The paperless paradise edges closer

The paperless office has been a popular talking point for years. It's that utopia where accessing, collaborating on, publishing and storing information is a fully-automated process, and where no more trees have to die to ensure that an essential report is written, approved, and on the boss's desk by lunchtime rather than sometime next week.

But ironically, while the dream has become reality to a limited extent, particularly in industries such as pharmaceuticals, the use of paper has ballooned.

As people have become bombarded with more and more information, they have also found themselves incapable of curbing a natural inclination to print out documents for reading, according to Sue Clarke, senior research analyst at Butler Group. That, of course, is a process that requires paper.

Moreover, although growing numbers of organisations are making their first move in a paper-free direction, most external customers still prefer to keep physical versions of forms, invoices and bills.

Not to be outdone, some companies are already implementing their second paperless initiative, using internal enterprise content management (ECM), the technology that underpins paperless processes.

Unfortunately, the term is surrounded by vagueness and is causing confusion among unsuspecting IT directors, who are often bamboozled by vendors using it for their own ends.

ECM comprises eight key technologies, explained Debra Logan, research vice president at analyst Gartner.

While they can be used separately, taken together they can handle most of the unstructured information that accounts for 80 per cent of all corporate content, which cannot be stored in traditional databases.

The first of these technologies, and also one of the oldest, is document imaging and scanning, which is often sold alongside another mature set of applications, integrated document management (IDM).

IDM includes workflow technology to automate business processes, and allows users to organise, manage and route documents securely to an appropriate recipient or place. Most IDM products also deal with images, web pages, video, audio and report data.

Next in line are the relatively immature web content management packages, which overlap with the web element of IDM.

The older forms-capture and processing software intelligently recognises and verifies information held in formats ranging from paper to email, before storing it in a suitable database or application.

Digital asset management software, meanwhile, is used to manage, store and retrieve rich data such as text, graphics, audio and video.

The final category, electronic records management, allows organisations to specify the lifecycle of individual pieces of corporate information, originating from sources as diverse as paper or web pages.

Again, this technology has been on the market for some time, but until now it has been mainly the remit of public sector bodies.

Adoption is rising among private companies, particularly in the financial services sector, as they attempt to tackle the many regulatory compliance issues arising from financial scandals such as Enron.

As a result of this awakened interest in records management, in particular, the ECM market, currently valued at about $4bn (£2.3bn), should grow by about three per cent this year, according to Logan. By 2007, growth rates will jump to about 10 per cent.

Rolf Beggerow, global applications manager at ventilation and cooling systems provider Flakt Woods Group, suggested that the key benefits of ECM relate to data control and management, as a by-product of keeping it all in a central location in an indexed format so that it can be retrieved easily.

Flakt Woods introduced Datum Consulting's KnowledgeWorker document management system to handle customer-related information.

"Microsoft Office tools can present a productivity challenge to users," explained Beggerow. "They'll save a document on a network drive, but a colleague will pick it up, change something and put it on a drive somewhere else.

"This presents problems not only with version control, but with finding the information later, and it means that documents aren't properly controlled."

The extra control leads to shortened process time, reduced costs in terms of improved efficiency, fewer lost documents and, in some cases, the ability to rationalise file servers.

It can also pave the way for more efficient risk management in the shape of improved backup and auditing capabilities.

The challenges involved in implementing ECM systems, however, are not to do with the technology per se, said Logan, even though organisations should be aware of the tendency to over-buy licences and features.

More important are clear policies and procedures and obtaining buy-in from senior management and users, especially those who are resistant to change.

This means there is a need for large amounts of consultation to establish user requirements, and to ensure that automated processes work effectively for them.

"The key issue is bringing the business around to a new way of thinking about things, which is a form of change management, so you need to have very good processes in place to deal with that," explained Beggerow.

It also helps to have a couple of 'quick wins' by undertaking pilots in departments that are supportive of the idea, according to Beggerow, because "if you have a couple of early successes, the rest of the business starts to take an interest".

But it is also important to decide which documents need to be managed centrally and which do not, because not all of them may need to be included in an ECM system.

"Our aim was to deliver control to important documents, so we had to find a balance between those that needed it and those that didn't," said Beggerow.

"You have to be careful not to force users into using systems they don't need, so while the function pretty much dictates what you do, it also means that users have to be the ones driving things forward."

Related to this, according to Butler Group's Clarke, is the need to come up with strict policies for what to do with content in terms of data storage, retention and deletion, to comply with legislative requirements such as the Data Protection Act.

"The issue is not so much technical as cultural because it's relatively straightforward to put in this type of system," explained Beggerow. "To make these projects a success, it's more about planning, managing change, and dealing with end users' fears and needs."

Serious savings to be made
Once upon a time printers printed. They sold on being faster or slower, cheaper or more expensive than rivals.

And when those margins became limited, the emphasis moved towards functionality: printers that photocopied, scanned and made the coffee.

All that is changing. Companies associated with printing are now focusing on the lifecycle of the document and the business process, and there are serious savings to be made.

Forrester analyst Julie Giera said: "Industry estimates peg printing costs at one to three per cent of a company's annual revenues. Reducing those costs by 30 per cent amounts to a lot of green."

CASE STUDY - Commerzbank

"It's the human factor where the real challenges lie in introducing an ECM system," said Jaymin Patel, project manager of the document and workflow management team at Commerzbank.

"It's about getting buy-in from end users, so they need to be consulted and encouraged to be part of the design, testing and acceptance process."

Without this, the system will always have a bad reputation, with no one wanting to use it "no matter what senior management say", he added.

Commerzbank is based in Germany but, as one of Europe's largest retail and commercial banks, it has around 35,000 staff serving about six million individual and business customers.

The organisation introduced a browser-based ECM system from Documentum into its London branch three years ago to streamline its corporate lending process which involved 30 teams in six separate departments.

Access was also provided for personnel at the bank's Frankfurt headquarters, bringing the total number of current users to 150. This will be extended to the remainder of Commerzbank's European subsidiaries over the course of this year.

To help overcome resistance to the new system, the company set up a user acceptance group of eight staff, comprising an IT project manager, a corporate sponsor and representatives from each of the departments affected by the nine-month initiative.

These divisions included risk managers, credit officers and relationship managers. The group consulted at least once a month, and even more frequently during the crucial six-month development and testing phase.

A core group of five still convenes on a regular basis as part of a continual process of enhancement and improvement.

"Change is something that users don't like and most prefer the status quo," explained Patel.

"If you provide a new way of working that is automated rather than manual, or introduces new business processes, there will always be resistance, and that has to be managed carefully."