Document Output and Print Management

Businesses spend a lot of money managing content, but few organizations are able to understand if that investment is translating to business success and making a difference to the bottom line. While this is a challenge for organizations across various industries, utilizing content management technologies can maximize business benefits for organizations, including improved distribution of documents, rapid search and retrieval of content, and compliance with corporate policies and industry regulations.

The exponential growth of content in the enterprise can make it challenging for organizations to understand where it exists, how to manage it and how to keep it compliant. However, organizations also have an immense opportunity to get the most out of their data with an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy. Recently, a survey of approximately 179 ECM professionals from independent analyst firm Forrester Research found that while 60% of firms already have more than one ECM solution in place, respondents plan to increase their ECM deployments within the next 12 months. We're seeing this increase in adoption not only because of content and data growth, but because today's information sources and outputs are much different than they were a few years ago and many organizations are ill-prepared to handle them.

Facing the Chaos

An ECM strategy helps organizations understand the current state of their content and where it resides, but it's certainly not easy. In some cases, organizations will have multiple content repositories spread out across its organization, all associated with various business applications, and the IT department is left scrambling to make sense of it all. This scenario is, unfortunately, quite common and can become chaotic if it's not handled properly, which can lead to serious issues for organizations down the road.

Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) is a great, but tragic example of how companies can suffer from decades of poor record keeping. Nearly four years ago in San Bruno, CA, a deadly pipeline explosion incinerated an entire neighborhood, taking the lives of eight individuals and destroying 38 homes in the process. An investigation from the California Public Utilities Commission found that the gas transmission records and safety-related documents had not been properly managed for decades and were overwhelmingly scattered, disorganized, duplicated and impossible to access in an efficient manner. While management and adherence to the filing and record-keeping process could have been handled more efficiently, there were also no systems in place to address the amount of content PG&E was required to manage. Had this been the case, PG&E may have been able to understand the defective nature of the pipeline and prevented the explosion.

Rarely will organizations find themselves in a situation where the difference between effective content management and poor content management is a matter of life and death. However, as organizations continue to grow in complexity, it will become increasingly imperative for them to capture and properly manage their content by ?having the proper policies, procedures and solutions in place.

One-Size-Fits-All vs. Fit-For-Purpose Solutions

Today, lots of money is invested by organizations on ECM projects and yet business and IT challenges still remain unsolved. Forrester's survey also found that nearly 44% of ECM professionals are unable to quantify the ROI for their ECM projects. Many traditional ECM vendors like to proclaim that their one-size-fits-all ECM suites can handle all of a business's content requirements throughout the entire organization—from improving business productivity and controlling costs to mitigating risks.

While this may seem like the answer to reducing complexity within an organization, that isn't always the case. Traditional ECM suites are intended to handle all business functions, whether an organization needs it or not, which isn't very cost effective. Traditional ECM suites often require a disruptive and highly expensive rip-and-replace implementation. Even if some existing systems are running efficiently, organizations may be required to replace all of their technologies and migrate their content for a new suite deployment.

This type of overhaul takes time to successfully implement and establish and includes everything from training staff to troubleshooting installation problems. With traditional ECM suites, content is also migrated and stored in one repository instead of in-place, where the content once resided. Depending on the amount of diverse content types within an organization, this siloed approach may not even be possible, but even for companies where it is, converting the content to a specific platform or format can cause compliance issues.

Unlike a traditional ECM suite, a fit-for-purpose approach aligns a solution with a specific business use case or cases. Organizations shouldn't look to an ECM suite to address their pain points, but rather deploy the best solution for each specific business case. These solutions are designed to directly enable businesses to access and use information in a manner that ensures control, quality and transparency, enabling them to pick and choose what they need to address in the most cost effective manner. Most fit-for-purpose solutions fall under one of these categories:

• Infrastructure content management—the management of storage and archiving of all enterprise documents, email, corporate records, etc. to ensure corporate and regulatory compliance with a repository of record; 
• Transaction-based content management—the management of content produced by applications, such as bank transactions; 
• Business content management—the management of business content and workflows to deliver information to employees who need to make operational or strategic decisions; 
• Web content management—the management of content associated with websites and the websites themselves; or
• Social / online channel content management—the management of instant communications such as text messages (Web IM or phone SMS), RSS feeds, blog postings, chat rooms and social network posts.

Within these categories, organizations are effectively able to identify their current and future content management requirements, and then select the best fit-for-purpose solutions to quickly address and resolve those challenges, instead of an ECM suite that may give them more than what they need without offering a "best" option for any one area.

Document Output and Print Management Solutions

Similar to other business functions, like accounts payable and accounts receivable automation, electronic records management, e-discovery, etc., document output and print management is also in the same fit-for-purpose category. Regardless of your industry, content remains one of the most critical items in the business world. It serves as the enterprise's record of any action or event and, while there is no denying the importance of these records, too many resources are often spent trying to manage them. Research from PricewaterhouseCoopers found that the average company spends $20 in labor to file a document, $120 in labor to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document. Furthermore, companies have been found to lose one out of every 20 documents and spend 25 hours recreating each lost document. In the business world, time is money and organizations can't afford to keep bleeding both just to manage document output.

Falling within the enterprise content management category, document output and print management solutions help organizations automate, format and distribute or print documents created by enterprise applications more efficiently. This simplifies an often lengthy and complicated process and enables organizations to capture and store output from all systems and applications throughout the enterprise. Sometimes constricted by content type, format, size, source or location, document output management software solutions help organizations easily manage this process with integrated forms management and document enhancement to save time and headaches, formatting documents from various outputs automatically without disrupting or destroying intended format.

It's also important in today's workplace to have the ability to output content to the Web and any device, to help increase flexibility and productivity. The same goes for printing. Employees are spread out all across the company's office and it's important for them to be able to print at their convenience from wherever they're working.