Delphi Group focuses on implications of mergers

BankBoston is just one example of how the Delphi Group (Boston, http://www.delphi.com) believes the document management and workflow market will evolve. The merger presses the need to create common access to documents and processes across organizations.

One of the nation's largest commercial banks, BankBoston was formed from the merger of Bank of Boston and Baybank. BankBoston will initially use PC Docs' (Burlington, MA, http://www.pcdocs.com) DocsOpen to automate the organization's electronic customer file process. Currently bank employees manually store paper-based files, then search through file cabinets to retrieve information when they need it.

"The mergers and acquisitions mania of the past several years has created a fertile market for (workflow) tools," says Thomas Koulopoulos, Delphi president and document management analyst. He further states that these organizations must "deal with the mounting pressure to create unified information systems and heightened customer service."

"The real fuel in this equation," says Koulopoulos, "will come from the further definition of standards from such established groups as the Document Management Alliance (DMA), the Open Document Management API (ODMA) and the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), as well as object-oriented standards such as CORBA. It is not inconceivable that these standards will eliminate one of the biggest problems in merging organizations--the merging of their respective proprietary information systems."

"The recent purchase by BankBoston of 1,000 seats of enterprise document management software is indicative of the emerging importance of document management and workflow in large mergers and acquisitions," Koulopoulos explained. "While this sale is not major EDMS news in and of itself, it foreshadows a positive trend within the document management and workflow markets. In some ways, these technologies and their interoperability will become the bedrock upon which a merger succeeds or fails in forming a competitive and responsive new organization by providing the foundation to a common process and document repository.