Bridging the Gap People and Process with Content in Context

collaborative processes include innovation management, new product launches, contract negotiation and execution, deal management for M&A and private equity, creating educational materials for learning services, managing call centers and the creation and management of customer self-service portals.

Collaborative business processes often exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

• The document creation process is highly collaborative and normally occurs within the context of a project team. Emphasis is on ease of creation, revision, and access to documents via multiple familiar interfaces such as Microsoft Office, Outlook and Web applications.
• A focus on managing the lifecycle of all related information (for example, individual project lifecycles, contract lifecycles and managing customer account service requests for the life of the account).
• An emphasis on document organization within a collaborative workspace and setting roles and privileges of team participants for easy interaction with active content—usually within the context of a project, product or customer service.
• A mix of both structured as well as ad hoc workflow to help with document review and approval within the context of a project. This may also include tracking all other project- related information such as challenges, escalations, milestones and meeting minutes.
• Cross-functional teams working collaboratively to create, review and publish content such as collateral and branding to intranets, extranets, customer portals and other document distribution systems.

A good illustration of this process is the introduction of a new nine-month certificate of deposit at a retail bank. Such a product affects multiple departments who must collaborate on reviewing and approving the product offering. Many individuals have an impact on this process, from the product group, to tax, risk, audit, legal, operations and IT. Once launched, it becomes necessary to gather data over the product's lifetime. Formal reviews at varying intervals can then effectively measure product performance vs. the original marketing plan. Such comprehensive tracking is the result of a complex, collaborative process that requires integrated ECM with CDM systems working in harmony with an effective workflow system.

The Bottom Line

Organizations looking to improve their business processes require a robust enterprise content management suite with an easy-to-use collaborative document management solution that:

• Provides flexible, end-to-end process management capabilities;
• Allows rapid access to content in context; and
• Facilitates collaboration across teams.

CDM also provides the ability to keep all information organized in context within a workspace structure. This forms the underlying platform for a highly collaborative, process-oriented workplace that provides transparency into customer interactions while enabling the management of product and project lifecycles. This foundational platform bridges the gap between people and processes across business units and geographies by putting content in context in a collaborative environment. The major benefit of this solution is that it provides companies with accurate and timely business information to help them quickly act on information to make smarter business decisions. 

 The Benefits of People + Process + Collaboration + Context

1. Accelerated response times: Creates a process-driven collaborative work environment with enhanced visibility and accountability. Such an environment provides common ground for workspace collaboration on documents and other project data. Organizations are able to accelerate their response to both internal and external customer requests for information by empowering users with contextual information at every step in the business process.

2. Reuse of best practices and information: Establishes better business practices by defining and automating repeatable business processes. Valuable information assets such as best practices, templates, policies and procedures can be categorized in an organizational or a departmental taxonomical hierarchy for standardization, knowledge management and information reuse.

3. Improved employee productivity and tools for effective decision-making: In addition to enabling collaboration between team members and functional groups, enhancing workflow capabilities and providing the ability to source contextual information, organizations can equip their users with the capabilities necessary to monitor tasks, issues, milestones, meetings and project dashboards, as well as track project, engagement or customer interactions.

4. Assists compliance activities: Helps organizations go beyond documentation of business processes in support of their compliance objectives. Automated and standardized business processes reinforce the legitimacy of an organization's compliance efforts and assist internal audit groups with their processes.

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With operations across the globe, annual revenues in excess of $40 billion, and 158,000 employees in 100 countries, Fujitsu is the third-largest IT company in the world and continues to provide customer-focused business solutions based on its enterprise software, hardware and services. Fujitsu's process-driven integration approach to SOA using Interstage Business Process Manager, together with CentraSite, Fujitsu's SOA registry and repository, is geared toward successfully bringing business and IT together. For more information, visit www.fujitsu.com/interstage

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