Hyland Software's Document Management Blog

Content is King in the Insurance Enterprise

// April 26th, 2011 // Comments // Insurance // Guest Blogger

This is the first of a three part series from Strategy Meets Action (SMA) partner – and now Hyland guest blogger – Mark Breading.

A popular theory regarding the World Wide Web is that content is king – the richness of the information is what draws people to use selected sites and entices them to use services and take action. That same theory applies to the insurance industry – the information is what drives the industry.

Information is the lifeblood of the success stories in the insurance industry. Plain and simple, companies that create and manage their information better – from documents to content in a wide variety of formats – tend to be more successful.

To learn how insurers are managing documents and content, and to find out how enterprise content management (ECM) systems fit in the big picture, SMA recently conducted a short survey about how insurers in North America manage information. Insurer participants consisted of 191 respondents representing all lines of business and all company sizes, and I’ll be covering the results from SMA’s survey in a series of blog posts.

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Escape the Admissions Processing Wasteland: 2 ECM-Driven Steps to Fast, Quality Decisions (Part II)

// April 21st, 2011 // 2 Comments » // Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

In part one of my cautionary take on the Admissions Office “wasteland,” I identified two key steps in implementing and leveraging enterprise content management (ECM) to bring speed and quality to application processing and review:

1. Purge Paper
2. Monitor Metrics

To reiterate, both recommended actions effectively target “waste” in terms of costs (budget) and resources (people). But, the “purge paper” step takes speed and efficiency only so far.

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Escape the Admissions Processing Wasteland: 2 ECM-Driven Steps to Fast, Quality Decisions (Part I)

// April 14th, 2011 // Comments // Higher Education // Tom von Gunden

“April is the cruelest month.” Or, at least it is to T.S. Eliot, who said so in the oft-quoted opening line of his very famous poem The Waste Land.

But, based on the ebb-and-flow of application volumes and processing spikes, folks in Admissions offices would likely disagree. In highly selective institutions, April means coming up for air and relaxing a bit after the intensity of the review/decision season. And, in any type of higher education institution, it’s the time of the midterm lull before the next seasonal or semester-approaching upswing in applications.

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The ROI Report Card for Government Software Solutions – and Why Document Management Gets an A

// April 6th, 2011 // Comments // Government // Terri Jones

One problem government IT folks often have is how to judge the success and failure of their IT investments – including calculating the return on investment (ROI) for technology. Why? Government acts based on law, rule and regulation, so it’s required to undertake some tasks. At the same time, it’s hard to place a “cost” or value on government activities since success is often defined as improved constituent service. Consider these examples: supporting voting at elections, firefighters saving a life or attorneys defending the state.

So if that’s the problem, let’s focus on those things that define good government! It’s all about improvements to how services are performed and how effective they are, and the metrics can measured as such: Reduced cost of providing services, reduced time and resources to provide service, protection or enhancement of agency or entity missions and furtherance of legal requirements or duties.

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A Tale of Two Content Management Conferences: AIIM/info360 and Gartner PCC

// April 5th, 2011 // Comments // Document Management, Enterprise content management // Ken Burns

In the past two weeks, I attended AIIM/info360 in the nation’s capital, immediately followed by a west coast enterprise tech party at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration (PCC) Summit in Los Angeles.

Both events cover a broad range of topics and technologies under the ECM software market umbrella. However, the two conferences have historically offered very different perspectives – each focused on opposing ends of the ECM technology spectrum.

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Report: Technology Spending by Lenders on the Rise

// April 4th, 2011 // 1 Comment » // Financial Services // Michelle Shapiro

Mortgage lenders of all sizes are expected to increase their technology spending by 15 percent this year to $4.11 billion, according to the new MORTECH study. Why?

They’ve weathered the subprime collapse. And now, they’ve recognized that technology is a vital component in addressing the changes and challenges facing the mortgage finance industry today.

This rang loud and clear at MBA’s National Technology in Mortgage Banking Conference & Expo where I spoke to many CIOs and senior business executives who are looking for ways to use technology to their advantage. Questions about document management and workflow were at the top of their list.

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Don’t Just Pave the Cowpaths With ECM – Evolve the Process

// March 31st, 2011 // Comments // Enterprise content management // Eric Proegler

I was visiting a customer recently, looking over their deployment and helping them architect for the next business process they are going to optimize. It was a lot of checking things off, because all the geeky details of the IT deployment were well-managed, robustly designed, and expertly administered.

While the deployment was going smoothly, some things about the way that the business process was working bothered me. These problems are something that I see all too often. “Self,” I thought. “These mistakes are being made far too often. You should write about it so that you can see more new ones.”

What I’m talking about here is transactional content management (TCM), or using an ECM solution as a system of record for transaction- and case-driven business processes. Massive returns on investment are right there, and days can be saved in business processes when business processes are optimized with TCM. But, to achieve the best returns, it’s not just new software that has to be installed – it’s new thinking, too.

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Gartner PCC, Day 1: Work-Life Integration 2.0 – The Empowered User

// March 30th, 2011 // Comments // Enterprise content management // Lindsay McCune

Our work and consumer worlds are colliding. But I’m not talking about how our experiences as consumers are making us want the same devices at work as we have at home (which is still very true!).

At the keynote session of Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration (PCC), Gartner Fellow Tom Austin shared a new way to think about this work-life integration conundrum that even Dilbert is experiencing in this cartoon.

Just like Dilbert, we all have lives outside of work. But, our roles as consumers (life) and employees (work) the lines are being blurred more and more. That blurring is apparent when we, the business people, are also the consumers who are demanding these changes in business.

What changes are we asking for?

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