Joining up the dots

By Nick Tuson, Technical Director, EMEA, FileNet

Up to 75% of European companies have taken steps to reduce the number of IT vendor relationships they have within the past three years. We explain why.

Up to 75 percent of European companies have taken steps to reduce the number of IT vendor relationships they have within the past three years, according to recent research by Vanson Bourne.

This is a promising sign, indicating that companies are looking to base their IT systems on an enterprise architecture that can cut the time and cost of vendor management, increase IT vendor accountability, and help them to standardise the technologies that they are using.

It seems that despite looking to consolidate vendor relationships, organisations are still suffering from the complexities of fragmented IT. The same research – which focused across various markets and included many financial services organisations from the region – also shows that across Europe, 64 percent of companies still hold content, such as such as e-mails, forms, images, electronic records and instant messages, in difficult to access operational silos. As a result they lose productivity because of time taken to source documents and are less able to audit activities for legal purposes.

52 percent of companies across Europe also said that they are worried about their ability to extend their existing content management systems to other departments and a further 39 percent are worried about the ease with which they can integrate those solutions with new or existing technologies.

Information is critical to the performance of financial services organisations (FSOs) today more than ever before. The issues shaping their agenda – compliance, cost reduction, employee effectiveness and consistent customer servicing regardless of channel – all rely on managed access to all types of enterprise information and optimised business processes.

So why is it seemingly so difficult to unify access to this information? Decisive and effective action in today’s FSO – with its diverse products and services provided through multiple channels from a broad range of locations – makes the task of information management much harder. All too often, information is used but then collects in departmental silos, is forgotten about and not channelled into key business processes. The information required to conduct most business processes flows in multiple formats from many disparate sources. However, as sound business decisions and effective processes require one cohesive picture, rather than a series of partial views, organisations often struggle to profit from the value of information due to a lack of enterprise architecture.

A changing and more complex business landscape is actually pushing the target of an enterprise IT vision further away. More channels to market and a longer list of information sources accentuate the problem. Silos of online or electronic information are accruing as an increasing proportion of business is conducted in this way. Access to structured and unstructured information also needs to be balanced as business processes require access to everything from financial data to e-mails, letters, forms and images. Only when you multiply the inefficiencies caused by these information challenges does the true cost to the business become clear.

However, despite the benefits of enterprise architecture, when organisations are faced with silos of information and a business crying out for improved processes, realising a ‘unified’ vision can be very daunting. For example, when IDC conducted research into European Enterprise Content Management (ECM) trends in 2004, respondents sited budget levels and resistance to change as their main constraints when considering ECM.

To minimise resistance to change, enterprise architecture needs to be sponsored from the top, its business case driven by the costs and efficiencies it will bring to the organisation and its processes.

With so many data silos and information sources currently in use within organisations, it is difficult to realise a vision of unified information based on the migration of all these sources onto a new ‘enterprise’ platform because the cost and time involved would be significant. A more pragmatic vision of unification is one where a ‘virtual’ infrastructure is created and managed, for example, supporting all information and content – irrespective of source. Within this infrastructure a single ‘metadata repository’ and user interface pulls all active information, and access to it, into one place from the user’s perspective, by interacting with all of the existing software, databases and repositories across the organisation. In other words, rather than moving all information into one place, you create a method of joining up the dots between the existing sources, which is much more cost effective.

Then, you can scale to enterprise levels, despite existing departmental and disparate systems still being used. This way information can be captured, stored, retrieved and managed in any format. Being ‘event driven’ and able to recognise information related to business events, like the processing of an insurance claim, the infrastructure also triggers the required actions and processes necessary to complete all events as efficiently as possible.