Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

AIIM and info360: Systems of Record vs. Systems of Engagement?

// March 22nd, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management // Ken Burns

I’m spending the next day and a half in Washington, D.C. attending the info360 conference (formerly known as the AIIM Conference & Exhibition).

This has always been the showcase event for all the vendors and technologies that fall under the enterprise content management (ECM) market umbrella. At its core, however, the big focus has been on ECM offerings that support transaction processing and formal record keeping (i.e. systems of record). AIIM/info360 has typically attracted audiences interested in those particular topics and technologies.

Again, this year, enterprise systems of record still largely dominate the conference agenda and the show floor. But, more than ever before, the AIIM organization, Questex (the firm that runs the conference), and certain vendor sponsors are pushing hard to discuss the impact (or potential opportunity) of content generated and used by consumer-oriented social technologies like Facebook and Twitter (i.e. systems of engagement).

I’ll be looking to get a sense of whether the show’s attendees place social technologies at the top of their priority list. No doubt, some will.

But, I suspect I’ll also come across many, many others who deal with those daily operational and administrative matters that make the benefits of minimizing paper-processing to be pretty compelling, critical stuff, too.

Stay tuned.

Are you ready for the Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 release?

// March 14th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Enterprise content management // Bill Filion

 After many months in beta, Microsoft will be officially releasing Internet Explorer 9 tonight at 9 p.m. PT.

There’s been plenty of talk around the pros and cons of the features and functionality. Some highlights: It has a brand new scripting engine under the covers that’s expected to render many websites and web-based products faster (possibly 10 times faster!). It’s definitely an improvement and a continual step forward by Microsoft. Chances are very good that you’re going to want to get it rolled out throughout the company.

But are you ready for it?

Here’s the problem. The new scripting engine from Microsoft is significantly different from all prior versions, and although Microsoft has made attempts to make web-based products run the same as they did in IE8, there’s no guarantee. This means that if you are running any web-based products that you’ve built or bought, those products may not work properly, or at all, on IE9. Clearly, this could result in a disruption of your business processes.

Part of the reason for this could be the age of the application. Applications that have existed for many years may be built to effectively support older versions of Internet Explorer, such as IE6, which offered some valuable proprietary concepts to developers that are unique to Internet Explorer. 

The last several versions of Internet Explorer, including IE9, are built to be more compliant-based, and to leave the proprietary nature of the past behind.  Compatibility modes available in IE9 attempt to make sure that older concepts are still supported, but it’s possible that compatibility mode doesn’t work exactly as it did with an older browser and an application running on IE9 won’t operate successfully.

Therefore, talking to your vendors and testing your applications in preparation for IE9 should be at the top of the priority list.

Since many of our customers use OnBase through Internet Explorer, we have some insight into how the launch will affect applications. We are expecting that IE9 will provide desired value, but that can’t come at the expense of unexpected downtime. Therefore, our recommendation has been to make sure that your organization makes a conscious, coordinated decision for when you’re ready to upgrade to IE9.

The good news is that you can decide when your users are able to install IE9 on their workstations. At a minimum, Microsoft offers a toolkit to block the delivery of IE9 through Windows Update. If you host your own Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) or System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), your administrator can block the release of IE9 to users, as well. This way, when you’re done with successfully testing all key systems that are dependent on Internet Explorer to be compatible with IE9, you can deliver it to your users without risking downtime.

As an additional resource, Microsoft has published the Internet Explorer 9 Compatibility Cookbook to provide insight into aspects of IE9 that changed and could result in products no longer functioning.  For instance, this guide can help you find ways to rework HTML e-forms that are using JavaScript which may not work properly with the new IE9 script engine.

If you’re not able to stop one of your supported users from updating their workstation to IE9, and a needed system isn’t working, there’s always the option to have them uninstall IE9 and return to the previously installed version of Internet Explorer.  This might be a worst-case scenario, but it’s still an option.

While IE9 will likely add great value for organizations, it’s not helping anyone if it’s taking down the day-to-day applications employees use every day. To make sure this doesn’t happen, it’s all about pre-planning and testing before any widespread installation happens.

Comments or questions on how IE9 could affect your applications? Use the comments feature here.

Novarica ACE Rankings: Shakespeare Meets Insurance Software Solutions

// February 18th, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Enterprise content management, Insurance // Lindsay McCune

“What’s in a name?” Our dear Romeo and Juliet asked the same question. Understanding the answer to this query was a struggle for these star-crossed lovers – and is a contemporary concern for modern-day insurance technology buyers (follow me on this one). With so many buzzwords and acronyms surrounding us, understanding IT and even more so, enterprise content management (ECM) can be a challenge.

Recently, Novarica’s Average Customer Experience (ACE) Rankings  were published (congrats to all the vendors ranked!). After looking at the category Hyland was ranked in – Document Management – something I’ve often considered finally clicked in my head. When it comes to ECM in insurance, most of us are still asking the same question as our Shakespearean friends, “What is in a name?” Document management? ECM?  Imaging? Workflow? Records management? Collaboration?  What’s the context for all of these terms?

Here are just a few points to consider:

• “ECM” means different things to different people and organizations
• With a turbulent market, acquisitions, such as a services vendor purchasing a document  management shop, can make it more confusing
• What business problem you trying to solve?

I ask these questions, because after looking at solutions that were grouped together in the ACE Rankings, especially in Document Management, like solutions weren’t being compared.

But, for the buyer, that’s okay – as long as they realize that rankings like this are simply meant to act as one snapshot of the market. The more important research in identifying what kind of ECM solution you need..  What business problems are you trying to solve? Where will the solution be deployed?  Who will be using it? Can it provide value throughout your enterprise?

Again, rankings are just the start to helping you answer these questions and become an ECM pro.

Another suggestion: turn to your peers!  With so many communities available, people just like you can solve the “what’s in a name” puzzle. Firms like Forrester, AIIM, Gartner, and Celent can give you the basics, propelling you to be the trusted advisor in your organization.

And, after all of your extracurricular reading, you will realize that the question all along wasn’t “what’s in a name?” It was “how does that definition of ECM software apply to me?”  

Insurance ECM pros, what tips can you give organizations in the market for a solution that are sorting through all of the nomenclature?  

Stay tuned for more tips and tricks through the ECM landscape.  It will have you smelling as sweet as a rose, or something that would smell as sweet!

Document Management Helps Johns Hopkins University Admissions Weather Snowmageddon 2010

// February 1st, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Admissions, Enterprise content management, Higher Education // Tom Tennant

With a winter storm revving up to deliver a second blow this evening (the weather cognoscenti are calling it “mammoth,” “massive” and “colossal”), today and tomorrow feels a little like déjà vu for those of us in the Midwest and Northeast.

Almost exactly one year ago today, on Feb. 5, 2010, much of the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states were buried under more than 20 inches of snow. The blizzard – designated “Snowmaggedon” by President Barack Obama – left thousands without power and shut down the government.

It stranded a number of Johns Hopkins University’s admissions staff at home. Bad news for the admissions staff, which was facing a looming admissions deadline and the largest applicant pool in the university’s history: nearly 2,000 more than its previous record.

For those of us not in the know, accepting college applicants earlier in the admissions cycle increases a university’s chances of seeing that student accept the offer. It also gives colleges and universities a competitive advantage by allowing them to admit the best-fit students faster than the competition.  

So, you see, a true dilemma. More so, if the university was still operating under its old procedure.

You know, admissions counselors hauling student files home, bulldozing through them like a city snowplow, dragging them back to the office, handing them off to John Hopkins operations team, who would then shovel through each to determine if the student was accepted, and then manually input that info into the computer before slotting the file into a snow bank of filing cabinets.

Too much metaphor? Maybe. But you get my drift.

Under the old process, chances were slim the staff could hit the deadline. They could get the files read – at least the ones they brought home – but they couldn’t get them into the hands of operations while roads remained unnavigable. But that’s not what happened.

Instead, admissions staff safely and securely logged into the university’s system from home and used document management tools to electronically decision files and have those decisions posted directly to the enterprise database. Instead, admissions staff recorded the most productive reading week ever.

As one Johns Hopkins admissions staff member says, “It made life easier for everyone.”

And that’s “snow” joke.

A lesson in data storage, starring WikiLeaks and pizza

// January 4th, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management // Glenn Gibson

How many scanned electronic documents might represent 5GB of storage space? 

This is the question posed to me last week by New York Times reporter Nelson Schwartz. You can read more about why he wanted to know in his article “Facing Threat From WikiLeaks, Bank Plays Defense” (see page two, paragraph one).

My response? That’s like figuring out how many slices of pizza fit in a large pizza box. The answer depends on how large the slices are. A pizza box could hold 100 little slices or eight large slices.   

Similarly, the size of electronic documents absolutely impacts the answer to the original question.

Before we start calculating, we need to understand that calculations are based on pages, not documents. This is an important distinction. Documents can vary in the number of pages, so we count pages to get an accurate picture.

There are then a number of variables which will profoundly impact the final size of an electronic document. 

1. Page size. Is this 8.5 x 11 letter, 8.5 x 14 legal, or something else?
2. Scan resolution. This is measured in dots per inch (dpi). The number of dots relate to the number of electronic “bits” stored. The higher the resolution, the better quality the image will be and the more space this will consume.
3. Color choice.  Black and white images take up much less space than color images.
4. File type. Most image file types (GIF, TIF, JPEG, etc.) determine how far the image is compressed. A group 4 TIF compresses at 20:1; a JPEG compresses at 100:1. Very high compression ratios such as JPEGs are known as “lossy compression.” This means that you will have the advantage of consuming less space on the disk, but may lose some image quality.

Here’s an industry standard example: An 8.5 x 11 page, scanned at 200 dpi in black and white stored as a TIF file type. We can calculate this document will consume around 22KB of space. With that electronic page size, you can store 238,545 pages in 5 GB*. 

If you wanted to improve the quality of that scanned image by increasing the resolution to 400 dpi, you will end up with a document that consumes 91 KB of space. With that increased resolution, with the same scanned documents, you can store 57,614 pages in 5GB*.

This is just by adjusting resolution. But these calculations change when you change color choice, page size and the compression ratios used. It’s up to an organization to ensure that the choices it makes regarding space consumed by electronic documents will not result in images that are unreadable because of being scanned at a very low resolution with a high compression. 

Let’s talk pizza again. If you purchased 100 slices of pizza for $10 and the pizza shop delivered one box crammed with 100 tiny slices, your friends would probably never come over to watch the Super Bowl at your place ever again. 

However, if your 100 slices arrived in 20 boxes, while the boxes take up more space, everyone would be much happier.

* These are the calculations used to arrive at these figures

Size: 8.5 x 11
Resolution measured in Dots Per Inch (DPI): Example 1 uses 200 DPI, Example 2 uses 400 DPI
Color Choice: Black and White
Compression: Group 4 TIFF (20:1) compression

Example 1 at 200DPI 

1. We calculate the number of electronic bits based on the number of dots that will be scanned.  A dot is equivalent to an electronic bit.
   (8.5 x 200) x (11 x 200) = 3740000 bits stored. 
2. There are 8 Bits in a Byte.
   3740000 / 8 = 467500 Bytes
3. There are 1024 Bytes in a Kilobyte.
   467500 / 1024 = 456.54 KB
4. This is stored as a group 4 TIFF which has 20:1 compression
    456.54 / 20 = 22.87KB

Example 2 at 400DPI 

1. We calculate the number of electronic Bits based on the number of dots that will be scanned.  A dot is equivalent to an electronic Bit.
   (8.5 x 400) x (11 x 400) = 14960000 Bits stored. 
2. There are 8 Bits in a Byte
   14960000 / 8 = 1870000 Bytes
3. There are 1024 Bytes in a Kilobyte
   1870000 / 1024 = 1826.17KB
4. This is stored as a group 4 TIFF which has 20:1 compression
   1826.17 / 20 = 91.3KB

IT strategy rapidly evolving as virtualization grows

// December 30th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Cloud Computing, Enterprise content management, Government, Healthcare, Insurance, Software as a Service // Glenn Gibson

Just when you thought it was safe to get back to work, your IT world is changing again. Or at the very least evolving.

It’s been doing so since at least 2008, when Gartner, the well-known information technology research and analyst firm, spotlighted one trend, which it calls “the highest-impact issue, changing how organizations plan, buy, deploy and manage IT through 2012.”

And that’s virtualization.

It sounds a bit Matrix-y, and that’s okay, because it is in a way.  Virtualization refers to the virtual rendering of an actual thing, like an operating system, storage device, server and so forth. Your employees encounter it most often when they’re running virtual desktops from their computers at home.

If you’re avoiding it, you might want to rethink your approach. Agile businesses are moving quickly to adopt virtualization, allowing their employees to access information anywhere, anytime with any device. Powerful, powerful stuff, as workforces become more nimble, mobile and spread out. WiFi, 3G, 4G, smartphones and tablets connect workers to their work – and each other – like never before. And virtualization is letting it happen.

As IT infrastructure and datacenter strategy moves toward this new reality ­­­– and we believe it is a reality that’s here to stay – more and more companies will rely on vendors who have the virtualization experience and understanding needed to support their long-term business goals.

We’re so sure this is one of the main avenues business IT is heading down, Hyland regularly updates its virtualization support statement to underscore our commitment to making OnBase run seamlessly on our customers’ virtual infrastructure. And it’s why we find maintaining our VMware ready and Citrix ready certifications so important.

And it’s not just talk. 

Hyland’s own Software as a Service solution, OnBase OnLine, runs almost entirely on virtualized servers hosted by VMware ESX Server.  Many of our customers also host their OnBase solution on virtualized servers. 

One customer runs 30 physical VMware ESX Servers which host ample virtualized servers, providing a server environment that can sustain some 22,000 users. 

So there you have it. Virtualization is the future. And the future is already here.

Best in KLAS rankings are out: Three trends in healthcare ECM software

// December 16th, 2010 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Healthcare // Ken Burns

Every year at this time, KLAS, a healthcare IT analyst firm, releases vendor rankings within several technology categories, including what they call “Document Management and Imaging.” The rankings are based on vendor-specific customer feedback.

But every year, when I open it and look at the data points, I wonder “vendor ratings are great, but what does this really mean for the state of healthcare ECM today?” So if you’ll indulge me, here are the three things that that I think stand out in this report:

1. It’s not document management and imaging anymore – it’s enterprise content management (ECM).

This has always been a peeve of mine. While the report calls it “Document Managing and Imaging,” KLAS knows well that, today, ECM isn’t just scan, store and retrieve – it’s routing patient charts, integrating with an electronic medical record (EMR), etc. And, because ECM should be ubiquitous throughout the organization (for example, not just in the back office), it is therefore a long term, strategic investment.

The market verified this in the report. One of the ratings was if the technology was a “part of long term plans.” The leaders in the report had very high marks here, including Hyland’s ranking where 100 percent said it was a part of long term plans (disclosure: I work for Hyland).

2. What’s increasingly becoming the most common point of entry for ECM in healthcare? Integrating with the EMR.

In other industries, most of the paper and process pains are felt in accounts payable and human resources, so these areas often drive ECM strategies. But the customer comments in the report made it clear that, in healthcare, the priorities are elsewhere: the clinical side.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that this priority is because of the national push to digitize patient information. Because of this initiative, healthcare organizations are looking at how they manage their clinical content now more than ever. If this doesn’t get them to realize that they need ECM, it’s the actual implementation of an EMR that makes it blatantly obvious.

Many of the customers pointed this out, stating that ECM solutions are most valuable when they integrate well with an EMR.

Another interesting point: They made it clear that an EMR wasn’t enough to manage patient information – they need ECM, too. Without it, content gets stuck in silos – an EMR system here, an HIS system there – making it impossible to access information at the moment it’s needed within the continuum of care.

3. ECM vendors need to be truly enterprise – not just departmental in clinical or administrative areas.

Okay, so this one wasn’t called out in the data points. But it was mentioned often in the comments, making me think it needs to be addressed in the report.

I think the KLAS approach of generating a report solely on customer feedback is really valuable. But what would make the information even more valuable is to see exactly in which departments the customers are actually using their rated ECM products.

See, the problem is that while the report asks customers “Is this product meeting your needs?,” it doesn’t ask what those needs are. Is a solution only being used in accounts payable with the understanding that it can’t go any further? Is it a bolt on piece to an EMR that can then only be used in conjunction with that EMR? Because, if the answers to those questions is “yes,” I’m going to suggest that the report is evaluating the value of ECM all wrong.

To my point in #1, the value of ECM comes when it’s ubiquitous, meaning it can unify an entire organization through document management and process management. This means that the same ECM used to manage patient records should be the same ECM that manages the hiring process.

In other words, how can ECM really be enterprise and provide the most value if it’s just a one-off departmental implementation with no hope to go beyond that?

Again, these are just my observations. But to me, it’s clear that the healthcare industry is crying out for ECM that really lives up to its name – especially when it comes to the “enterprise” part.

KLAS agrees – in fact, they already covered this topic in greater detail, including how ECM solutions are used by department and which are most effective across the enterprise. The report came out in October 2009, and is called “Enterprise DMI: Finding the Right Stepping-Stone to Full EMR.” I encourage you to check out this and other third-party sources on ECM to really get the full picture of an ECM solution’s value in healthcare.

FAA loses 119,000 planes: A lesson in records management and ECM

// December 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // Enterprise content management, Government // Tom Tennant

I read with interest Friday how the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has lost track of 119,000 aircraft.

In case you missed it, the Associated Press reports “119,000 of the aircraft on the U.S. registry have ‘questionable registration’ because of missing forms, invalid addresses, unreported sales or other paperwork problems. In many cases, the FAA cannot say who owns a plane or even whether it is still flying or has been junked.”

Holy high-flying cow.

Now, I’m pretty new to the world of enterprise content management (ECM), but I have to believe the FAA has some sort of document management system in place. What it is, I don’t know, but at first blush – or in the way it’s described by AP’s intrepid reporter – it doesn’t seem to be working.

Or on second thought, maybe it’s working all too well.

Could be the FAA’s system includes a component like exception reporting, which either confirms the existence of required documents or spots broken transactions and missing documents, then notifies the appropriate stakeholders about said missing items. It’s up to the stakeholders to go looking for them.

Can you imagine the look on someone’s face when that exception report came through? Gulps are rarely audible, but I bet this one sounded like a bass drum.

There’s more.

The article talks about “instances of mistaken identity in which police raided the wrong plane because of faulty record-keeping” and “the paperwork gap is becoming a bigger problem as authorities increasingly rely on computers to tighten aviation security in the wake of 9/11 and other terrorist plots.”

Then there’s this cry for ECM help: “The amount of missing or invalid paperwork has been building for decades, the FAA says. Up to now, owners had to register their planes only once, at the time of purchase. The FAA sent out notices every three years asking owners to update their contact information if needed, but there was no punishment for not doing so. As of 2008, there were 343,000 airplanes on the registry. By 2010, the number had risen to 357,000.”

Ouch.

Hopefully I’m not talking out of class when I say that every new employee at Hyland is thoroughly schooled on the dramatic effect ECM can have on an organization. How it can save a company time and money, eliminate low-value tasks, and empower its workforce just by employing stuff like workflow, document retention and document imaging. Not to mention the aforementioned exception reports (gulp). 

If this all sounds too good to be true, I promise you it’s not. And I encourage you to start exploring the world of ECM. You might find the right solution that can help your company take off.