In his well-known book “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten,” which is regarded for its timeless insights, Robert Fulghum reviewed some basic lessons of life we all learned as children that are universally true, even at the places where we work and within our social interactions. There’s a reason we invest a good portion of our educational funds in early learning: what we absorb and come to believe during our formative years influences our thoughts and decisions throughout our lives.

If you haven’t thought about each of the ten timeless truths listed below in terms of your business process automation goals, it may be time to rethink your ECM strategy. The payoff for ‘getting it right the first time’ is significant.

Here they are, rephrased a bit to help you make the connection:

1. Remember that everything dies. Hamsters, mice, people, and even company projects have limited life spans. Routine business processes, too, ultimately outgrow or outlive their usefulness. Take time to put everything in perspective. What are your company goals? Are your processes still relevant and in line with your vision? Are there processes you maintain purely because things have ‘always’ been done a certain way? Is anything ripe for change?
    
2. Be prepared. Remember the first day of kindergarten? Probably not, but chances are good that you carried a backpack or bag with everything you needed to address the routine challenges of the day. If you’re investing in technology, give yourself and your staff the time and resources they need to be prepared. You can’t expect miracles from even the best software and hardware. However, if you give your people sufficient time for analysis, planning, and improvement, ECM technology can produce phenomenal results.
    
3. Play fair. Be considerate. Even if you’re starting with a small project, keep the company’s enterprise goals and other departments’ needs in mind. Although you need to remain dedicated to your own vision, being selfish about your needs, simply refusing to make your project transparent, insisting on your own way of doing things, and similar self-centered practices will hurt your company in the long run. You’ll also miss great ideas for improvement that others could offer. You may have terrific ideas and plans, but someone else’s contributions might help them to prosper more fully.

Communication is everything. The moment we’re born, the labyrinth of neurons in our brain starts processing and distributing information. Strong neural connections help our brains to expand their function so we can make smart decisions and reach our potential. Our well being relies on quick, efficient messaging. If the right connections aren’t made early on, our brains miss vital input that would otherwise instruct or protect us.

Business software integrations are similar, except a well-conceived integration delivers information with efficiency and consistency that vastly exceeds human potential. Integration makes it possible to tap into the tangle of business processes to get information wherever it resides and make it useful wherever it’s needed. If the diverse software applications you use don’t connect at logical points, you miss opportunities for efficiency that enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software allow.

If you’ve read the first article in this series, you know that data is the basis of any ECM implementation, helping to drive work and decision making efficiently across your organization. The number of integration points and their thoroughness determine how easily and effectively your information can be pushed and pulled enterprise-wide. Thorough integration assures that data is available wherever and whenever it’s needed. It helps to drive processes forward based on real-time information, dramatically increasing accurate messaging and efficiency.

If you’re not connecting your business systems, you’re not engaging in effective ECM or BPM. Simply said, without thorough integration, you’ve missed the point.

Do you remember the first time you rode your bike without gripping the handlebar? “Hey—look—no hands!” you probably exclaimed with excitement. If you’re lucky, you ended the trip on your bike, bearing a bright smile rather than a skinned knee.

Planning for a business process management (BPM) and workflow implementation bears some resemblance to riding hands free, only on a larger scale. Whether or not you stay on course isn’t just a matter of luck. You need to know where your business is headed; understand what you are striving to achieve; streamline your processes to ensure efficient routing; anticipate the unexpected; keep a sharp eye out for change; and make changes on the fly so you remain steady till the end.

Presuming you’ve read the first two articles in this series (Developing an Enterprise Vision for Business Process Automation and Indexing for the Enterprise: Retrieve Your Documents 100% of the Time), you already learned the importance of establishing a clear organizational vision. You also know ECM is data driven, and you learned tips for effective indexing so information can be found when it’s needed and leveraged enterprise-wide. BPM and workflow build on these successes.

Whether your processes revolve around documents, represent a series of events, or both, your data is a launching pad to drive work and decision making efficiently across your organization. If you understand the unseen as well as the obvious benefits of automation, you will visualize more clearly the long-term value across the enterprise. Knowing what questions to answer before you start helps you approach your project confidently.

Enterprise-wide projects require clear vision and effective leadership. This is especially true if your company engages in business process management (BPM) with the goal of maximizing efficiency gains enterprise wide. Since your everyday processes are built around your mission-critical content, a thorough understanding of your data, routine processes, and the interrelationship of one business area to the next is crucial.

Establishing a grand vision isn’t necessary for a successful enterprise content management (ECM) and BPM implementation. Developing and communicating a clear vision based on an understanding of your company’s long-range goals, prioritization of needs, and knowledge of constraints, however, is.

Assemble the right team

Establishing a vision for BPM requires a strong team comprised of executive-level and IT leadership, line-of-business managers, and a dedicated project leader. Since a detailed understanding of your company’s content (data) and how it is used daily is vital, ground-level knowledge workers must also be represented on the team. Their involvement in day-to-day information gathering and processing brings critical knowledge and valuable insights into how your business operates, as well as potential improvements. As your team defines long- and short-term goals, understanding your current processes is as important as defining long-term business needs, technology capabilities, and budget constraints.

BPM requires that you view your business as a series of intertwined processes driven by people, data, and events. The data that feeds and drives your processes may be found in legacy systems, line-of-business software applications, paper, voice mails, and other media. Wherever it resides, it must be accessed, controlled, and manipulated intelligently so you can leverage it wherever it’s needed to drive efficiency. Understanding the sources and function of data within your organization is vital.

Humans have hunted from the earliest times. Maybe that’s why we often accept the burdensome quest for information. We’re accustomed to the chase—even fooled into thinking we’re doing something valuable. Yet time lost in pointless pursuit means something is sacrificed. In the case of college enrollment, a drawn-out chase can mean losing top candidates to other institutions and ending up with a mediocre catch.

During peak season, enrollment office employees frenetically pursue information and answers, compiling scattered documentation in the hope of making quick, prudent decisions. Admissions, student aid, registrar, scholarship committees and other areas each have separate forms requiring distinctive information.

Yet as each department collects what it needs, useful information that could be shared is often requested again…and again. Information that could move decisions forward sits idle, garnering little or no attention.

Regrettably, as processes are deferred, institutions risk losing top candidates to other institutions.

Make informed decisions, quickly

Whether we’re considering undergraduate or graduate admissions, student financial aid, scholarship applications, or faculty search, the overriding goal is to garner and retain top people. Even though roles and responsibilities differ among departments, most draw vital information from transcripts, applications, test scores, essays, and references. Often, specific data found on forms is valuable in multiple places. Unfortunately, departmental software systems that store this precious information create data silos, resulting in information that is unknowingly collected multiple times for varying purposes.

Gathering information several times—even if it’s done efficiently—wastes resources, results in redundancy, generates errors, and causes delays.

Why not re-use your information to satisfy current needs and anticipate what lies ahead? Enterprise content management (ECM) and business process management (BPM) software, integrated meaningfully with your business systems, redefine efficiency. By centralizing and securing access to content, then pushing and pulling information wherever it’s needed according to your pre-set business rules, ECM and BPM free your staff to work efficiently and focus on the services for which they were hired.

Recycling – reusing an item for the same (or a new) purpose – is vital as society seeks solutions for sustainable living. Yet for insurers, the greatest potential for reusing valuable items in meaningful ways doesn’t require material recycling. It lies in the meaningful reuse of important information. Consider the information you collect from policyholders and others, and how many decisions are contingent on what they supply. How can you extract more value from what you have?

Understanding information value

Technology today is about building bridges so insurers can work efficiently, provide quality service, and compete successfully in a challenging marketplace. Trying to bridge existing gaps in the information flow isn’t new; insurers have discussed it for years. Business process management software tied to ECM is an effective enabler, but technology alone doesn’t guarantee meaningful use. Typically, gaps arise from a failure to understand—and manage—our information and its multiple uses.

Defining meaningful use

To make astute decisions, information must be accurate and timely. Knowledge workers need it whether they’re in the office, traveling, or visiting clients. If you want to capitalize on information value as it’s harvested, it should be captured digitally at the source and shared efficiently everywhere within your business where it could influence processes or outcomes.

Ideally:

• Incoming mail, data captured via online forms, and email attachments launch pertinent business processes and advance appropriate actions.
• Pertinent policyholder data feeds automatically into billing software as new policies are approved and issued, expediting billing and ensuring accuracy.
• Data captured in rules-driven voice mail and faxes launches appropriate business processes.

For information to be worthy of reuse, it must be accurate and readable. Front-end capture makes it instantly useful, restricting human involvement to tasks requiring analytical thinking and decisions. Even the smartest knowledge workers are prone to mistakes when information must be gleaned, copied, or re-keyed.

Timing is everything. From philosophers to athletes and business writers to investors, many a wise person has quipped about the importance of timing and bemoaned that lost time can never be reclaimed. In business, one place it’s universally true is invoice processing. Timing is critical to good cash management, and the costs resulting from lost time can never be recovered.

Ideally, payments are processed at the last possible moment to capitalize on pre-pay discount opportunities and to maximize positive cash flow—without missing deadlines that could result in penalties. Yet despite carefully laid plans, typically there are hidden expenses. The Institute of Management Administration (IOMA) reports:

• Organizations typically spend $15-$25 to process each invoice, largely due to labor costs;
• 25% of all invoices are paid late, many resulting in penalties, late fees, or cessation of early payment discounts;
• Nearly half have one or more discrepancies requiring resolution (contributing to high labor costs).

Navigating the sea of diverse documentation—paper, faxes, email attachments, and online forms— takes time. Many A/P departments are being asked to process more with fewer resources, yet they are receiving an increasing volume of documents and diverse formats as time goes on. Invoicing is more taxing than ever.

"The fact is, however, that major IT projects are inevitably going to be about business change, and the two have to go hand in hand. As it continues its steady evolution, IT becomes less and less about individual products, languages or whatever, and more about getting things to work together."

-Jon Collins, Freeform Dynamics, Organisational Change and IT: More than a bar-room conversation?, The Register, April 28, 2010

Anyone who has worked in an underwriting office understands the challenges of managing files, processing underwriting documents efficiently, keeping track of agents and clients on the move, and making sure customers are happy. Unitrin Direct, based in Chicago, Illinois and with offices in multiple states, recently made these processes easier by integrating diverse technologies and leveraging their effectiveness to offer faster and better service. Their vision and success resulted in the company receiving the Insurance Accounting and Systems Association (IASA) Technology Achievement Award in 2007. This was merely the beginning of what Unitrin Direct plans to accomplish as they enhance services to their customers.

Unitrin Direct, an insurer that sells direct-to-consumer automobile and homeowners insurance in 25 states, is a rapidly expanding company that conducts its business over the Web, by telephone and by using tools such as strategic partner sites to gain new business. Initially, management had a vision to expedite services by automating the processing of returned mail, incomplete customer submissions, and pursuit of signatures that were required on underwriting documents. By integrating digital workflow with their third-party automated call system, policy management software, third-party capture and indexing provider, claims management system, and data review criteria stored on their Web page, the company aimed to leverage the value of each of these technologies and do more work, faster. This increased efficiency has enabled the company to continue to grow without adding staff, and it has positioned Unitrin Direct to handle future growth effectively.

Palm Beach State College serves approximately 47,000 students in one of the largest counties in Florida. Composed of four campuses, Palm Beach State receives approximately 20,000 applications per year— usually between 12,000 and 15,000 during their main semester.

Like most colleges, Palm Beach State had concerns about disaster recovery. Indeed, the College had legitimate cause for anxiety. Palm Beach State is located within the Florida hurricane zone, and the 2005 hurricane season had been particularly destructive. In early 2006, after two failed attempts at implementing an electronic document management (EDM) system, all of the institution’s critical documents were still paper-based.

Chuck Zettler, Director of Information Technology Project Management at the college explains, “We were intent upon finding an EDM system that suited all of our needs. Disaster recovery was a driving factor, as was a need for space and for improved efficiency.”

Palm Beach State hired a consultant and built a business plan. As part of that process, they discovered other pressing issues that could be improved with an EDM system. As Zettler describes, “Our infrastructure is an urban, multi-campus environment. Students must travel across different sites, and procedures were often constrained by the limitations of paper. Staff would have to make numerous phone calls and send faxes in order to verify student information. There was a need for staff to access information from Web browsers, and a need for simultaneous access to information.

“After evaluating our business processes, we determined that we also had a need for workflow. Students are our number one priority, and we wanted to implement measures to serve them more efficiently, with faster turnaround time. It can take up to an hour to travel from one campus to another; paper processes made work distribution extremely inefficient. Workflow would give us the ability to distribute work to staff across the multi-campus environment with the click of a mouse.”