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.