Managing Mission Critical Content
fewer lost customers due to service problems. It also saves time and money because more issues can be resolved on the initial contact.
Enabling greater access delivers benefits, but access must also be controlled to protect customer confidentiality and assure the integrity of records.
4. ARCHIVE: There is a point in the document lifecycle where a document is no longer active. At that point it can be logically laminated and placed under formal records management control. It can be checked in and out but, if it is altered in any way, a new record will be made including metadata that describes who made the change and when. This ensures the record is protected in compliance with regulatory and business rules. It also sets into play any retention policies as to how long it is stored and its eventual disposition.
After a document has been processed, how does a company effectively store the information? The choice of an adequate storage strategy is very important because of the sheer volume and size of documents involved. An organization can realize significant savings by moving archived documents from primary high-performance, high-value storage devices to disk-based storage devices for less frequent access. Key requirements in storing this content include:
- Authenticity: The validity of documents must be protected with appropriate security measures which control access and limit the ability to revise or delete. The system must also provide an audit trail to show everything that happens to documents in storage.
- Longevity: The system needs to have built-in protection against media failure, system shutdowns or external threat. Typically data is automatically replicated at secondary locations, and self-healing features continually monitor data integrity and make repairs as needed.
- Accessibility: Regulatory compliance might involve the rapid recovery of
hundreds or thousands of archived records in response to a subpoena or other legal request. In such a scenario, the
ability to respond quickly might have an impact on litigation costs and help companies avoid penalties for non-compliance.
Complete Transactional Content Management Solution
If you’d like to start enjoying the benefits of managing transactional content, there are several places where you might begin: reducing the amount of paper, addressing a specific department or functional area or embracing an enterprise platform which allows you to buy the pieces you need and then integrate other content management solutions.
But whatever approach you take, your effort to transform the way your organization captures, processes, accesses, archives and meets compliance regulations for transactional content should bring significant benefits including:
- Improving customer service with better, faster, more complete responses;
- Eliminating the inefficiency, expense and risk of a paper environment in which documents are handled sequentially and can be easily misplaced or lost;
- Managing and appropriately associating all types of related business information, from scanned documents to digital pictures, application documents, e-mail and more, in a common virtual folder;
- Providing overall control for business processes as required by your operations, industry standards, or regulatory factors; and
- Enhancing your market position relative to competitors who still struggle with manual processes and paper documents.
Defining the Terms
Transactional content: Content which typically originates outside an organization from external parties—customers and partners—and relies on workflow or business process management (BPM) to drive transactional, back-office business processes. In some cases, the content not only triggers internal processes, but is based for the transaction itself.
Transactional content management: A software solution that enables organizations to capture, process and access electronic images of documents all on a unified content management platform. Content may include paper and electronic documents, photos, reports, computer-generated reports, XML data and electronic forms, and is appropriately managed and integrated with your data-driven line-of-business systems.
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at
www.emc.com