The AIIM Blog
Keep your finger on the pulse of Intelligent Information Management with industry news, trends, and best practices.
Capture and Imaging | Document Management | Electronic Records Management (ERM)
In this day and age, we are faced with more and more electronic receipts, contracts, bills, etc as the paper ones continue to be phased out. However, what about that garage full of old documents you’ve been collecting for the past twenty years?
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1. Knowing Why You Need It. Before going about any initiative or technology implementation, it’s essential to know why you’re doing it. What are the business goals? Who should be the stakeholders involved? Information Governance ultimately means being able to transform unmanaged information into valuable business assets. And it provides enterprise readiness. Readiness means proactively servicing the legal and compliance policies in today’s business, and it requires continuous visibility, trust, and control across all of your digital information. With the combination of new government mandates, increased corporate accountability, and the digital information explosion, it is a necessity to have a holistic view of all information. With the right governance strategy, the business will have insight into unstructured content while complementing existing investments in content management, email, archiving, and storage management.
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Making an ECM implementation successful requires planning and attention to detail. The best way to create the right solution is to identify organizational goals and priorities. Learn how to manage a successful implementation in our free guide.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Because best-of-breed enterprise content management (ECM) software enhances existing business processes, organizations can quickly identify the many tangible benefits of implementing ECM technology. Calculating the return on investment (ROI) for the implementation becomes a relatively straightforward process, which makes it easy to develop a convincing business case. If the ROI is so obvious, why aren’t ECM implementation plans at the top of every IT project list? Perhaps there isn’t a single proponent in your organization to drive the process because no one person controls the whole budget for a solution that is truly enterprise-wide, Or possibly the sheer volume of documents and unstructured content your organization is dealing with makes it difficult to narrow the initial project focus to a manageable size. (Hint: Start in one department and then expand from there.) Whatever the reason, the benefits of ECM are too great to let implementation languish in the no man’s land of “if we have budget left over in Q3, we’ll consider it.” If you’re ready to dramatically speed business processes, get rid of cumbersome paperwork and meet the many compliance regulations facing your organization, read on to see eight ways to advance your case for ECM.
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Compliance | Information Governance | Information Security
Get your (information) house in order. It's no secret that companies of all sizes in all industries are creating and storing more documents, in more formats than ever before, driven partly by regulatory and compliance pressures. Gaining control of your information is sound business practice. And knowing what you have (physical and digital) and where is it can be found is critical when litigation occurs.
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Automation | Document Management
As standard documents become more complex, and organizations adopt new systems and technology, the information for these documents needs to come from different places. Pricing information may come from a financial management, sales configuration, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, while customer contact details may be stored in a customer relationship management (CRM) or contract management system. Other parts of these documents may only need to be included in certain situations, or spreadsheets that contain charts that need to somehow be incorporated. This process is often time consuming, unwieldy and error-prone. Organizations can gain extra efficiencies and optimize their resources by automating the creation of standard documents. Automation can also extend traditional templates to become more powerful by taking advantage of new technologies and other data sources.
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Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
There are too many ECM Systems on the market today. I will never be able to find the right one that fits my business needs. There are many ECM Systems on the market today. And trying to find an ECM System that will fit your business needs at the right cost can seem like a daunting task. While this may be true, finding the right ECM System starts with understanding your underlying data and document management challenges and needs and then mapping those core needs to a system and vendor that solves those needs for you. Although it is probably best if you can do your own analysis since you know your own business better than anyone else, if you feel strapped for time or knowledge, then you always have the option of using an outside consultant who can help you.
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