Stop staring at a blank screen: How to kick-start solution building
For me, writing is difficult.
I have studied the craft for the majority of my life, but I still find that when given an assignment, I can spend countless hours staring at a blank Word document, debating how to even begin the piece.
You may remember this feeling from when you were in school. The teacher gives you a writing assignment, and you’re left wondering, “Where do I start with this?”
It was a lot easier when the teacher provided you with assistance, whether it was a writing prompt or specific texts to reference. That’s what really helps a lot of people find success in writing – having a framework; guidelines to work from that can help shape the narrative of the story they want to tell.
It’s that guidance from a trusted source – your teacher – that provides you with the necessary tools to not start from scratch. You instead have a structure in which to mold your piece.
Sparking ideas
This same idea is true for solution building. Why start with a blank slate when there are frameworks available to provide you with assistance and help spark ideas?
Imagine, for example, that you’ve never built a solution before and your organization asks you to create an asset management solution from scratch. If no one ever gave you an outline or an example to work from, this can be a difficult project to get started.
At Hyland, we’ve created our own Concept Solutions team in R&D to help alleviate this challenge. Many of the concept solutions we create center around this idea of helping people skip that first step – what we call “the blank paper problem.”
Because it’s always been a struggle to get started, explains Eric Patalinghug, manager of Hyland’s Concept Solutions team. Even six to eight years ago when his team first started building solutions with Hyland’s toolset, it was difficult to understand what a solution should look like – what kind of data needs to be behind it? How do you assemble the structures to work in a certain way?
“As a sales engineer back when I used to manage the demonstration services team, we’d commonly have to build solution demonstrations from scratch,” he explained. “It was also common for us to craft new solutions for customers from scratch.”
“In those days, as we transitioned from document management and workflow-centric solutions to complete information management solutions, we often found ourselves starting with that blank piece of paper.”
And then, over time, his team began to identify patterns.
“For example, it turned out that task lists and notes were common configurations,” he explained. “We also discovered that power users wanted the ability to change their solutions without requiring IT involvement. So we built an administration panel that lets power users control some of the business rules without having to go into OnBase Studio.”
Patterns like this now make up the core framework behind many of the recent concept solutions that his team has created this year. These frameworks have become guides – or templates – for customers that show how they can put together a potential solution for use in their organizations.
No matter your industry, the Concept Solutions team has offerings available for you. These solutions range in focus from industry-specific concepts like patient referral management in healthcare and fraud investigation for credit unions to those applicable across all industries like physical records management and crisis management tracking.
Accelerate success
We built these concepts as a way to help our customers accelerate their own projects by acting as starting points or references for building their own solutions. Their purpose is to get customers to that “a-ha” moment – that point where they realize how their existing investment in Hyland’s content services platform can solve a variety of pain points across the enterprise.
Kind of like one of my English teachers giving me a much-appreciated prompt to go with one of my writing assignments.
Customers interested in learning more about available concepts can visit Hyland’s Application Builder Community where our Concept Solutions team provides all the tools needed to solve that dreaded “blank paper problem,” including nearly 20 unique concept solutions to download as well as related materials like key features, benefits and demos for each.
And the list doesn’t stop here. The Concept Solutions team is dedicated to continually making new concept solutions available for customers to take to the next level. In my next post, I’ll dive into a handful of the concept solutions they created based on real-world use cases customers submitted to Hyland.
In the meantime, head over to the Application Building Community to learn more about the tools available to help you get started building solutions. You’ll never have to stare at a blank screen for hours again.
