ECM: Make Better Decisions Faster
Through a Focus on Content, Process and Connectivity
As content continues to grow exponentially, companies struggle with issues of aggregating, sharing and using various types of content. In fact, content management was ranked the No. 2 priority—second only to security—in Gartner’s 2002 CIO Survey. However, simple and passive management and delivery of content is no longer adequate to meet the needs of today’s business environment.
Today, companies need every advantage to differentiate themselves, and to maximize competitive edge and shareholder value. Cost and revenue aspects are more important than ever before, as is the need to deliver comprehensive value-added customer service in response to an increasingly sophisticated and demanding consumer base. Key to achieving these goals is improving the way decisions are made. Let’s face it—to a great extent, the quality and quantity of decisions made by a company determine its competitiveness.
Better, Faster Business Decision Making
Consider that across industries and around the world, critical business decisions that define an organization's very existence are made hundreds and thousands of times each day. Loan applications are being accepted (or denied), manufacturing designs are approved (or denied), insurance is granted (or denied). The methods of arriving at these decisions, and their outcomes, have a significant impact on the financial health and reputation of a company, as well as its ability to meet return on investment, response time and cycle time goals.
Better, faster decision making is challenging for most organizations due to the fact that the information required to make vital business decisions is spread throughout the company in multiple formats, IT systems, locations, business units, even time zones. To facilitate decision making, content and data must be shared across applications, business processes and organizational boundaries to increase responsiveness and knowledge exchange. Business today requires activating content to solve real business issues.
Enter Enterprise Content Management (ECM), which supports the business decision-making process by leveraging content, process and connectivity. While basic content management technologies and tools have been in existence for more than 20 years, it is the integration of these same technologies today that promises even more powerful and rapidly attainable results. Unlike traditional, niche document management and Web content management technologies, ECM helps businesses achieve better business results by enabling greater access to content, optimizing business processes and connecting disparate systems, people, applications and databases. This enables companies to more effectively manage and leverage content that drives their business to make better decisions faster.
ECM’s Role in Enhancing Decision Making
ECM promotes rapid decision making in a number of ways. First, it allows businesses to apply business rules to automate processes, reducing the need for human intervention in routine or low-risk decisions. This enables companies to apply valuable human resources when there is an exception (for example, a loan amount over a pre-established value) requiring a human decision.
Speed is of the essence in this equation. The faster you can process a business transaction, the more transactions you process. The more transactions you can process, the more clients and more businesses you service, and the more revenue you generate. Faster decision making not only shortens cycle time, it reduces handling costs—and ultimately increases profitability.
Additionally, ECM aggregates the right content and delivers it to the right people at the “critical moment” when a decision must be executed, so they have all the information necessary to make real-time decisions. This also substantially reduces the likelihood that employees will make poor decisions, helping the company manage its exposure to risk. While it’s difficult to capture the cost of wrong decisions within the enterprise, it’s easy to appreciate their cumulative effect. One wrong decision may cost you money—many wrong decisions may put your company out of business.
Defining Active Content
Imagine a business that has a handle on all of its content, yet no processes in place to execute business decisions based on this content. Now consider the flipside: a business that has comprehensive processes in place, yet lacks the ability to capture and manage the content critical to providing the right context for decision making.
The simple management and delivery of content does not provide sufficient value in today’s business environment. Content by nature is event-driven. Events trigger the use, creation and management of content and associated processes. In fact, most business situations require content, process and connectivity to varying degrees. They must work together to facilitate information exchange. And connectivity is key, as many organizations have “stove-piped” applications, creating obstacles for data and content exchange.
Harnessing the power of content, process and connectivity, ECM “activates” content by creating relationships between documents, Web pages, folders, etc. and the processes and business systems that are critical to the operation. “Active” content reacts to changes or events and is put to work to solve business problems in real-time. (Imagine a runner, crouched at the starting line, poised to take off at the exact second the starting gun fires.)
Content becomes “active content” when it is: 1) proactively delivered when and where it is needed to accelerate decisions; 2) when it is enabled to react to business or transactional events, and 3) when its context can launch business processes or updates to enterprise business applications.
Active Content in Action
Applying the active content concept, companies can use business rules to automate processes, reducing the need for human intervention in routine or low-risk decisions. This automation eliminates both the cost and potential for errors associated with human-based workflow, and allows companies to apply expert human resources when and where they can add the most value to the decision-making process.
Aside from cycle time and cost advantages, automated workflow also assists companies in complying with security and privacy regulations by limiting file access to only designated personnel and providing audit trails.
The value of active content can be observed when a customer calls with a common query about a service request (for example, a policy change). This query is the event that creates the need to use, create and manage content. Specifically, this event triggers a requirement to identify, locate and extract specific content related to the status of the request. The data and content related to the sales order process may be located in various systems and applications (i.e., a CRM system, a customer database, or perhaps a third-party contract management system). Connectivity is then necessary to aggregate, integrate and update this broad range of content that exists in different locations across the enterprise. As a result, these inquires can be serviced more quickly and accurately than ever before and new or updated information can be immediately captured and shared with the rest of the organization.
Companies using ECM to activate their content are seeing significant ROI. For example:
- CNA Insurance lowered claims handling costs by 11 percent and improved claims processing productivity by 53 percent. CNA now pays 1.7 million claims automatically, and 93 percent are paid within 28 days.;
- The Missouri Public Services Commission, which regulates 1,100 public utilities statewide, has seen average productivity savings of an hour and a half a day per employee—an estimated ROI of more than $3 million a year.;
- Standard Bank of Africa, which operates 674 outlets throughout South Africa, has seen improvements in productivity of 140 percent turnaround on financial decisionsreduced from seven days to an average of seven minutes, and reductions in headcount by 50 percent to 60 percent in one location, resulting in significant cost savings. Empowering Your Business with ECM;
Today’s ECM technology is more accessible and easier to deploy than ever before, which means if you’re not incorporating ECM into your business, your competition probably is. When sourcing ECM technology, be sure to look for a vendor that offers the full range of ECM capabilities, yet offers a modular approach so you can purchase only what you need and add more capabilities as your needs change. This “one-stop shopping” also reduces the risks associated with contracting multiple vendors, as well as lowers total cost of ownership.
Look for products that offer enterprise-level scalability and flexibility to handle the most demanding and complex content, business process and application integration challenges. Finally, look for critical integration capabilities, which will ensure your new ECM technology will “play nicely” with existing infrastructure and legacy systems.
The end result will be an ECM system that delivers compelling ROI—in the form of improved business agility, response and cycle time, as well as lower transaction costs. But the killer ROI will come in the form of better, faster decision making, ensuring that the overall health, reputation and market share of your organization continues to grow.
FileNet Corporation(Nasdaq: FILE) helps organizations make better decisions by managing the content and processes that drive their business. FileNet’s Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions allow customers to build and sustain competitive advantage by managing content throughout their organizations, automating and streamlining their business processes, and providing the full-spectrum of connectivity needed to simplify their critical and everyday decision making. FileNet ECM solutions deliver a comprehensive set of capabilities that integrate with existing information systems to provide cost-effective solutions that solve real-world business problems.
Since its founding in 1982, more than 3,800 organizations, including 80 of the Fortune 100, have come to depend on FileNet solutions for help in managing their mission-critical content and processes.
Headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., the company markets its innovative solutions in more than 90 countries through its own global sales, professional services and support organizations, as well as via its ValueNET® Partner network of resellers, system integrators and application developers.