A new report by Datamonitor argues that many organizations waste 10% of their staff costs because employees can not find the right information to do their jobs. Over 50% of staff costs are now for employees performing “information work”. But the employees are suffering from both information overload and information underload, and as a result they spend up to 25% of their day searching for the right information. Datamonitor argues that this why some organizations could be frittering away as much as 10% of their staff costs on wasted effort. continue reading...
An increasing number of enterprises are investigating e-mail archiving solutions due to regulatory compliance, legal discovery and storage management issues. Understanding how to evaluate these e-mail archiving solutions is critical if you want to effectively address these business challenges.
If you understand the options for email archiving and how they apply to electronic document management, you can increase efficiency in your business and provide savings to your bottom line. continue reading...
The Small-to-Medium (SMB) business segment may be one of the most misunderstood markets ever. Vendors erroneously assume SMB is a large, undifferentiated market that is easy to sell into, especially compared to large enterprises, where big brands and massive corporate sales forces are needed to get a foot in the door.
In fact, SMBs vary substantially in their technology needs. The smaller prospect is very different than the larger mid-sized firm in terms of the technologies they can use as well as how they buy, support and implement these technologies. The differences between small and mid-sized companies are well-illustrated by their document management technology needs. In particular, integrating electronic document management technology with the business applications commonly used by the small enterprise poses a special challenge. continue reading...
Tristam Wallace, at the Document Imaging Blog, had a very interesting post on SharePoint and Document Imaging. I think that one of the most common misconceptions is that if you have SharePoint in your office that you have a fully featured document imaging system.
SharePoint can certainly help increase your productivity through collaboration and document storage, but if you have a lot of unstructured data (documents that have been scanned), you probably need to look at integrating your document imaging system (capture/scanning or storage) with SharePoint to help your employees increase their document management productivity. continue reading...
In today’s business world the ROI of any project is important as competition increases, it is imperative that a company make sure investments generate a large enough return. Increasing business efficiency is the most compelling reason for investing money in any project. Obviously technology has helped many businesses over the last 10-15 years become more efficient. Just replacing typewriters with word processors and calculators with spreadsheets initiated a huge increase in productivity per employee. Taking the next step is more challenging than simply replacing one tool for another as these programs were basically point solutions. It was predicted as early as 1975 that the “paperless office had arrived”. Obviously progress has been made toward this goal, but the amount of paperwork necessary to run a business (particularly a regulated one such as financial services and medical clinics) has increased a great deal since 1975. Just to maintain the status quo requires businesses to move to the next level in office productivity and implement a complete document management solution. continue reading...
When it comes to making decisions on moving to an electronic content management system in your business, who is the person most responsible for making that decision?
The Business World is a rapidly changing entity, and technology helps adapt to these changes quickly and will help a company keep its competitive advantage. Paper has always been an inefficient medium for conducting business processes, and recently has become a key focus for Business Process Improvement (BPI) initiatives. So what are the main reasons for a company or organization to move towards the paperless environment?
One of the questions that was asked was why people would consider implementing an electronic content (record) management system (often we simply call it document management). I find the results very interesting, but not surprising.
The two most important reasons that companies want to implement an electronic document management system are (1) efficiency and productivity and (2) compliance to legal regulations (FACTA, SOX, HIPPA, etc). continue reading...
Many of the Document Management and ECM System Implementations fail right out of the gate due to several factors. Most of them revolve around planning, and project definition and focus. Below are some key areas that are imperative to a project’s success:
Infrastructure A huge part of the planning for a DMS/ECM System is examining your organization’s network infrastructure and ensuring it is ready. Implementing a system with inadequate resources can provide wrong end user perceptions. Focus should be placed on the below items:
PC Clients – the client PC’s should have appropriate horsepower to handle their specific tasks. Obviously, basic search clients will not require extensive resources such as memory or hard drive space, but a scanning or OCR station may.
Network – It is time to get rid of those hubs your brother in-law gave you, and upgrade to 100MB, or in some cases (at the server), Gigabit technology.
Server – adequate memory, processor and storage is a necessity.
Backup- often an overlooked area, planning for system backup, now and in the years beyond is very important.
How much paper do you use? Do you foresee getting rid of it in the near future?Industry analysts suggest that this will be the year that we’ll start to see the turn from paper to paperless. We have been talking about the paperless office for better than 30 years now. Can this really be the year that we will do away with paper?
Well, that is a lofty goal for this year. But, the analysts do think that the turn toward the reduction in paper will start this year. I think that no one is going to totally eliminate the use of paper, but more and more companies are realizing the benefits of converting an increasing amount of paper into digital files.
So, what is it going to take? I tend to think that document imaging is really about fundamentally changing the way you do business. Fundamentally changing the way you think about your business.
It is all about change. We have to be willing to change the way we do things. If we are not willing to change our strategies and approaches, it will never happen.
And, the only way that we will ever be willing to change our strategies and approaches is if we see a possibility of improvement. continue reading...
eWeek posted today a great article titled, 
The Small-to-Medium (SMB) business segment may be one of the most misunderstood markets ever. Vendors erroneously assume SMB is a large, undifferentiated market that is easy to sell into, especially compared to large enterprises, where big brands and massive corporate sales forces are needed to get a foot in the door.
Tristam Wallace, at the 
How much paper do you use? Do you foresee getting rid of it in the near future?Industry analysts suggest that this will be the year that we’ll start to see the turn from paper to paperless. We have been talking about the paperless office for better than 30 years now. Can this really be the year that we will do away with paper?
