Imagine if you could type in a few search terms and find any document relating to your business, or for that matter, your home life.
Last year's property tax bill. The receipt for that big business dinner. Joe What's His Name's card. Even that hand-written note from the maintenance guy with his cellphone number on it - right now, while the toilet's overflowing.
"A place for your stuff" is the metaphor Steve Parent, senior consultant at professional services company ARC Business Systems, used recently to explain enterprise content management (ECM) to an audience of chief information officers in Calgary.
Parent quoted comedian George Carlin: "That's all your house is: A place to keep your stuff. If you didn't have so much stuff, you wouldn't need a house. You could just walk around all the time."
ECM is for people with a lot of stuff. Lawyers were early adopters, since it's a heck of a lot easier to tote a laptop computer than 50 binders and much faster to find that juicy bit of evidence if it's digitized.
Parent's session, sponsored by the Canadian Information Processing Society (CIPS), drew a full house of corporate types around the breakfast table at the Petroleum Club.
Most said they were already using at least one ECM system, or in the process of implementing one. Some complained that they had more than one in their company, which is a problem in itself.
Actually, we're all sliding into the ECM world. I'll bet you keep just about everything you type on your computer. You can probably even find a lot of it on command. Back in the old days, there were different programs for word processing and spreadsheets. Along came suites such as Microsoft Office, and now you can search for data in a database, run it through a spreadsheet, then paste it into a report.
The freely downloadable Google Desktop program is truly ECM for dummies. It means that you don't need to remember exactly what name you called a file since you can search by content.
Remembering that Parent quoted George Carlin was enough to get me to his presentation, which I saved on my computer under some obscure file name.
The security guy in me cries out to warn you that Google Desktop can be a double-edged sword. It makes it really, really easy for somebody who accesses your computer, even for a minute, to find embarrassing stuff. So if you have lists such as, "people we're going to fire soon" or "things we don't tell the taxman" you should think twice about installing this program.
Parent says that ECM systems are for "unstructured data," which he defines as anything that's not in a relational database. Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, videos, large maps, webpages, all of the rich media content.
"Oil and gas companies are flying over environmental sites and taking video - that's unstructured content," he says. All of these can be stored, filed and managed in an ECM system.
Should you save everything?
"Absolutely not," says Parent.
"Forget about letters to Grandma that are done at work and messages that say, 'meet me downstairs for coffee', even if it's in an e-mail.”
Those things don't belong in an ECM system.
He says the trick is to decide what needs to be stored. "Ask your employees to assist you," he advises. "They know what is worthy of storage, what needs to be tracked and kept.”
His firm makes a business out of helping companies do just that.
Parent cites examples like "a major oil and gas company" that brought in ARC Business Solutions because, after one year, their ECM system had low user acceptance. It was only being used by one small department.
The problem, Parent says, was that management used the "big stick" method - announcing that the technology was being deployed to organize and protect the company's intellectual property.
Far better, he suggests, to use the "carrot" approach of asking employees how ECM might help them do their jobs better. He also advocates having users ask to have spiffy new ECM features implemented, rather than pushing them down their throats.
He also addresses what he calls the "SharePoint Conundrum" which is bedeviling many companies.
Microsoft is pushing this product hard, and according to Parent, it does offer ECM and "it's getting better.”
It integrates seamlessly into Microsoft's other products.
Still, it's not a heavy-hitter ECM package like Documentum and the result can be open warfare. In his presentation, Parent quotes the CIO of a medium-sized oil and gas company as saying: "There seem to be two camps in this company. The IT guys want SharePoint, and the records, legal and regulatory people want Documentum. And I'm stuck in the middle and I have no idea what to do. The records manager says she'll resign if we implement SharePoint!" Parent notes that the records manager did indeed quit over this issue.
It didn't have to end that way.
Instead, companies should integrate SharePoint with their other ECM approaches. After all, once the data is spinning around out there, you can look at it through different windows. Parent says people overestimate the work involved in doing this, since "integration is getting a lot easier."
ECM is definitely coming, even to the Mom 'n' Pop and home-office market. You can start with an online contact manager (such as CardScan or Plaxo) to grab information from business cards. Move up to scanning receipts and organizing them with a product like the $99.95 Paper Tiger program, whose latest version integrates with Google Desktop.
It will even tell you if Mom or Pop entered the document and who's been using it.
If you're having trouble justifying that $100 expense, consider the claim by the program's manufacturer that "the average business person spends 150 hours per year just looking for lost information.”
Is your time worth more than 67 cents an hour? If so, the payback period on Paper Tiger is less than one year.
Of course, there's time spent setting it up and entering data, but there's also that nice peaceful feeling when the tax man or his cousins come knocking, and you are indeed able to find that hefty business dinner chit.
And take note, the lost business dinner receipt scenario is a real one. It happened to a friend of mine. He did not have an ECM system. He did call American Express and they supplied the missing receipt.
Moral: There's often more than one way to skin an information cat.
Web Watch: www.arcbus.com desktop.google.com (Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
