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.

“In progress.” When it comes to government, we hear those words a lot. It’s no surprise: meeting the needs of a geographically large nation with diverse constituents is challenging. Change and progress require time…and patience.

Technology is one area where progress is evident. Change is afoot everywhere, from optimizing government websites for mobile devices, to coordinated healthcare services and discussions about creating a national dashboard to share meaningful information. The goals are familiar:

• Better communication.
• Improved efficiency.
• Greater transparency.
• Fiscal responsibility.

Poor communication, inefficiency, and lack of transparency contribute to financial leakage. They invade the workplace via redundant tasks; duplicate payments; time wasted digging for answers or waiting for replies; recreating missing files; and researching and re-keying data from one system to another.

Cost control: recycle useful information

Shrinking budgets, ballooning deficits, and public demand for fiscal prudence require new responses to the crusade for efficiency. Inefficiencies silently hemorrhage cash. The only way to stop the bleeding is by smarter information management, which first demands recognizing its full value so you can maximize meaningful use.

Smart administration involves streamlining without adversely affecting constituent services. One of the most effective ways is to deploy enterprise content management (ECM) to connect information systems. ECM creates a firm foundation, centralizing access to scattered information and making it secure, searchable, and useful while laying the groundwork for automation. Yet ECM can only reach its potential when it’s backed by a strategy that enables meaningful use of the information that drives decision making.

Life can be intense. Every day, employee dramas enter the workplace unsolicited. Some of the greatest workplace concerns we face as HR professionals, employees, and caring colleagues are making sure:

• Health needs are met and costs are covered as anticipated.
• Everyone is treated fairly by managers and co-workers, able to work without discrimination or harassment.
• No one makes (or must endure) threats in the workplace, idle or real.

Intentional wrongdoing, inadvertent employee mishandling, shoddy record keeping, or a manager or worker with a hidden agenda can devastate company finances, reputation, and employee morale. Noncompliance penalties, unemployment insurance, time-consuming training programs, lower productivity, and other HR costs can pull strongly on the bottom line as a result. So what can you do to:

… help staff members comply with corporate policies?

… improve confidence, trust, and satisfaction with your HR department and company?

… discourage workers from wrongdoing and prevent acts of poor judgment?

… protect your organization and its workers from engaging in and getting away with---or experiencing---harassment, unjust treatment, false accusations of such activity, or other harm?

… guard your organization against false accusations?

The answer lies in timely, complete, accurate documentation…along with the ability to organize, associate, and handle information appropriately, consistently, and quickly when you need it. The challenge: gathering it from diverse places including your HR software, document repositories, payroll systems, email, voice messages, and more, and maximizing its use everywhere it has value.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato viewed everything as a form, and every form as an ideal version of an object. His notions hold true with an increasingly popular business tool: electronic forms (eforms), which allow organizations to stipulate the ideal form for content so it enters their organizations as consistent, desirable, and ready to use. (Had Plato lived to see eforms, I think he would have approved.)

To generate desired efficiencies, electronic forms demand meticulous attention to detail. Each form must shape the content it captures to maximize meaning and usefulness for those who rely on it. When they’re well designed, forms gather quality content and use it intelligently. Built-in controls provide tools to capture and make meaningful information useful wherever it has value. This article will help you understand considerations in designing and using online forms so they will supply the control, compliance, and results you’re looking for.

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.

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.”