Best Practices for Best Practices for Mission-Critical Applications
Document and image processing systems enable financial services organizations to better manage mission-critical, document-intensive business processes such as loan origination, new account enrollment and claims processing. However, these systems often lack proper data protection, exposing organizations to significant financial and legal risk. How can you provide your document and image processing system with protection equal to its mission-critical status?
The Value of Data Protection
In paper-intensive industries from banking to insurance, the march to streamline and automate manual paper-based processes has been underway for many years. Paper has long been recognized as both a burden and a bottleneck—relative to digital methods, paper undermines individual and group productivity and exposes the enterprise to unnecessary risk.
Document and image processing systems were developed to meet this challenge by electronically capturing, creating, managing, delivering and archiving the documents that drive mission-critical business operations. These systems integrate unstructured documents and information into organizational workflows, instantly converting huge amounts of original content to a digital form that can then be fully exploited as part of end-to-end business process management (BPM).
When document and image processing is working properly, organizations streamline and improve decision-making, meet compliance requirements and gain a competitive advantage.
But when such a system fails, overall company performance is compromised, if not crippled.
Unfortunately, at many financial services companies today, document and image processing data protection isn't on par with the rest of their information lifecycle management (ILM) infrastructure. In fact, many such systems cannot meet the uptime, data-replication and data-recovery demands that come with mission criticality.
Let's take a deeper look at why document and image processing is important today, why these systems require a robust infrastructure, and how to best deploy such an infrastructure.
The Unstructured Information Challenge
Financial services companies, like all other players in today's business world, are doing their best to cope with an explosion of unstructured information: new account opening forms, applications, documentation for insurance claims, contracts, invoices, Web pages, presentation slides, spreadsheets, a constant stream of email and IM messages, images and drawings in various formats (PDF, JPEG, MPEG, etc.), and much, much more.
In fact, as much as 80% of corporate information is unstructured—and growing by 40% annually.
Paper is particularly problematic. It comes in an almost limitless variety. Processing it sequentially "one person at a time" is inefficient, slow and expensive. With paper, providing global, 360-degree access to customer data and business transactions is nearly impossible, as is establishing enterprise controls and complying with various and proliferating regulations. And the drive for superior customer service and customer loyalty demands better, faster methods than paper allows, especially in today's ultra-competitive environment.
IT Drivers in Financial Services Today
Unstructured information is expensive to manage, and numerous regulations—such as SEC rules, HIPAA requirements and the mandates of Sarbanes-Oxley—have dramatically increased the organization's legal and financial responsibility for nearly all of it.
Meanwhile, the ability to exploit unstructured data has turned into a competitive differentiator.
Accordingly, most financial service firms have invested in, and implemented, electronic document management capabilities; many are currently working with second-generation systems.
Such systems have become more important as user populations, data volumes, transactions—and the number of line-of-business applications requiring electronic document capabilities—have grown. And, fueled by the Four C's—cost, compliance, customer communications and collaboration—a document automation infrastructure is now more critical than ever.
Given the significant initial investment, and the current and future stakes, should financial services organizations extend recovery management capabilities to their document and image processing systems—and if so, how?
Mission Critical Is As Mission Critical Does
Typical characteristics of mission-critical financial services applications include long (or, often, constant) hours of operation; a requirement that they meet service-level agreements (SLAs); high volumes of data to be processed; an ability to be audited; prohibitively expensive downtime; a noted ripple effect on other processing environments; and poor or unacceptable manual back-up options. Sound like your image processing system?
Early image processing systems were mainframe-based and managed as mission-critical systems. But over time, these systems shifted to more flexible departmental and line-of-business orientations with broader capabilities. Begun as small or test deployments, these systems were typically deployed without the data protection capabilities that were built into the earlier mainframe systems. And in many cases, firms maintained paper as backup.
Many currently deployed image processing systems were intended to serve a limited number of users, but have since been employed enterprisewide. These departmental systems now handle tremendous volumes—far greater volumes than anticipated in their original design.