Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

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.

The Evolution of ECM and the Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011

// October 20th, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // AJ Hyland

While the stand-out fact in this year’s Gartner Magic Quadrant for ECM, 2011, was the 7.6 percent growth in the ECM industry, even in a down economy and as organizations tighten their tech investment belts, what’s more remarkable is the rapid evolution of enterprise content management as a strategic business solution. 

Gone are the days when ECM was little more than a means by which companies transformed paper documentation into electronic information and then organized and disseminated that information to employees and staff. That still occurs, but it is really now only a foundational piece to a much larger solution.

Or, truly, solutions, because every organization is as different as the business content and process challenges they face. You see, it’s about more than knowing where your information is and how to quickly access it. It’s about leveraging that information in a meaningful way so that you can achieve your specific organizational goals, all the while taking care to achieve just the right balance of focus and flexibility in that endeavor.

What do I mean by this?

I’m saying think of your ECM solution holistically – beyond what you want to capture and how you want to capture it. Consider who will access this information. When will they do it and why? Is your audience an admissions staff? Or a business decision maker whose office is in the air or on the road? Is that information critical to keeping your business moving forward, to beating the competition or better serve a constituent?

In other words, are you leveraging your information in a meaningful way? Do you have a protocol in place should your admissions staff get snowed in during the busiest time of year? Can your managers and executives make decisions via their mobile phones whether they’re in Boston or Bermuda?

A strategic ECM solution must have the flexibility to help answer those questions. It must work in concert with other software solutions, to accurately capture, process and quickly distribute information to staff when and where they need it, and connect the content dots that allow organizations to gain the competitive advantage, better serve their constituents – or both.

Strategic ECM vendors will help organizations elevate their game by focusing on speed of deployment, getting organizations up and running faster, putting them ahead of the competition sooner or offering improved services to constituents faster.

After all, the strategic use of ECM is a differentiator for today’s organizations. And there is ample opportunity to become even more competitive using ECM technology.

Mobile ECM: Your Content In Your Pocket

// October 5th, 2011 // No Comments » // Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, Food and Beverage, Government, Healthcare, Higher Education, Insurance, IT // Glenn Gibson

Put mobile ECM into the pocket of your employees

The world of computing has changed. Forever.

These days it seems archaic to have to wait until you get home or to the office just to check your email, because now your email is in your pocket. The idea of printing off maps before heading out on a journey seems crazy because GPS on our phone gives us turn-by-turn directions. Lively pop-culture debates over a pint are now a thing of the past, because we can look up the answers on the internet immediately.

Yes, mobile computing devices have changed the world and changed us.  We expect instant access to information from wherever we are. The iPhone and the iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Blackberry give us this access like never before.

So what does the explosion in mobile computing have to do with ECM?  Everything. 

Think about it. What is one of the primary driving factors behind an organization developing an ECM strategy? The need to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time. That’s what ECM is all about. 

But what if the right people are in the wrong place at the wrong time? What I mean is, what if the people who are responsible for making important decisions, from approving a critical business expense to agreeing to hire the perfect candidate, can’t physically get access to the information and systems they need in order to execute business decisions, simply because they are travelling or not in the office?   

The reality is that these individuals spend a lot of time on the road and out of the office. This lack of real-time access causes bottlenecks in your processes as the decisions have to wait until they get back online. This causes on-the-fly workarounds with emails and phone calls to get someone, anyone, with authority to make the decision. And once that decision has finally been made, it is very difficult to track all the activity that supports it. 

Yup, bottlenecks and workarounds caused when people who play a critical role in business decisions are out of the office have come to be expected as a normal part of business because, until recently, that’s just how it was. There was no other choice.

But, the world of computing has changed. If the ability to access email from anywhere in the world is not only a reality, but expected in today’s world, why is it any different when thinking about your other important business content and processes?

It shouldn’t be. And when you partner with an ECM vendor who understands this, it is not.

Today you can put your ECM content in your pocket. With mobile ECM applications you are able to not only able access your important content, but also participate in business processes, reviewing, approving and denying requests from wherever you are, directly from your mobile device. 

Now it is likely, for many good reasons that you may not want to make ALL your business information available via mobile devices. If mobile access to your information is part of your requirements when you are choosing an ECM vendor, you should look for a vendor which allows you to control what type of content and processes to make available via these mobile devices. You should choose an ECM system that can truly deliver on the promise to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time, wherever they happen to be.

For your business this is both simple and profound. No more waiting to get back to the office. No more driving to coffee shops just to get access to your system to approve a request. No more bottlenecks caused by business travel. No more un-documented workarounds.  

It is that simple. It is that revolutionary. Because now your content is right there in your pocket.

Enterprise Content Management: A Simple Step Toward Sustainability

// October 3rd, 2011 // No Comments » // Back Office, Enterprise content management, Food and Beverage, Uncategorized // Becca Toth

Sustainability is top of mind for most companies today. Even as a consumer, you can’t go many places without hearing, seeing or reading something about “going green.” 

Thus, sustainability, or “going green,” is a sweeping trend in the corporate sector as well.  From a corporate perspective, we often hear companies take on initiatives to install solar panels or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  These are certainly great steps toward making organizations “sustainable,” but what about the internal business processes of most companies? What about the methods most employees use to get their day-to-day work done? How does that fit in?

Having worked for companies in different industries, I know that the practice of relying on manual paper-based processes is just a way of getting things done.  But taking a step back and looking at most organizations’ internal departments , it is staggering the amount of paper that is not only consumed, but then stored. Moving away from manual processes is definately a cultural change for many employees – even a difficult change for some – but this presents a golden opportunity for companies to “go green” in the office place. 

A report published by the North Carolina Division of Pollution Prevention and Environmental Assistance titled “A Checklist for Office Sustainability,”  outlined five main areas within the office to consider in any sustainability initiative:

• Paper usage,
• Equipment usage,
• Recycling and reuse,
• Utilities, and
• Office sustainability practices. 

Under paper usage alone, nine areas were considered when evaluating waste reduction activities.  So where do most companies begin? 

Evaluating how your organization uses paper, and more specifically how each specific department uses paper, is an easy starting place.  Some important questions to ask yourself or others in your department: Do documents exist in paper form that can be converted into an electronic format? Are there forms or documents made or used electronically or both?

Streamlining or removing a lot of the manual paper-based processes and moving toward an automated process for dealing with those activities will not only provide an opportunity to infuse green practices in the office, but also increase operational efficiencies and reduce a lot of non-value activities. 

A smart, strategic enterprise content management solution can help companies realize these goals. Want to know more? Check out Hyland Software’s ECM Solution Guide.