Category: Digital Transformation

After many months of 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 thats'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.

Have you ever been in a car accident, and had a claims adjuster come to the scene? They typically come armed with a clipboard, camera and a car that looks like a mini-office. What’s wrong with this? We talk a lot about the benefits of ECM – process management, document management, compliance, etc. But if they don’t work the way the users need them to work – in this case, completely offline – what good are they?

I spent part of today in the commercial vertical OnBase group of user experts (VOGUE) meeting. Remember what I said about ECM being the convergence of people (among other things)? Well, I’m one for one so far with my theme. During one of the presentations, the presenter stopped and asked how many IT people were in the room. Then, she asked how many were the people actually using the technology. The room was split 50/50. And then, she threw a curveball: “How many act as both IT and the user?” About a third of the room proudly raised their hands.

In part one, I talked about why powerful metadata configuration should be a requirement for ECM solutions. I used invoices as our sample content type to show the value of being able to capture a comprehensive set of metadata. There may have even been a mention of bacon cheeseburgers. When you have flexible and thorough metadata capture, ECM can do even more than the already compelling storage and multiple-index retrieval story I told in the last post. We can use content for more than just supporting business processes – it can actually drive business processes.