How to Achieve an Information Advantage

An “information-advantaged” company is one that uses information more effectively than its competitors. The Leadership Council for Information Advantage released a report this month that discussed how to turn information into a competitive advantage. While it is a high-level goal, the recommendations were concrete and merit consideration. One source of rich information is the data that is contained in paper or electronic documents. In this article we’ll discuss how case management technologies such as capture and process automation can help organizations use information for competitive advantage.

The information within a document is enormously valuable, but if it exists only on paper or locked in an electronic format like Word or PDF, it is difficult to use. When data is transferred to business systems using manual data entry and tagging/classification, you are throttling your productivity with manual steps that are expensive, slow and error-prone. One comprehensive study of crashes, disasters, system failures and accidents found that human error was the overriding contributing factor in more than 60% of the incidents.¹ This finding supports a second notable recommendation by the council—making systems, not people, describe the data.

The greatest value in modern capture technologies comes from extracting the information contained within a document and using that information effectively. Three key uses include:

1. Creating a 360° view of the customer. Leadership Council member Guy Chiarello, CIO of JPMorgan Chase, states that “... one of the characteristics that defines the most advantaged companies is their prowess in understanding the client.” Eurobank EFG Group CIO, Dimitris Mavroyiannis, further describes that being customer-focused means “... everything is engineered around the customer as a person—not around the account, not around the loan. Our systems and data repositories are all designed with the goal of providing a unified view of the customer.²

Intelligent capture can add information from each new document, transaction and interaction to an evolving customer profile or case folder. That information is critical to making optimal decisions for each customer and for analyzing trends across customers.

2. Fostering data-driven insights and decisions. Information about a customer in one aspect of the business enables a firm to better analyze patterns and make decisions in other parts. For example, the type of phone a person ordered may indicate the type of service plan or cable option he or she would be interested in purchasing. However, in the absence of accessible data, organizational leaders can easily fall into the habit of making anecdotally based decisions. These decisions are often driven by the most recent customer complaints or the loudest voices on the team.

If an organization is limited to the transactional data it acquires and retains in its ERP systems, it limits itself to a fraction of the information that is accessible to its competitors which are extracting information from documents and other content that flows between them and their customers. Capturing and disseminating more complete information enables decision makers to analyze a richer data set when seeking to understand risk or new opportunities.

3. Improving operational efficiency. Efficiency gains are important and critical to remaining competitive, especially if you consider the results of Gartner’s latest CEO Business Roundtable Survey: 54% of CEOs responded that they expected their companies’ sales to increase or remain the same, whereas 94% of those CEOs responded that their US employment would decrease or remain the same.³ That means companies need to make their people more productive.

Improvements in efficiency come from two main sources: automating tasks that were previously performed manually (and often serially); and by eliminating errors and re-work. Human labor is expensive, as are human quality-control measures. Examples of how capture and process automation technologies can improve efficiency include:

• Automatic detection of document type: Information within a document typically describes its type and purpose (e.g. a purchase order). Capturing the document type enables a system to automatically route it to the appropriate process;
• Automated application of business rules: A rules engine can evaluate captured data to “make decisions” and perform actions whenever rules rather than judgment can be applied; and
• Automated case filing: A business process management system can automatically create a case file and populate it with documents and metadata passed from an intelligent capture tool.

An information-advantaged company will use information in ways their competitors do not. Companies seeking an information advantage should capture data from documents using advanced recognition and classification techniques and pass it to a case management system which automates processes and improves human efficiency. Doing so can ensure that a 360° view of the customer is created, that decisions are data rather than anecdote-driven and that operational processes are as efficient and as error free as possible.

When the capture, classification and process automation tools are integrated by a common case management framework (such as the Captiva and Documentum xCP systems from EMC), the system integration requirements are minimized, making the organization more agile and better able to leverage its information for competitive advantage when new opportunities arise.  

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The case management offerings from EMC’s Information Intelligence Group automate business processes from initiation through completion, including capture, document management, collaboration, communications and compliance. The EMC Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP) enables organizations to build case management applications quickly and successfully by replacing custom code with the composition and configuration of pre-built re-usable components.

For more information, see: or contact EMC at www.emc.com/xCP.

1. Romney B. Duffey and John W. Saull, 2004, “The Probability and Management of Human Error.”

2. Leadership Council for Information Advantage, “Creating Winning Strategies for Information Advantage.”

3. Gartner Scenario for 2010: “The Current State and Future Direction of the IT Industry. Results of U.S. Business Roundtable CEO Survey June 2009.”