Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Transparency and Open Government? But, How?

// February 20th, 2012 // No Comments » // Cloud Computing, Document Management, Enterprise content management, Government, IT, Mobile, Software as a Service, State and Local Government // Terri Jones

In light of recent federal reform to modernize records management government-wide, a new chapter opens promoting transparency and accountability of information at the state, city and local levels. In fact, this sentiment was echoed recently at county and city events in discussions about transparency and open government becoming more than just a hot button topic. Now it’s a requirement.

As public officials begin to move towards transparency, staff is already stretched thin due to the current economic climate. It’s a struggle to figure out where to even begin. More importantly, how can they afford it with reduced staffing.

As counties and cities consider their options, we already know some things that hinder the journey to transparency:

• Lots of paper that hasn’t been organized for the public to easily view, despite legal requirements around public records access in all jurisdictions.
• Costs of staff time vs. new solution investment seems daunting. To meet records requests and be proactive, it’s not surprising that counties and cities limp along using the same manual methods even though they have less staff than ever.
• Evolving constituent expectations force government to keep the pace of evolving with the speed of technology. Even if traditional ways of meeting requests were sustainable, constituents are asking why they can’t just surf to a website or their phones to review records.

So, how can you increase transparency using enterprise content management (ECM)?

Offer self-service by putting documents on the web

Foster internal transparency by giving staff easy access to documents using an ECM solution. Now they answer constituent concerns by linking documents to a website, allowing the public to search and view documents, 24/7 from their homes. Your transparency has increased without requiring constituents to travel to your office, and with less staff time required to find, photocopy and provide these documents. Set up a storefront or kiosk to sell documents, preserving a revenue stream with a self-service delivery system.

Manage your agendas and offer them online efficiently with ECM

Documents necessarily drive our government, but decision-making is what constituents really want to understand and that means insight into deliberations and decision-making. You could print hard copy agenda packets, but these are large, expensive and time-consuming to produce. ECM saves time and money by automating agenda packet creation and approval while satisfying open-meeting requirements. So, by you can provide sustainable transparency by publishing agendas to the web and you’ll improve and simplify work processes at the same time.

Provide records in a timely and still protect confidential data

Another challenge with public records requests is collecting the documents and packaging them to the requestor in a timely fashion. With less staff to manage the growing number of requests, constituent service is hampered. Adding to the challenge is the potential for accidental release of confidential information. Confidential information requires redaction so that account numbers, social security numbers, etc. are not released to the public. ECM offers process automation that finds confidential data automatically creates a redacted version that can be released by the public.

Whether it is 24/7 access to documents, constituent self-service, better agenda management or faster public records requests, the important thing is to move away from paper and step into the transparent world of ECM because “digital opens doors.”

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

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?

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.

Keeping Up With Technology: Award Winner Demonstrates Best Practices for Credit Unions

// November 1st, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Financial Services, IT // Michelle Shapiro

Technology makes huge leaps forward every day. Just like any other business, your credit union needs to keep pace with all those technological changes so it can lower costs and increase efficiencies. If you can’t manage this process, you’re going to have a difficult time staying relevant in the industry.

To support innovative approaches to solving everyday business challenges through the use of technology, the CUNA Technology Council recognizes three credit unions annually for their efforts in this area. The Council recently recognized Affinity Plus Federal Credit Union of Minnesota with its “Best Practices Award” for its creation and implementation of an e-contract workflow process. The process allows for business contracts to be easily located, accessed, stored and routed.

How did they do that? And how can you emulate the process?

To achieve its goal, Affinity used a document management solution to capture contracts electronically, making them available from one central location. The credit union then automated the process that takes them from start-to-finish. Now Affinity shares information across departments and the entire company with a few clicks.

By automating time-consuming repetitive tasks, like looking for paper contracts that used to be stored in file cabinets, the credit union has more time to accomplish its goals. Examples include improving member service and empowering those members with the knowledge of how their money is being managed, furthering their trust in Affinity’s ability to do so successfully.

Affinity is looked at as a pioneer in the credit union movement. That innovative spirit is what drove it to take a slow process that used to rely on tons of paperwork and make it simple and fast by using the technology it already owned. That’s the power of a document management solution that easily integrates with any technology.

Your challenge, then, is to mirror Affinity’s efforts, turn them into best practices and start making your own credit union more efficient and effective. Not only for your employees, but for your members as well. And you can do that the same way Affinity did it:

• Improving member service by utilizing document management
• Realizing efficiencies and cost savings departmentally
• Adding more departments and rolling solutions out to the entire company

Creating ways to do business faster and more effectively lets Affinity focus on helping members achieve their goals. Affinity’s proven and repeatable solutions, utilizing the technology it already owns, is why the credit union is looked at as a leader in the industry. You can be too.

What Next ??!! – The Art of the Government ECM Roadmap

// October 28th, 2011 // No Comments » // Document Management, Enterprise content management, Government, IT // Terri Jones

Just back from our biggest ever users’ conference and the question on many government end users’ minds is “What next?”

Not surprising in the current “New Normal” climate of risk reduction, cost-cutting and staff squeezes. Even without these dilemmas, the timing and expansion of enterprise solutions has always required thought, diplomacy and planning. The struggles of these end users include delayed and reduced budgets, less appetite for change in the context of reduced staff and the need for quick success in terms of ROI and the application’s dependability. 

So, what next? Here are some ideas about how to pick your next enterprise content management solution expansion :

• Measure the paper. The fact is, paper-based systems are slower and costly to sustain. Tackling departments with the most paper will produce savings of both time and money. It will also produce benefits in terms of better or maintained customer service levels, because the time your staff used to spend printing, filing,photocopying  and searching for documents is recaptured and can now point toward other needs.
• Biggest cuts. It’s likely one or more departments experienced big cuts in budget or staff. If you find yourself looking for the next expansion, it makes sense to address what is likely the same workload despite cuts. In this scenario, you eliminate low-value tasks associated with paper systems and replace them with fast retrieval and no need to print, file or photocopy. That allows remaining staff to work within a smaller budget and recaptures time to make up for staff cuts.
• Compliance burden. My own experience with document management started with the need to produce and store complete documentation for my department. If you have departments that live and die on the completeness of the documentation of processes, they are great candidates for your next expansion. And in the era of reduced staffing, this may save your agency from a difficult audit or monitoring visit. Why? Because the tools offered by document management can reinforce documentation requirements even as the staff avoids some of the low-value tasks discussed above.
• Horizontal application Savvy deployment folks know user acceptance and change management is often at the core of the success of that government IT investment. They also know this is not easy. Picking a horizontal application for a next step not only brings the new investment into every user’s life, it forces change in a productive way. So, it may be that AP or HR are the logical next steps, and using document management to automate some of these processes can really speed the document management adoption rate. . Horizontal applications may be the best place to start because it tells your users document management is here to stay, but you would be doing that within departments that have had some of the highest reported ROIs.
• Deploying a new application. This one thanks to a great end user. Whenever they deploy a new database or solution they integrate it into document management. In that way they make a change at once and the new experience with their solution includes a hot key to bring up the related documents. That’s smart change management.
• Funding. Sometimes the next expansion is about who has the money. The good news is the solution’s  value, your expertise and your experience grows just the same, but the availability of funding can keep your overall progress going, even during difficult budget times.
• The champion. There is no doubt you are facing change management challenges when you propose document management. Why not embrace those with vision,tackle them first and let the good news about document management make its way around the organization, thanks to these champions of vision.

Government end users that are satisfied with their document management solution are always looking for the next deployment. These ideas form the basis for how to decide between multiple options as you move forward to get the most from your document management investment.

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.

Two Key IT Trends for EDUCAUSE and Beyond

// October 12th, 2011 // No Comments » // Admissions, Higher Education, IT // Tom von Gunden

As we head toward EDUCAUSE week and the calendar turns to 2012, two IT trends are front of mind for me and, no doubt, for many of you: user mobility and real-time information exchange. The advantages of both are summed up with one word ─ speed. 

Speed helps higher education leadership, staff and faculty become ever more nimble and responsive. Speed bolsters institutional agility, allowing schools to succeed in an increasingly competitive landscape for students, funding, and tuition revenue. And, ultimately, it helps achieve fiscal stability.

Mobility isn’t about having remote access anymore; it’s about mobile access. With smartphones, iPads and the like attached to the hip or tucked under the arm of most university leaders, staff and faculty, there’s a rapidly increasing expectation that staff can complete work anytime and from anywhere. As a result, there’s a good chance the school around the corner wants to lure away your top prospects and current students. And there’s a good chance they are doing as well as – or better than –you are at attracting and retaining students.

Why? Because with mobile platforms in easy reach, representatives can act decisively and communicate in a timely fashion, accomplishing formerly desk-bound tasks from anywhere. Need to evaluate a transcript for transfer credit purposes? Bring it up on your iPad. Need to make a decision on an admissions or financial aid application? Review the complete file and respond from your smartphone.

Remember, students and prospective students carry these devices as well and are accustomed to the instant gratification such devices bring. For that reason, they are increasingly unforgiving when it comes to delays, especially when other schools consistently respond more quickly. Mobility means staying out in front.

Real-time information is just that: real-time. Not so long ago, organizations could get away with having slightly stale information in a line-of-business application. After all, LOB apps — especially large, enterprise-supporting ones — were thought to be somewhat unwieldy, with a tendency to operate in isolation, as an information “silo” of sorts. Batch processing with a turnaround time of a day or more  was common and accepted.

The pressure is on to move faster. Critical to gaining speed are tighter integrations between mission-critical business apps. One fundamental example would be real-time feeds between the student information system (SIS), and the complementary enterprise content management (ECM) platform driving files and actions to and through SIS-reliant business processes.

Want to know when an admissions application file is complete and ready for review? Have the ECM system update the SIS document checklist in real-time, then trigger the review process when all application-related docs are received.

Want to make sure your top prospects have admissions letters in hand before the competition gets its letters out to them? Have the ECM system manage the review process, then update the decision in SIS in real-time in order for that early action decision letter to be generated right away.

As we travel full-steam ahead to Philadelphia for EDUCAUSE and into another year of increasing demands for ease-of-access and greater speed and efficiency, it’s clear that the race is on.