Driving Capture Driven Business Processes
Today, information has two aspects: On one hand, it is the basis for most business processes and can contribute to a decisive competitive advantage. On the other hand, the sheer volume and complexity of business information and its tendency to get lost within large organizations can put the brakes on productivity, waste resources and overtax the IT staffs deployed to support the relevant systems. So, before being overrun by information, organizations should develop and implement strategies to capture and manage the enormous amounts of incoming information from a variety of sources and integrate it into their downstream business processes.
Critical business information reaches companies in many forms—from paper and faxed documents to email with attachments and electronic content. And all of it must, at some point, be converted into intelligent information for use in enterprise content management (ECM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other business systems. Organizations often try to meet these challenges by deploying isolated solutions where the immediate need is greatest, but they soon find they have created a large number of individual solutions that have not solved the underlying problem and actually might have made it worse.
Microsoft SharePoint, when implemented with an enterprise information capture solution, offers a way to solve today's information challenges. With this approach, organizations can more effectively capture, collaborate and re-use a large number and variety of documents and make the best use of the information and data.
Business Process Operating System
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called SharePoint 2010 "the next big operating system." However, unlike Microsoft Windows, SharePoint isn't about getting business software applications up and running. It is about getting business processes up and running. SharePoint harnesses the functionality and pervasiveness of Microsoft Office applications and provides a platform that links information created across desktop computers, laptops and business applications. All employees work with the same information. They have access to all the data they need to do their everyday tasks, they have the same knowledge at their disposal and they communicate with each other across distant continents and time zones.
SharePoint is also a platform on which customized solutions can be developed and deployed. Users can link distributed data silos, integrate technology with business processes and customize information for groups and individuals.
With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has turned SharePoint into a comprehensive ECM tool for business. But SharePoint only delivers the core content management and collaboration functions. Microsoft relies on ecosystem partners, such as Kofax, to deliver some of the key technologies needed for a complete ECM solution. Capture is one of these technologies.
In a 2010 study, Capture and Business Process: Drivers and Experience of Content-driven Processes, the independent organization AIIM concluded that 40% of the 493 businesses surveyed are using SharePoint to introduce an ECM platform to their organizations for the first time. More than half of the SharePoint users (58%) stated that they do not use SharePoint to capture scanned images. This is astonishing considering that capture is known to provide one of the quickest ROIs of all IT initiatives, often delivering ROI in 12 to 18 months. Apparently, the reasons for this lie primarily in the fact that the core SharePoint platform doesn't provide capture functionality. Also, before SharePoint 2010, the product was regarded more as a department solution than something for enterprisewide use.
The AIIM study also asked about each organization's adoption of automated capture in general. At least 52% had not automated capture at all.
Why is this a problem? In its 2010 study, Managing Documents for Success in the New Business Information Paradigm, IDC discovered that much time is wasted by companies looking for information and not finding it. Knowledge workers spend 7.4 hours a week searching fruitlessly for and reformatting multi-source data to make it usable. IDC calculated that these efforts cost about $12,000 per employee, per year.
Different Methods for Capturing Data
With a local capture system, employees can capture documents into SharePoint, at the point of origination where they enter the organization, and distribute them electronically or exchange them with team members. However, until recently there has been no solution for the centralized management of such information capture or the complete automation of document processes. This is enormously important for enterprisewide installations to get the fullest from SharePoint.
An enterprise-ready capture solution for SharePoint should also capture content in other ways, including:
- From the front panel of a multi-function printer (MFP): Users can launch a capture workflow with a single click on the printer's control panel, leveraging indexing and metadata information;
- Through a browser-based client: Remote users can scan and index from within a Web client; and
- From a desktop computer: Users are able to capture single documents or even entire batches of documents with a desktop solution. Advanced capture solutions can integrate such local processes into an overall corporate infrastructure to provide all the advantages of an enterprisewide installation.
Enterprise information capture can significantly reduce errors through capture automation and touch-less processing. In general, the more intelligence that can be applied to a piece of information when it enters a process, the more effectively the process can proceed.
Kofax is managed by a team of individuals with extensive experience in the information technology industry. The executive management team is responsible for the definition, development and execution of the strategy.