Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

To Do More With Less, Banks Should Consider Lean IT

// January 6th, 2012 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, IT // Michelle Shapiro

Is your bank lean? What does that even mean?

Being lean is all about creating as much value for the customer as possible by eliminating processes that consume time, resources and space. In a word: efficiency.

The concept is usually associated with manufacturing, but your bank can be a lean operation as well. And the best place to start is in your IT department. “On average, financial institutions spend more on IT than other industries do, but the value of their investment is often unrealized,” reports McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of management consulting firm McKinsey & Company.

After all,every day, the IT function is becoming more and more important as a driver to deliver value to the customer. A more efficient – and more lean – IT department only increases that value.

Obviously, buying software without a master plan to integrate it into existing processes isn’t the way to go. Financial institutions need to “draw on lean operating principles [to] build the more efficient models that banks need today,” McKinsey counsels.

One way many financial institutions are realizing lean value in IT is through enterprise content management (ECM). ECM solutions, like document management and workflow, provide organizations with sophisticated process automation and case-based applications. It allows you to manage content according to your organization’s business rules and gauge the health of those processes in real-time, adjusting as necessary, growing leaner with each modification.

.Not only that, but by utilizing ECM to automate processes, you can reduce your reliance on paper, saving money on storage and shipping costs. And by using an ECM solution to integrate the core systems you use every day, you can increase the value of technology investments by giving them the ability to communicate with each other. You may even be able to replace wasteful legacy IT systems.

First step toward lean banking

When you begin any automation project, the most important step is the first one: streamlining processes. Otherwise, you might automate a messy process and end up with an automated messy process. That’s how the value of an IT investment goes unrealized.

The trick is figuring out how you handle your core operations. Think about your accounting and human resource functions. In those two departments alone, you have numerous opportunities to gain efficiencies by replacing inefficient paper-based processes with electronic documentation that can be automatically routed through processes from start to finish.

Procurement, fixed asset management, AR, AP, payroll, expenses, budgeting, recruiting, onboarding, performance and promotion management, policy and procedure administration – all these processes depend on documentation. Wouldn’t you rather have all of it centrally located and available to anyone who needs it with a simple mouse click instead of storing it in file cabinets or file shares?

By initiating lean concepts where important information is stored and shared – the IT department – here’s what your bank can accomplish with ECM:

• Streamline operations and improve collaboration among employees
• Reduce the time and cost of performing important business functions
• Tie together the technologies you use every day and give them the ability to communicate
• Improve the ability of the entire enterprise to share and act on corporate information assets
• Help comply with existing and pending regulations

Using Compliance as a Competitive Advantage

// December 15th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Food and Beverage // Becca Toth

“Companies should be able to turn the necessity of sharing information with the outside world – what regulation is all about – to their competitive advantage,” says IT specialist Conrad Thompson. Thompson was speaking with Alan Cane of the Financial Times.

I agree. Using compliance as a competitive advantage is a great idea. Too many organizations are reactive to regulatory requirements. Interesting, because regulations aren’t going away. They’re growing. According to a September 2011 House Oversight and Government Reform Committee report on federal regulations, there are 4,257 regulatory actions in the pipeline and the number of regulatory employees is “expected to reach an all-time high of 291,676 in 2012.”

Whether you’re a manufacturer, wholesaler or retailer, complying with existing and pending regulations directly affects your bottom line. So why not flip the situation around? Instead of looking at compliance as a painful thing that needs to be done because of external forces, you can be proactive and make it part of your business plan. Don’t view compliance as laborious, because if you do it right, you’ll actually be saving time and energy. Think of regulations not as a set of rules, but as a roadmap to an effective organization.

“Regulators are not there to catch you,” Cain writes. “Their role is to ask: Are you running your business properly? Do you have the right controls in place? Are you dealing properly with customer complaints? These are all things that companies should be doing for themselves.”

Being compliant revolves around the documentation of critical business processes and procedures. You need the ability to provide documentation in a timely fashion to outside constituencies. But you can also use this as an opportunity to take your organization from the world of slow, paper-based processes to the world of real-time information and efficient automated processes. So how do you do all that?

Start by making all the information your organization uses available across the enterprise in a central repository. When employees can find the documents and data they’re looking for with the click of a mouse instead of searching for paper, they become more effective. And the ability to view information within processes in real time makes complying with regulations easy.

So don’t be reactive to compliance. Get ahead of it. And your competitors. I challenge you to become “ultra-compliant,” because if you do, regulations become nothing more than a checkmark on a list. Instead of spending time trying to comply with them, time can be spent creating new business. That’s how you leverage compliance as a competitive advantage.

Mobile ECM: Well Within Your Grasp

// December 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT, Mobile // Lindsay McCune

Put mobile ECM into your employees' pockets

The concerns people have about ‘The Future of Work,’ with regard to mobile technologies, was top of mind for Vice President and Principal Analyst Ted Schadler. Schadler was speaking to Fortune 2000 organizations at Forrester’s Content and Collaboration Forum. Questions came pouring in:

• How are professionals using mobile devices?
• What about bring your own (BYO) versus corporate provisioning?
• What kinds of applications are available? Are they task-specific? Role-specific?
• How do I know which vendors are spending time on security and efficiency around development?
• How do I manage licensing?
• What about security?

To my surprise, some organizations anticipate it will take five years to get comfortable with mobile devices and all that goes into managing them. And while mobile will mature over the next few years, you shouldn’t stand still and try to catch up later.

It’s time for organizations to take small steps, and move out from under the blanket of consumer mobile enablement. It’s time to empower the worker. They have valuable needs that can be addressed today.

Enable your workforce

It is all about enablement – not just about devices or applications, but rather overall empowerment. Sure there are lots to things to consider – security and licensing, for example – but you don’t have to eat the whole apple. Just bite off what you can chew.

Start with roles or departments, like human resources or managers, rather than the diverse enterprise. Baby steps! Consider your goals and which employees would benefit most.

Maybe you are thinking you have much bigger fish to fry and that mobile business solutions are low on your priority list. I would argue that bringing your mobile devices into play with even your most basic business processes will reap immediate rewards and have a dramatic impact on your business.

How about an example

So, let’s imagine you are a human resources manager hiring new employees. Let’s also imagine you are on vacation in Hawaii. Your company is competitive and needs to act quickly to get offer letters and other documentation to your soon-to-be colleagues. But you are hanging out by the ocean and won’t be back for a week. Those irreplaceable new hires now take the offer of your competitor. Think of the now wasted time spent interviewing, completing reference checks and all.

Now, imagine you are in Hawaii and getting ready for the day, checking the weather on your smartphone and you notice that you also have notifications from your mobile enterprise content management (ECM) application to approve. Through your mobile device, you can push these offer letters through workflow. With a few taps, you’re done.

It’s time to look beyond mobile’s soft consumer side and empower the devices to make your organization more efficient and more competitive. Are you ready?

How Big is Your Net? The Importance of Capture Options in Government Document Management

// December 2nd, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Government // Terri Jones

Sometimes when we talk about the value of having electronic versus paper information in government, we gloss over the key first step: how to make that paper content electronic in the first place. The size and coverage of the “net” you use is key to creating a transformational document management system.

From my experience, when it comes to capturing information in government, “options” is the name of the game.  It’s important to consider how documents are used within your organization, and the variety of ways that documents can enter that document management solution that is supposed to change your government life. After all, options at the capture stage can go a long way to ensuring your solution will be widely accepted, especially if it other departments can use the solution.

Here’s a short list of things to consider when identifying what capture options you should look for:

1. What kind of documents do you have? Information comes to government in a blizzard – paper, email, fax, large packets, single sheets, forms that must be returned, official correspondence that needs a file copy, and so forth. With so many possibilities, make sure you’re able to capture all of these different types of content, whether they’re already electronic or in paper form.
2. How many documents do you take in? Not all areas of government have the same volume of documents that need to be captured. But they do all have the same goal – capture as many documents as early as possible. Therefore, having high and low volume options for capture that seamlessly feed your document management system is critical to how well information is captured across departments. For a courthouse or a land records office, high-speed scanning with automated indexing is the perfect mix of speed and minimal human interaction. But in your county offices where it’s just a few pages coming in at a time, small scanners can capture identity documents without a need to get up and go to photocopier.
3. Where do you receive documents? It is also important to consider when and where documents are received, again with an eye towards the vastly different ways that government collects and creates documents. The reality is that oftentimes, county offices are in separate buildings or there are convenient locations for their constituents, so you have to be ready to consider how remote offices will scan documents that might be needed in another location. The internet certainly makes this possible, but can your bandwidth support it? Do your capture options include a way to manage when documents are archived so that it can happen at off-peak times? Again, the efficiency gained by a document management system is enhanced by capturing as much as possible as early as possible, regardless of location.
4. What documents do you create electronically? For every electronically-created document, letter, spreadsheet, PDF file, digital photo or digital audio recording, capture can happen as simply as a drag and drop of the file, avoiding the need to print and scan or to create a file copy and then store it in a file cabinet.

Having flexibility in capture offers a lot of benefits, but it all comes down to this: more departments and agencies can share the benefits of one solution, and therefore they also share its costs. And, if you’re able to implement the document management in a phased approach, you can build a system affordably by growing your return on investment with each department that is brought on to the system.

The White House on Records Management: ‘We Can’t Wait’

// November 29th, 2011 // No Comments » // Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Affordable Housing, Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Federal Government, Finance & Administration, Government, Health & Human Services, Human Resources, Justice & Public Safety, Public Works, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

“Records management can’t wait,” President Barack Obama told the federal government agencies yesterday, via presidential memorandum. It’s likely the federal government could learn a lot from state and local government agencies who have already embraced records management. Maybe you can, too.

The president hopes to transform federal agencies and create more transparency. How this will happen is captured in a White House blog post titled “We Can’t Wait: Bringing Records Management into the Twenty-First Century.”

It is a great post, but I believe it’s possible many readers will overlook a small – but important – phrase:

“…The [Records Management] Directive will focus on maintaining accountability to the American public through documenting agency actions; increasing efficiency (and thus reducing costs); and switching, where feasible, from paper-based records to electronic records.”

In those few words highlighted above, the enterprise content management (ECM) community rejoices. Why? Because ECM is a valuable tool for government, and it is an investment that should be made at every level of government, even in this time of severe budget reductions.

You see, the flexibility of a good ECM solution means the solution can become a tool for many government departments and initiatives. Understanding this, thousands of cities and counties across the country have already embraced electronic records and ECM, and have used the solution to meet a number of needs. We can see the result:

• Reduced costs. From eliminating paper and file cabinets to the costs of storing and moving files.
• Reclaiming staff time. No more searching for files, no lost documents, no filing, printing or photocopying.
• Speeding up government. Workflow automation shaves days off of processes; physical paper files replaced with electronic allow more staff to simultaneously access information.
• Connecting documents and data. Easy information retrieval helps make the transition from paper files to electronic records easy and intuitive for users, and requires little or no staff training.

At the same time, the ECM investment lays the foundation for meeting transparency and open government initiatives, while realizing all of the lowered costs and efficiency government organizations need to survive. So, access to records can take place through a website or a kiosk or a computer station at an office, improving constituent service while reducing the staff time needed to fill requests.

The good news for federal agencies is that they need look no farther than the counties and cities who have invested in an ECM solution. Other counties and cities who are considering an ECM solution can similarly find ideas and proven value thanks to the examples of their peers.

Current government ECM users show that creating transparency is just one of the benefits of moving to electronic records. So, while federal agencies may make this transition to meet a presidential memorandum on Open Government, their efforts could end up improving government operations, reducing costs and reclaiming staff time for the important work they do. The proof is in the results of cities and counties who have already moved to include ECM as one of their IT tools.

The ‘Dreaded’ Dodd-Frank: Is Your Data Compliant?

// November 8th, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services // Michelle Shapiro

I can’t check my email without reading something about Dodd-Frank. It’s been a headliner at every conference I’ve attended this year.

At MBA’s 98^th Annual Convention, U.S. Rep. Spencer Bachus demonstrated both the length and detail of the new regulatory legislation by carrying on stage – and then dumping – a box filled with thousands of pages of regulations affected by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

While a bit dramatic, it highlighted how huge and complex data requirements imposed by Dodd-Frank are. For banks, there are new reporting requirements for compliance and risk mitigation, as well as new records that must be captured. Where to begin, right?

Your top priority is to make sure your systems are secure, auditable, traceable and flexible enough to quickly adapt to any new regulations. By leveraging an enterprise content management (ECM) or document management solution, you will have the tools to ensure consistent record keeping while guaranteeing the right information is available to the right people.

It will also give you the ability to automate document retention in a secure system, provide consistent disposition and immediately respond to audit requests and legal concerns. You can also control revisions of documents and instantly track changes to records, making traceability a non-issue. And your increased visibility into information and processes will help you adapt to new regulations.

Your second priority is to consolidate records and reporting across your institution’s different departments and regions in order to comply with Dodd-Frank’s new reporting requirements. The right ECM solution captures, stores, manages and shares any type of documentation – including reports from the core – in one easy-to-use interface.

It also gives financial institutions the ability to allow for instant and secure access to reports and documentation across the enterprise, regardless of geographical location. This helps you meet the Dodd-Frank requirements, but it also provides increased ability to analyze data, so you can make better decisions and support your institution’s growth initiatives.

All eyes are on Wall Street and the legislation that affects it. Banking divisions, affiliates and their disparate data sources need to be better integrated and more transparent than ever before.

Stay out of negative headlines, avoid hefty penalties, comply with reporting requirements and focus on achieving your goals by using an ECM solution to manage your documents and data.

At EDUCAUSE – and Everywhere – It’s About Partnerships

// November 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

Because I’ve been married for at least my share of years, maybe more (I won’t confess how many), I believe I know the importance of partnerships. What struck me at the recent EDUCAUSE annual conference in Philadelphia was that the benefits of partnerships extend well beyond the parties directly involved.

My wife and I (primarily because we don’t have kids of our own) benefit from the “perks” that our respective siblings’ partnerships have provided us: our nieces and nephews. While their parents benefit from no-cost childcare, our nieces and nephews benefit from their association with us: weekends away from the monitoring eyes of mom and dad, additional dollars spent on their behalf, etc.(We embrace a “spoil them, then send them home” strategy, securing affection yet sidestepping any real responsibility.)

For those attending EDUCAUSE, the perks of seamlessly integrated solutions leveraging offerings from partnering providers were featured in the panel discussion featuring Vince DiStasi, Chief Information Officer at Grove City College (GCC) in Pennsylvania. While presenting the business case for implementing enterprise content management (ECM) technologies, Mr. DiStasi referenced the convenience of having ECM-integrated functionality available on multi-function devices.

Currently at Grove City, staff can walk up to any scanner/printer/copier device on campus to scan and index documents directly and securely into the ECM repository. And, as DiStasi noted, in a second phase of the implementation, many of the documents scanned into the repository will also immediately be added to automated business workflows for various review, approval and decision-making processes. This ease-of-use and efficiency is made possible by the partnership and technology integration of HP, the providers of the multi-function hardware, and Hyland Software, the developer of the ECM platform installed at GCC.

Another example comes in the area of transfer credit evaluation (TCE).  As many of you know (and as I had commented on in a previous post), speed and accuracy in this arena is critical to matriculating students ahead of the competition, enrolling them in the right courses and retaining them through graduation in a timely fashion. Because transfer transcripts often in exist in electronic, not paper, formats, it’s important for the ECM platform capturing the documents and data to seamlessly handle the import of electronic data feeds, such as transcripts arriving in XML or EDI formats.

That’s an integral component of an end-to-end TCE process, ensuring that course data is captured quickly, automatically uploaded and efficiently routed for evaluation and degree audit purposes. As was revealed at EDUCAUSE, the partnership between Hyland, with its transcript capture and TCE solution, and Parchment, a provider of electronic transcript services, allows for seamless import at the front end of the process.

Such partnerships should be reassuring – as much for the users of the solutions, as they are for me. Why me? Well, all that extra cash the parents of my nieces and nephews save by offloading their kids to me and my wife on the weekends will, no doubt, be redirected to their respective college tuition funds. Do I want to see that money wasted on administrative inefficiencies when they submit their admissions applications and transcripts to the colleges of their choice?  Of course not. So, here’s my thanks, in advance, for the kinds of partnerships that will eliminate cost-wasting processing hitches on campuses everywhere.

Let the race begin: Final ACO rules announced

// November 2nd, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Healthcare, IT // Jared Blankenship

Well, there you have it. The CMS recently released the final rules for Medicare’s accountable care organizations (ACOs). HIStalk did a fine job of summing up the differences between the final and preliminary versions:

• Quality measures reduced from 65 to 33
• Use of an EHR is not a requirement to participate
• Introduction of a savings-only track without financial risk during the initial contract period
• CHCs and rural health clinics now have an option to lead ACOs
• A longer phase-in for reporting and performance measures
• Multiple start dates established
• CMS will provide approved marketing guidelines and language (so ACOs don’t have to wait for CMS approval, as was stated in preliminary rules)

According to the CMS, the preliminary elicited more than 1,200 comments, which helped shape the final iteration we now see. Great to see the healthcare community so vocal and active. Even better that the CMS listened.

But now that we have the final rules, it’s time to get to work. Sure, additional rules are likely to follow. Also, as real-world lessons bubble to the surface, there will be changes, adaptations and modifications. Nothing is likely to remain static for very long. More than a little reminiscent of how Meaningful Use unfolded – and continues to unfold. Nevertheless, with clear guidelines in place, those of you in technology-oriented roles will find even more complexity working its way into your daily lives. As if you needed any more…

InformationWeek recently highlighted an interesting report – “Preparing for Accountable Care: The Role of Health IT in Building Capability” (full version available here). There’s one message resonating with crystalline clarity throughout the report: Information technology has a critical role to play in the ACO model.

All right, that seems obvious. But technology doesn’t operate in a vacuum. It’s up to those of you who understand IT’s potential and limitations to share your insight and knowledge. Because the ACO model implies (and demands) such deep organizational changes, many people in your specific organization will find themselves involved. Amidst all the ensuing politics and confusion, the strategic planning and trial-and-error, it’s easy for the rational-minded soul to lose patience and succumb to frustration.

Don’t let that happen. Make sure everyone understands your position and that IT’s role is not misunderstood, overstated or ignored. Daunting, I know, but the stakes are high. Assumptions made in your absence today will only drop a mountain of pain on your desk tomorrow.