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DIGITISATION
Held every two years, the Fujitsu
Information Capture Conference
(ICC) is an important event for the
scanner manufacturer’s reseller and
partner community. Over two days
in September, Fujitsu welcomed
more than 500 people to this year’s
ICC, which took place in Waterloo,
London. As well as highlighting new
solutions, the event gave delegates
an insight into key trends in
content management.
Jo Caudron, founder of Duval
Union Consulting, set the scene
by explaining how we are entering
the third wave of digital disruption.
Unlike the first wave in 1995, which
transformed the music, video and
photography sectors, and the second
wave in 2005, which impacted print
media, TV, travel and HR sectors,
Caudron warned that the third wave
was touching every industry.
He said evidence of this
transformation can be seen in
changing ‘business touchpoints’
e.g. the transition from meeting
room to conference room to virtual
reality; from paper storage to digital
storage to the cloud; from paper to
PDF to real-time smart data; and
from the office to home office to
new ways of working.
Caudron pointed out that the rate
of change was deceptive. Because
businesses are adopting digitisation
at different rates, a supplier could
convince themselves that it was
possible to carry on as normal
losing only a few customers each
year. To them, he put the question
‘what percentage of customers can
you afford to lose year after year?’.
He added that the need to
support customers at every point
along the digital adoption curve
means that businesses must
master the old world and the new.
Phase Three
John Mancini, chief evangelist of
AIIM, makes the same point in
the context of electronic content
management. He argued that
because successive stages in
the evolution of document and
content management don’t replace
what has gone before but are
layered on top, organisations will
have to connect the dots between
traditional ECM systems and new,
third wave mobile solutions.
In his keynote presentation,
Mancini identified the three distinct
phases of content management that
have emerged over the last 35 years:
Phase One: Document
Management and Workflow
– the
automation, mainly by Fortune 500-
type organisations, of complicated,
mission-critical processes, such
as insurance policy admin and
cheque management. These
solutions were expensive, complex
and highly customised. There were
no standards and people had
to undertake week-long training
courses to use them.
Phase Two: Electronic Content
Management (ECM
) – by 2000
document management had morphed
into ECM. This was promoted as an
enterprise layer, but in reality it was
still driven by business departments,
resulting in knowledge silos. ECM
had started to spread down into
mid-sized businesses, but it was still
mainly a big company game.
Phase Three: Mobility & the Cloud
– in the late 2000s things started to
change, as first Sharepoint (2007)
and then enterprise ‘sync and share’
offerings like Box upset industry
price points and precipitated the shift
from ECM specialists to knowledge
workers. There was a fundamental
change in how solutions were
adopted, but usability and mobility
were still a problem. Phase Three,
dominated by mobile and cloud, has
changed all this.
Explaining the key differences
between legacy ECM systems and
Phase Three ECM systems, Mancini
said: “Legacy ECM systems are
all about technology; modern ones
are all about applications. Legacy
ECM was mostly a large company
thing; now it’s relevant to just
about any size of company. In the
legacy era, usability and mobility
were an afterthought; now they
are core. In legacy land we said
‘someday’ about the cloud; today
Going through the phases
The new era of enterprise content management, as outlined at the Fujitsu
Information Capture Conference (ICC)
people want the cloud now. We went
from an environment where IT was
buying technology to one in which
businesses are buying applications
(Gartner says that by 2020 80% of
the IT spend will be by the business
rather than IT). We’ve gone from a
legacy world of costly, very complex
integrations to one in which people
want to configure not customise.
And, lastly, the focus has gone from
24-36 month projects that set out
to change everything to modest,
application-specific improvements
that can be scaled and extended
throughout an organisation.”
Not everything is perfect. Mancini
points out that businesses are
frustrated by the security implications
of greater mobility and the blurring of
lines between home and office; and
that there is a massive legacy drag
– the gap between what people have
and what they want to become.
Digitisation vs digitalisation
Mancini says that organisations
need to do three things to overcome
this drag:
1
Get paper out of their
organisation. “Of the end users we
have questioned, 72% agree that
‘business at the speed of paper’
will be unacceptable in a few years’
time. I think that time has already
come and gone”, he said.
2
Understand that digitalisation is
different to digitisation. “When we
talk to people about how they are
using digital capture, you still get a
scan-to-archive type of game. We’ve
been in scan-to-process now for 10
years. Organisations must figure out
that this is not just about digitising
paper and sticking it in an archive;
this is about how you digitalise a
business – how you take capture
and move it from document capture
to information capture.”
3
Sort out back-end processes.
“Back-end business processes are
still a mess. Businesses could get
away with it in an earlier era when
their processes weren’t exposed
to customers and suppliers as
directly as they are now. But when
an organisation opens up and
walls become more transparent,
back office processes have to run
efficiently,” said Mancini.
John Mancini,
AIIM
