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

Four IT Security Lessons to Learn From Anonymous’ Stratfor Hack

// December 30th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Enterprise content management // Kaitlin McCready

On Christmas Eve, while most of us were immersed in the holiday spirit, others were immersed in the sensitive information of Stratfor Global Intelligence Service’s client list.

A group of hackers, associated with the collective known as Anonymous, breached Stratfor’s systems, obtaining the credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses of the company’s customers. The group has already used this stolen information to make donations to charities, such as the American Red Cross. (This story keeps evolving as new information is released. For the latest updates, check out The New York Times topic page on Anonymous here.)

Breaches like this are happening so frequently (just follow the medical community for the evidence) that they’re becoming ho-hum. But that’s even more reason to question how they can happen in the first place. This is 2011, after all, and technology in organizations should, in almost every case, protect against something like this.

To help you ensure you don’t become the next Stratfor, here are four lessons in IT security that you can take to your organization.

1. To protect against data breaches, it’s not just the database that needs to be protected – it’s the documents.

The full picture of exactly what content was compromised from Stratfor is still unclear. But we do know that it went beyond the database to things like emails.

The reality is that sometimes, documents like PDFs and Word files have sensitive information like credit card numbers on them. To make sure they’re securely managed, an enterprise content management system should be able to provide granular levels of security down to the single document level, and can store them in an encrypted format.

2. An email might be a communication tool first. But when it contains sensitive information, it needs to be treated as a record.

We’re in a world where the amount of information is exploding, making it more complicated to determine which needs to be deemed necessary to manage within an organization’s content management system.

Hopefully, the Stratfor situation will put the focus back on the need to better manage sensitive emails and the way they’re archived, a piece of the IT security puzzle that’s often overlooked. Typically emails kept in Exchange or an email archive solution aren’t archived in an encrypted format. To create a complete solution, you should be able to configure an enterprise content management system to delete emails in the respective mail client once the email is archived in that system.

3. Encryption should be built into your software.

Storage and data archiving vendors, like EMC or IBM, provide a lot of security and data integrity controls in their systems. But you shouldn’t rely solely on your hardware to administer security on where your documents are residing.

ECM software should be able to encrypt documents and images at the physical storage level, protecting the data from unauthorized access to the physical drives. Documents that are archived in this way then can only be opened and viewed with ECM software interface, ensuring that the security controls imposed by the software are respected at all times, regardless of what happens to the hardware.

4. You can’t fully control your employees’ actions. But you can protect against it.

Every company has disgruntled employees, even a few willing to give up their login information to your enterprise systems - or more commonly, employees who mean well, but are fooled by hackers from time to time. Here’s how you can combat these situations (to a degree).

When it comes to documents, most ECM systems offer the capabilities to either automatically or on an ad-hoc basis do redactions on sensitive information that the majority of users in the organization don’t need to do their jobs. So, authorized users can still get access to the physical documents, but only certain people can see the actual information on the document, like a credit card number. This level of security is becoming more talked about with PCI compliance regulations.

The IT tools are out there to protect organizations. Hopefully this incident (and these tips) lights a fire under the IT departments who aren’t yet taking advantage.

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.

Performance-Based Funding: It’s About Getting Students In and Out the Door

// December 7th, 2011 // No Comments » // Admissions, Enterprise content management, Higher Education, Uncategorized // Tom von Gunden

For programs I administered back in my faculty days (not so long ago), I had to respond to increasing pressure to measure and report on student success. The buzzword then was assessment (i.e., identifying which specific learning outcomes were actually being achieved), and the accreditation agencies were the ones primarily applying the pressure.

Since then, the source of the pressure has shifted to legislators and other stakeholders involved in allocating funding for higher education. The key buzzword now is performance, as in “performance-based funding,” a concept which is supplanting “assessment-based learning” in public debates about the so-called crisis in higher education. In this context, the word performance connotes more of an institution-wide responsibility for success. As a result, the targets of scrutiny on college campuses have broadened significantly to now include the administrative as well as academic sides of the house.

This evolution in terms of who is responsible for student success has accelerated, in large part because of federal government initiatives and other mandates for ensuring student retention and fostering on-time graduations. In many states, policies for overtly tying funding to retention and graduation rates are underway, if not already in place.  

What this means for administrative offices, particularly in enrollment management (admissions, financial aid, registrar), is a heightened expectation for responsiveness to students and prospective students. Addressing that expectation requires, among other things, getting new students matriculated as quickly and seamlessly as possible. Once they are enrolled, it also requires providing an accurate and appropriately paced roadmap to degree completion.  

With competition for students heating up, responsiveness – at a level which will ensure degree completion at your institution — calls for increased speed, accuracy and efficiency in terms of administrative processing and decision-making at every stage in a student’s academic career. Poor performance at the front end – the pre-enrollment stage – can mean losing students, often to formerly non-competing local or regional options. Poor performance in the post-matriculation stages can lead to dropouts, drift-offs and outright transfers to other schools.

Given that funding, when it does come, may not deliver additional administrative resources, the demand often must be met with existing staff resources. More than ever, staff can’t do it alone, no matter how dedicated or how much overtime is logged. Staff needs tools – tools that automate many of the time-intensive, manual elements of administrative processing:  capturing, filing, retrieving, and routing documents. Reducing the reliance on paper offloads the operational burden of these critical components to automated systems. The entire process of administering student entrance can be dramatically enhanced, be it admissions application processing, financial aid processing and verification, student advising, course registration, graduation petition processing, etc.

Perhaps the most illustrative example of the connection between funding and performance comes in the area of transfer credit evaluation. In a recent post, I referenced the partnership between Parchment, which offers electronic transcript delivery services, and Hyland, with its ECM (enterprise content management) offerings. As I described there, the ability to quickly ingest transcripts and course data – whether arriving electronically or originating in paper – is key making timely decisions for degree audit purposes. Slowdowns in evaluating transfer credits can lead to losing students at the pre-enrollment stage and, in post-matriculation stages, can cause degree-threatening, money-wasting mistakes such as students unnecessarily repeating similar coursework.

Neither of those scenarios in any way helps institutions get students in the door or keep them advancing steadily and appropriately toward degree completion. If performance indicators for your institution include goals and rates for matriculation, retention and graduation – as they increasingly will – the time for process acceleration is now.

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.