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| Management Briefings
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Battling email overload: Chris Reid, Morse (November/December 2008)
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It’s no secret that the amount of email being sent and received is growing fast. According to
research from Gartner, business email will increase by 25-30% through to 2009, as more
businesses depend on it as their main method of external communication.
However, this dependence comes at a price. For many companies, a large proportion of their
confidential information and intellectual property is held in the corporate email system, making it
difficult to locate when needed. The Enterprise Strategy Group has found that 75% of corporate
intellectual property is now trapped in email systems.
The solution to this is to create a comprehensive, long-term email management strategy –
and to do that businesses need to take account of the major factors affecting their email
systems.
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Collaboration is key: David Haynes, Atkins (September 2008)
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Is your organisation involved in project work, either as a client or as a supplier of services? If you are responsible for
commissioning, managing or controlling projects, you may have faced problems including skill shortages, proliferation of
information systems, project teams that are not in one place, participation of several organisations, or large volumes of
information and data that needs to be managed and retrieved.
Collaborative working environments (CWEs) could help you address these kinds of issues. You should consider using CWEs if
you recognise any of the following demands on your organisation, project or programme.
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Print's charming: Louella Fernandes, Quocirca (April 2008)
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As IT environments continue to grow in complexity, many organisations are focusing on
managing and rationalising a diverse infrastructure of applications, hardware and storage
across many locations and an increasing number of users. The rising threats associated
with network and software security, along with managing the growth of networked and
mobile devices, make the task of managing a distributed and multi-faceted IT
infrastructure ever more challenging.
However, although organisations are concentrating on these core elements of the IT
environment, few give the same strategic focus to the printing and imaging environment,
which is an essential component in most organisations’ document workflow process.
With printing and imaging costs reckoned to equate to 1-3% of an organisation’s total revenue, organisations simply
cannot afford to ignore the potential savings that can be achieved through a managed and optimised print environment.
The benefits are manifold – including productivity improvements, financial savings and the ability to boost environmental
credentials through more efficient printing practices.
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Coming to terms with compliance: Cliff Mills, PMP Research (February 2008)
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Businesses face a data management double whammy: they are creating more information today than ever before, yet they
have more compliance and regulatory legislation than ever before. The upshot is that companies need to manage their
information more effectively to satisfy compliance requirements.
PMP Research has surveyed a cross-section of leading organisations to find out how they are progressing.
The results show that legislation has indeed provided a key driver for organisations to improve the management of their
corporate information. Over one-third (36%) of respondents say legislation has had a ‘great effect’ on their implementation of
information management technology, a further 19% a ‘significant effect’ and 23% a ‘moderate effect’. Only 20% of companies
feel that it is not a consideration.
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Search continues: Justin Waters, Serco Consulting (December 2007)
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We have a major problem when it comes to corporate information – it is difficult to get people to
store information in a way that allows other people to find it.
The root of this issue goes back to the time when companies used paper-based registries – a
centralised storage area for paper records where important information was stored, ordered and
archived, and from where information could be quickly retrieved.
But when people began using PCs, rather than a typewriter, secretary or typing pool, to
generate documents and records, they started storing information on their own hard drives – an
individual filing system, with or without structure, and inaccessible to all.
Next, people began using emails to communicate information. But this meant corporate
information was stored in people’s in-boxes, again inaccessible to everyone.
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Connected, but not collaborating: Richard Hall, Avanade (October 2007)
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As commerce has become global, so the need to communicate with the extended supply chain
has increased. Major corporations now compete not just locally but on an international scale,
and have to regularly communicate with a wide variety of divisions, business partners,
regulatory bodies and customers.
The result is that the need for regular and controlled communication has never been greater.
Luckily, there is an abundance of technology available to all organisations to facilitate better
productivity and communications and reduce the cost of the communications explosion. These
technologies work to connect businesses (and are partially responsible for the non-stop
comments that ‘the world is getting smaller’). Improving quality and speed of decision making is
the key goal.
Larger firms are now moving towards enhanced collaboration to reduce costs and time to market and improve customer
experience. And on the surface, the use of digital technology for improved collaboration seems to be key to organisations
generating the productivity and cost reduction necessary to meet the competition head on.
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What's new about BPM?: Janelle Hill, Gartner (May 2007)
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Business market dynamics have changed with the rise of the internet and the forces of globalisation. These trends echo the
arguments presented In ‘The World is Flat’ by Tom Friedman. He describes how business has become ‘frictionless’ as
boundaries that existed for years between countries, geographies, people and businesses have fallen, with many ‘flatteners’
being technological innovation.
Historically, whenever the global economy turns downward, companies explore process thinking and look internally for
opportunities to either reduce waste (cutting costs) or increase productivity. Yet nearly seven years after the dotcom bubble
burst, the focus on operational excellence – or at least operational accountability – continues and is accelerating.
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Email: kill or keep?: John Hookham, Adrelia (March 2007)
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Over the last decade the internet has moved from being a closed tool for the university boffins
to become ubiquitous. Email and the world wide web are available to the masses and for many
organisations digital media is now the preferred method of communication.
However, the web was initially seen by many as the new electronic ‘wild west’; governments
and lawyers had no jurisdiction; you could say and publish anything you wanted on a website;
you could send scurrilous emails; and you could not be sued or even be identified.
Today, we have an information-based economy, and email has evolved to become the
preferred method of communication for business and increasingly for personal use. Most
companies no longer have a post room or individually named racks of trays to receive the
incoming mail. If you do receive a ‘real’ letter, it will probably be given to you directly by
reception and become a talking point during the coffee break.
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Going live: Malcolm Beach, AMTEC Consulting (January 2007)
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An electronic document and records management system (EDRMS) implementation can only
be deemed successful when it is being used as intended and the organisation is receiving the
full benefit of its investment.
There have been many EDRMS projects over the past few years, especially in the public sector.
Other areas, including pharmaceutical and legal, also have years of experience in implementing
such systems. So given this reasonably wide set of experience, can we guarantee that
implementing an EDRMS will be easy and successful?
Well, no. Just because there are a number of successful EDRMS implementations does not
guarantee success in every case. Even now there are cases of unsuccessful projects, and
some have even been cancelled before completion.
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Why integrate when you can aggregate?: Lisa Hammond, Centrix (November 2006)
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Every medium and large-sized company has many organisational and technological silos –
product development units, customer-facing business units, sales and distribution channels,
geographies and information technology.
These silos are separated by well-defined and often rigid boundaries, which diminishes the
company’s ability to build strong brands and broad customer relationships. The more decentralised the business, the greater the transaction costs of such fragmentation;
and in many cases over-engineered enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and IT
silos can actually increase those transaction costs. As the number and rigidity of silos increase,
a company will tend to miss more and more market opportunities.
Because the boundaries tend to obstruct the flow of information, different parts of the company
can end up selling to the same customers, sometimes even competing for the same business
without knowing it.
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Are some processes more equal than others?: Julian Benson (May 2006)
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Effectively managing business processes requires significant investment in time, effort and resource. So should
organisations manage all their business processes using a ‘one size fits all’ approach – or should they scale their effort
in a measured way? Should you manage business processes within the context of business strategy, or simply manage
them reactively?
Clearly, all organisations possess their own discrete business processes. However, relatively few would claim that they
succeed in fully controlling them. Instead, business process management often falls to practitioners within IT teams,
often in a pretty reactive way. The question of which strategy to adopt goes to the heart of the challenge to manage
processes more effectively – and the dilemma that all organisations face in matching the expectations of their
customers, with the planned fulfilment of a particular good or service.
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Taking the open road?: Finbarr Joy, UPCO (January 2006)
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The selection, implementation and maintenance of an enterprise workflow or business process management (BPM)
solution can be a significant exercise – not least because for many organisations, the workflow solution pervades many
business systems and represents a significant enterprise-scale cost. The level of investment demanded can expand
further if you need customisation or onsite specialist vendor consulting for protracted periods of time.
In this light, organisations should be considering whether the time is right to add open source solutions in this mix. This
article helps answer this question by highlighting the characteristics of current open source workflow solutions.
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Cutting costs without compromising compliance: A Maurice, Iron Mountain (Nov 05)
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The paperless office has long been the El Dorado of staff dealing with steel filing
cabinets, credenzas and those indexing labels that stick to your fingers. With email now
the primary form of correspondence and Microsoft Word responsible for the vast majority
of documents produced, it is no surprise that the market for information storage is now
worth $70 billion worldwide. Nevertheless, statistics show that, at least for the
foreseeable future, the paperless dream will remain just that. Envolve, the recycling
consultancy, estimates that UK paper consumption is rising by 20% a year. Copiers, fax
machines and printers generate between 860 billion and 1 trillion pages annually.
It’s not just that regulated industries are required to keep original paper copies. A survey
by PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2001 found that companies that extended email to their
employees saw printer use increase by 40%. We actually like to have things on paper.
Good news for the logging industry, bad news for companies drowning in paper.
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Through the document maze: Malcolm Beach, AMTEC (October 2005)
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Your electronic document and records management (EDRM) project has now reached
the stage where you are ready to implement a technical solution. Assuming that you
have followed a full process – and not a ‘purchase-by-magazine’ approach – you will
have gone through at least the following stages: defined your business and technical requirements; assessed the technical options and identified the most suitable solution for your
organisation; communicated regularly with your users; addressed change management issues; and negotiated a suitable contract with your chosen supplier.
All that remains is to take the technical solution and implement it. Since you have
chosen a package, you can be fairly certain that the system works and therefore the implementation should be
reasonably straightforward. Also, the supplier is providing the technical support necessary to implement the system and,
after all, they’ve done it before.
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To be or not to be content managed?: David Martin, Ether Solutions (June 2005)
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Various forms of the content management wave have swept across IT during recent
years, from web content management (the management of pages displayed on websites
and intranets) to the all-encompassing enterprise content management.
These approaches have all focused on different aspects of controlling corporate content
(ie, everything that is not structured data) – which is entirely reasonable. But as the
extent of coverage reaches out across an organisation, the question needs to be asked:
does this content have to be managed?
This fundamental question is not the blasphemy that it might at first appear to the
holders of the content management bible (yes, there is such a book).
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The age of uncertainty: George Imlah, Atos Origin (June 2005)
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The only thing we can say with certainty about today’s global business environment is that there is no certainty. Yet
most organisations are geared up to an IT scenario where nothing much is expected to change, and the ability to
change systems rapidly to meet market demand is almost non-existent.
So how do organisations manage constant change and uncertainty? Corporate size is not the main issue, but corporate
philosophy certainly is. As Charles Darwin said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most
intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” What businesses need is some sort of ‘uncertainty processing’ –
processes and systems that will enable them to meet head-on the business changes required to stay with or ahead of
the competition.
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Talking to each other: James Robertson, Step Two Designs (June 2005)
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While the goal of interoperability between content management systems (CMS) is an important one, it is limited by the
lack of standards relating to content management. At present, there are a range of narrowly-focused specifications in
the marketplace, but these address only specific aspects of system interoperability.
A number of initiatives are underway to address CMS interoperability, but these are in their formative stages, and it is
expected that at least several years will be required before widely-accepted CMS standards are developed. This article
explores the need for interoperability, and outlines the current state of the relevant standards and technologies.
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Regulating the use of workflow: Alan McSweeney (June 2005)
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Workflow technologies and systems can offer financial institutions significant benefits in the emerging area of ‘know
your customer/customer identification procedure’ (KYC/CIP) and anti-money laundering (AML) applications. Workflow systems tend to be associated with document management software since processes that are automated
using workflow tend to involve the movement of paper.
Workflow systems utilise document management software to ‘computerise’ paper, allowing it to be moved electronically.
The documentation associated with account opening – especially the identification-related documentation – can be
captured and stored in the document management component of the workflow system, if one is implemented.
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