Content on demand

After 15 years of industry experience in selling and marketing content management, Hanns Köhler-Krüner looks back over his experience and exclusively tells FST some home truths about ECM development.

“You need to look at ECM not as a piece of technology, but as a strategy to which technology plays a part”
-Hanns Köhler-Krüner

The current industry has changed quite considerably from when I started about 15 years ago. Back then we talked about imaging and we talked about scanning files, but we were only really starting to think about digitalizing paper, which was the main drive. While email was there, it was not considered that much of an issue – at least nowhere near as much of an issue as it is today. 15 years ago, people were working in departments with departmental solutions and information silos, and there was very little being said about integration. If you look back at the vendor landscape in those days, there were many more small or mid-sized companies across the world, and the consolidation that we have seen over the last five or seven years has really thinned out the herd quite significantly.

The reason for this change is really two-fold. Technology has certainly helped, but it wasn’t the main drive behind it: that was just the sheer size of the problem, and the fact that people couldn’t handle the stand-alone tools that the information was flowing through anymore. Today, email has become more and more important as a business tool, and we’ve managed to come up with a few other ones as well. These tools have more and more collaboration and if you compare today’s markets to the markets we operated in 15 years ago I don’t think, for example, Google was of any significance – back then it was Yahoo that was the market, so the whole search market, at least on the internet, has become much, much bigger. Also today there is so much more information on the internet, which of course provides organisations with more web-based driven information, and if you look at the last couple of years particularly, there is the whole mobility drive that we have seen, where just about everybody has a laptop rather than a desktop PC.

Connectivity, 24/7
In today’s environment everybody is trying to be continuously connected. The reason for this relates to the sheer size and complexity of the information, and the speed with which both customers and consumers of the information are expecting answers back. You no longer have the time to go through the paper archive and say, ‘I’ll call you back tomorrow’; consumers expect the answer to be there right there, right now, and that permeates through a variety of different industries as well as the financial services sector.

The sheer size of data that all companies are handling today is very important in these markets; it is just that the problems associated with size become much bigger when we’re talking about internationally operating companies. Globally operating companies often have to deal with multiple languages within their organization, dispersed workforces, and maybe some on-the-road workers or home workers, and as a result, different systems, different legislations and different internal policies often have to follow. All this just exacerbates the problem of handling business processes.

Nobody can afford not to look after information in an efficient manner anymore, and of course, with the current economic crisis going on, that drives even more of a need for looking after your assets and information. With all the cutbacks and layoffs that are happening, a lot of organizations are letting people go, but that doesn’t mean that workloads are getting any less – it’s just that people are doing the same amount of work with fewer people, which makes efficiency even higher on the list of requirements that companies ask from their people.

Justified
The emphasis in ECM solutions is certainly warranted during this prolonged period of uncertainty, but if you look at the vendors, while they are all certainly feeling the pinch, IBM recently came out with some figures that said they were actually doing okay.

So what we are seeing is, as long as these vendors have got the right solutions to the questions that the customers are asking them, even in what seems to be a recession, there is still plenty of need for ECM solutions.

During today’s markets, everything has to be about cost cutting and efficiency gain, and that’s very important to remember when considering ECM solutions because they are proven to provide real ROI. While there remains a fundamental question about the importance of ROI, and that focus is currently much higher, I think there is a little too much emphasis put on hard figures. If you look at enterprise content management not as a piece of technology but as a strategy to which technology plays a part, then there are going to be benefits to managing your information more efficiently.

ROI very much depends on the kind of processes that you are trying to improve on, especially anything that goes from paper to electronic; what’s more, some of the things that are happening through an ECM strategy should be asked the other way around – is there a return of investment, no, but what is the total cost of ownership? What is the total cost of failure? What if you don’t do it – what would be the ultimate consequence of that?

The real question here is whether you can afford to tell your customer that you’ll get the information they require to them tomorrow, while your competition has the ability to say, ‘hold on a second, I’ve got it right here in front of me?’ The simple answer is, you can’t – so there are always two sides to the coin, and oftentimes the real issue of ROI is that it can’t be enough to simply justify an investment to ECM for any size organisation.

Quick access to data is today crucial to any organisation – and that’s particularly true for financial services institutions. Having a single security system across a number of ECM installations or solutions is also critical, and the ease of finding information can play a role in that because you then have all your information gathered in a much smaller number of systems and are working with an enterprise-wide implementation rather than departmental implementation. And then, when you do have to make decisions, all the information is within a single depository or a number of depositories under a single interface. Subsequently, on the customer service side, this presents a definite opportunity of just being able to answer questions quickly, which ties back into the necessities of quick data access and having your customer information to hand.

Out with the old
I actually know of one bank where unless you’ve been working there for 10 years or more you can’t actually get certain customer information out of their system. And that’s not because of seniority or security concerns, but because of the old systems and the fact that only if you’re an old-timer do you know how to operate such a system. To me that seems a fairly ridiculous way of business effectiveness. In fact, it’s not effective at all.

With enterprise content management, if you look at the main blocks according to the AIIM road map – capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver – you can find across the board ECM functionality that can help any financial institution. And having everything under a single interface makes it much easier for customers to get access to their own information rather than having to ring three different departments and try to find out in three different places what their current status is.

In the coming months the important thing for organisations will continue to be focusing on greater speed, more ease of use, greater security and more compliance. We still haven’t seen the full impact of the current economic crisis, of course, in which financial institutions play a huge role, and there is an awful lot of additional legislation that will be coming in over the next few months and years. This will have to be implemented in a variety of different banking sectors – and that will drive implementation needs. What we will see overall is leaner, more agile developments and we’re going to have to see quicker reactions to consumer needs. In addition, we’ll see many more delivery and collaboration channels appearing as a more business-oriented way of working develops going forward.

Hanns Köhler-Krüner has more than 15 years of industry experience in selling and marketing content management, document management, search and workflow solutions. In the last few years, he has helped both national, as well as international, companies manage their information assets in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, as well as various Eastern European countries.

About AIIM
AIIM represents the Information Management community as the global association for both users and suppliers of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. 
AIIM hopes to ensure that users and suppliers have opportunities to become better connected and have broad access to the knowledge, skills, advice and support necessary to tackle the evolving challenges of Information Management successfully.