Flexible, Intuitive UIs meet LOB Applications
We’ve been talking about the consumerization of IT ever since the very first PCs moved computer technology out of the office and into the family room. Coupled with technology-savvy young people entering the workforce, the trend to consumerization has boiled over with explosive growth in mobile computing. Technology and demographics aside, the consumerization trend forces us to remember that user experience drives adoption.
Today’s information consumers have high expectations about applications and their user interfaces. They demand fast, easy and device-appropriate access. And they don’t make a distinction between personal tasks and work. When it comes to purchasing and deploying technology in the workplace, the consumerization of IT has also placed line of business (LOB) users and their managers at the same table with the CIO. As they demand more from their applications, users drive change with their budgets.
The growing emphasis on UI ease-of-use and rich information context is most apparent in areas where documents play an important part in day-to-day tasks. Users of enterprise applications like ERP, CRM and HR, and specialized systems for supply chain management, loan fulfillment, claims processing and others rely on documents to complete transactions, answer customer questions, comply with regulations and make informed decisions.
Unfortunately, the first steps in using documents—finding and retrieving them—are often just the beginning of a very time-consuming and frustrating process. Most users are compelled to search, open and scan (repeated far too many times). This is especially frustrating when workers must abandon their primary LOB or “destination” application (like ERP) to navigate to a separate content management app. It’s a time waster, a productivity killer and a real barrier to responsive, informed decision making.
A Different Perspective
Suppose you could provide your knowledge workers and information consumers with rich, contextual content at the click of a button? What if effective document retrieval was just the beginning of what you could accomplish? A new class of flexible UIs for content and case management applications opens up a world of functionality that will delight your employees and make their jobs easier.
Consider for example, a private banking scenario—an industry where customer retention assumes critical importance. Customers maintain large account deposits and expect a fast response to their requests. Authorizations need to happen quickly, but with complex portfolios and lots of related paperwork, they also need proper governance. Under these circumstances, UIs that streamline document retrieval from a portfolio management system, with embedded workflows for approvals and escalations, can improve response time dramatically. In some cases, they’ve reduced response time by 70% while increasing customer retention by 40%.
So rather than treating content and case management as a separate destination for users, these applications become companions to the systems around which your business operates. With a new generation of flexible UIs, your content and case management platforms can deliver a consistent set of information regardless of the system that accesses it, presenting all relevant information in context. They enable individuals to preview and annotate any document without having to open it in a separate application. Users can trigger workflows or other automated processes, such as generating an e-mail that extracts data directly from a document instead of having to manually copy and paste. They can even pull information from social media sites in real time. Moreover, they can embed compliance and information governance policy, making it seamless and transparent for the user.
The most fragile component of successful business performance is decision making, where human insight is required to find the optimal path forward. That’s when LOB applications must make all information available quickly in a relevant context. Content and case management vendors have started offering rich, contextual UIs to their document repositories, making them easy to integrate with LOB applications. Successful organizations will consider that integration as a means of empowering users to act efficiently and decisively for improved business outcomes.
As part of EMC’s portfolio of content and case management products, EMC Documentum xCP automates complex, information-intensive business processes with modern applications that expose and exploit the full value of business information. xCP is ideal as a development platform for building companion applications for operational systems.
To learn more, please visit www.emc.com/xcp