies

Paul Thompson is a seasoned veteran of the IT industry. Co-founder and CEO of PFI Knowledge Solutions he has developed it into a successful technology solutions company. His leadership style is practical and pragmatic, all about getting results, developing people and being motivated by their success.

Luciano Balzarini is CEO of CST Consulting, an IT Consulting, System Integration and Technology, and Business Services provider focused on ERP & ECM.
With more than 15 years of business and technology experience on ECM in the EMEA market, Luciano Balzarini and CST Consulting Specialists help customers to optimise the management of information and corporate processes.