The death of document management?

While some enterprises are sounding the document management death knell, local experts are telling a different story. According to these industry insiders, document management has simply evolved and is now more important than ever before.

Whether enabling students to work together or helping a company transform its entire intranet, document management has evolved to meet the changing needs of digital workplaces, says Tracey Newman, small and mid-size business lead at Microsoft SA. As work teams become more dynamic and digital content continues to grow, effective document management applications and software will play an ever-increasing role in enabling content collaboration, which further enables new ways of working.

Poorly created documents end up becoming records without integrity, authenticity and reliability, states Paul Mullon, MD at COR Concepts. If the mass of documents and records that exist within an organisation are managed incorrectly, it could cost millions as customers and staff cannot access the information they need, when they need it. "In an age of privacy legislation and corporate governance, a significant proportion of information is `unstructured'. Failure to properly create, capture, manage, store and protect this information is expensive, inefficient and risky, at best, and potentially criminal at worst." He believes that developing a cohesive, integrated information governance framework – which includes data, documents and records? is a critical first starting point. "This should define the rules, principles and conventions by which information should be managed."

The changing nature of document management requires a paradigm rethink, says Brent Haumann, platform head at Striata. Document management initiatives should start by defining the desired customer experience across channels, he notes, stressing that it's no longer appropriate to make internal efficiencies or compliance obligations the ultimate goal. "New document management systems must approach today's challenges with the right order of priority? Security, efficiency, availability and control."

As the amount of data an organisation has to deal with increases, businesses need to understand how they are obliged/compelled to manage both structured and unstructured information before they opt to throw technology at the problem, says OpenText's senior solutions consultant Glen Thompson. He describes technology as a streamlining and automation enabler, stressing that it is only truly effective once an organisation has a handle on how it should be managing documents and records across the enterprise. "Legislation, industry standards and governance policies should drive how an organisation goes about designing and constructing their own document and records management practices."

Moving past paper

The only companies that still store paper are those that have a legislative obligation and those that have yet to enter the digital age, says Haumann. "Paper storage is expensive and painful to manage, requiring large spaces, complicated filing and retrieval mechanisms and physical security. There is also a high level of risk that documents will get damaged by fire, water or just plain old age."

According to Haumann, today, we have the technology to change the `default' ? instead of sticking with paper records and viewing digital as an additional offering, digital records should become the norm, with paper offered only when absolutely needed. "Going digital first allows new thinking around how the document is created, stored and retrieved. If we no longer have to consider the ‘print' version, we can focus on what is important in the current and future landscape." The integral factors in the digital age are maximum security, efficient storage, smart indexing and flexible ways to retrieve documents for various purposes, he adds.

Many approaches to document and content management are no longer relevant in the digital age, notes Haumann. He highlights how the dawn of an always-on, mobile workforce and the rise of increasingly digital-savvy consumers means that documents must be available at any time, through any device/channel. "The only way to achieve this is to make the entire process digital ? the creation of the document, storage and making it available to multiple channels can all be done digitally, with none of the restrictions and cost of traditional document storage."

New document management systems must approach today's challenges with the right order of priority? Security, efficiency, availability and control.

- Brent Haumann, Striata

For Nkuli Mbundu, lead of the enterprise content division at EMC SA, part of this transition to the digital enterprise involves retraining or reskilling old-world knowledge management champions to becoming digital content specialists spanning all critical business functions within an organisation. Professionals with knowledge of metadata, business process and information architecture will continue to be in strong demand, adds Forrester's Cheryl McKinnon, principal analyst serving the needs of the enterprise architecture professional. But new skills such as user experience experts, designers and developers are becoming valuable, required by those forming part of document and content managament teams.

A new approach to customer relations is also required.

Age of the customer

Modern businesses are operating in what Forrester has called the `Age of the Customer'. This means that people who act as buyers, in both the business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) context, are ever more empowered to do research, compare products and services and assess options before engaging with a supplier, notes McKinnon. "With the rise of web, mobile and social networks, customers have a wealth of information available to make informed decisions. Enterprises that recognise this, and change their behaviour to better serve these empowered customers are those that will succeed."

For McKinnon, using information – data and content – to better understand customer needs, and to serve them more effectively, is key to this transformation. This is where effective document and information management can separate a business from its competitors, she outlines, noting that digitisation is an essential element of this process.

Failure to properly create, capture, manage, store and protect this information is expensive, inefficient and risky, at best, and potentially criminal at worst.

- Paul Mullon, COR Concepts

The digital approach to document and information management frees CIOs and their teams from the traditional administrative overheads, capacity constraints and security concerns associated with document management, adds Haumann. This allows them to refocus their efforts on leveraging the accessibility of digital document management to enhance internal processes, while improving the customer experience.

Content to the core

While content should be a priority for any enterprises looking to fully embrace digitisation, achieving this requires a strategic approach. The challenge at the heart of content management is making this content work for you without spending exorbitant amounts of money or wasting resources and human capital. According to data from Forrester, 86% of current enterprise content management decision-makers plan to continue their rollouts or expand their use into 2016. Content is core to communication across teams, with customers, suppliers or partners, and `serves as important record of decisions', notes the research and analysis firm's Cheryl McKinnon.

In the era of digital enterprises, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT), content is the connective tissue between customers, business and IT. "Content is, therefore, the lifeblood of digital enterprises," says EMC SA's Nkuli Mbundu, adding that managing and exploiting this content should be an integral part of the business agenda. "A complete content strategy addresses all aspects of the organisation's transformation – people, business and IT." Behind this transformation are people and systems dedicated to harnessing the value of content.

According to Mbundu, customers interact with content to access products and services and businesses interact with content to make information-driven decisions. IT has a responsibility of ensuring that content is properly managed and is available to business and customers in a seamless way, while being easy to consume. "Content is a common denominator in the running and survival of most, if not all, businesses. The management of content, specifically exploding digital content in all its formats (structured, semi-structured and unstructured) is a strategic enabler for digital transformation and should be a priority for all businesses."

The art of archiving

When information is saved in an archive system, it can be easily managed for retention, discovery and disposition. For Nkuli Mbundu of EMC SA, the process of archiving involves identifying data or content that is running on a high-performance, high-cost infrastructure, making a copy and migrating it to an archive that provides compliance support and runs on low-cost infrastructure. Once the data or content is safely stored in the archive, it is deleted from the business application. Mbundu outlines three key use cases for archiving:

1. Application decommissioning. An application that holds ONLY static information, which is being held for reporting and compliance reasons, is a candidate for application decommissioning. Application decommissioning is all about cost savings, i.e. reducing the cost of preserving information inside applications that cost IT a lot of money to maintain each year. Application data that must be retained in accordance with industry or corporate policies must be secured in a reliable, compliant system, not within an ageing application running on old infrastructure.

2. Active archiving. This differs from application decommissioning because data is being archived from live production applications, which contain a combination of active and static data that can be archived. Organisations implement active archiving to secure data for compliance reasons and to manage the costs of data growth in applications that drive up the storage, server and backup costs.

3. Information transformation and reuse. Data archived as a result of application decommissioning or active archiving can be transformed and reused to add new value to a business. It can range from opening up access to information that was previously available only to users of a particular application or providing a single repository for information discovery searches. Value can also be achieved through the integration of information from multiple different systems and its transformation to provide users with a new context to use this information.

Source | http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=154217

Regards

Pralhad Jadhav

Senior Manager @ Library

Khaitan & Co

Blog | http://pralhad-fyilibrarian.blogspot.in/

Best Paper Award | Received the Best Paper Award at TIFR-BOSLA National Conference on Future Librarianship: Innovation for Excellence (NCFL 2016) on April 23, 2016.  The title of the paper is “Removing Barriers to Literacy: Marrakesh VIP Treaty”

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