Bridging the Back-Office/Front-Office Gap
“As competition continues to grow via the e-economy and as customer/partner relationship management becomes more sophisticated, the need for organizations to leverage the wealth of information in documents, images and reports will increase.” (Meta Group, September 1999)
“How effectively organizations deal with mission-critical information and expose it as usable content to support employees, partners and consumers is becoming a recognized differentiator.” (Meta Group, January 2001)
With 75% of your organization’s information contained in unstructured (non-database) format—documents, reports and images—can you transform it into “usable content” to support your e-business initiatives? According to AMR Research, the problem that e-business exposes most often is inadequate integration. In other words, the vital information about customers, products and transactions produced by back-office systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) often isn’t available as Web content or at Web speed to employees, customers and suppliers.
The challenge for the enterprise is to manage, Web-enable and Web-present content in multiple formats from multiple sources. Documents and reports required for presentation in customer-facing applications may be generated by ERP or other back-office applications, or may be converted from paper to electronic format by scanning. These documents will be of many different types—bills, statements, purchase orders, invoices, remittances, output reports, e-mail, policies, correspondence and more. And they will be in many different formats, including AFP, PostScript, PCL, PDF, text and others.
The project manager planning to use content in a front-office Web application must ask a number of questions:1. What is the source of the content I need to present? Are the documents application-generated? Scanned?2. What format are the documents in?3. How can I capture these documents and ensure that they can be linked through shared values such as vendor number, account number, territory and product?4. How will I want to present the documents over the Web: HTML, XML, image?All these questions must be answered in order to implement an effective solution to manage and present enterprise content.
Content management comprises a number of activities associated with making documents Web-ready, including capturing, indexing, integrating, transforming and displaying content. The robustness and flexibility with which your solution addresses each of these steps will determine the success of your implementation. The first step is to capture the documents, regardless of format, from the scanning system or from the applications that produce them and store them in an integrated repository. This process indexes the documents, making them accessible based on key identifiers.
A robust indexing capability will support multi-level, multi-key indexing to make retrieval easy and flexible. Name, policy number and customer number, for example, might all be used as access keys. A true enterprise indexing architecture will let you create logical folders of related documents, such as all the records for a customer or a particular transaction. It will let you index and logically group documents, regardless of format, across time, across platforms, across storage devices and across applications. The indexing structure is what enables an employee to research all the claims made in the Southeast region during the week of March 12, and enables a customer to retrieve and compare the electric bill from December 1999 and the one from December 2000.Presenting Web content means transforming it, if necessary, and displaying it in a Web browser. Different applications require different types of Web presentment. For example, for an electronic bill/statement presentment application, you might parse the document, extracting only the data elements needed to display on a formatted Web page. You might even need to integrate values from multiple documents into a single Web page. This flexible content presentment allows you to define what information should be extracted and where and how it should be placed on your Web page.
Automatic content presentment converts the entire document into a Web-ready format such as HTML or SVG (scalable vector graphics) and displays it in the browser. This form of presentment preserves the display characteristics of the original document and would be used, for example, to give a customer service representative a display that is an exact replica of the paper document, facilitating communication with the customer.
These services bridge the gap between back-office information and Web content that can be deployed to support a wide range of front-office applications including customer relationship management, e-presentment and payment, customer self-service and more. With an effective strategy for managing and presenting enterprise content, you will be able to fully exploit your information assets.