Taming the information beast

As more and more web-based services and records databases come on-stream as part of the e-government process, public sector organisations are beginning to lose their reputation as forms-driven bureaucracies steeped in long-winded, paper-based processes. However, as traditional forms-processing duties go electronic, bigger threats are appearing in the jungle of spreadsheets, word files and e-mails that threaten to swamp traditional filing systems and disrupt records-keeping practices.
    
A recent survey, taken in advance of the AIIM Roadshow - the annual showcase for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions - indicated that 30 per cent of public sector respondents are not at all confident that their electronic records in general were accurate, accessible and trustworthy. This rose to an astonishing 50 per cent who are not at all confident that e-mails related to external commitments and obligations are recorded, complete and recoverable. Only 27 per cent were at all confident that these important communications were being held securely. When narrowed down to the healthcare sector, results were even worse.
    
Tracking and recording customer correspondence via multiple channels of web, e-mail and paper, demands a re-writing of policies and procedures that few organisations in public or private sectors have undertaken, or if they have, staff are not following them. Furthermore, as recent high-profile legal discovery cases have clearly shown, both inside and outside government, the concept of e-mails as transient communications that have no long term value is no longer valid. In the US, recent rule changes on legal discovery have established that all electronic documents are as much part of the evidence trail as paper ones. Even when electronic documents are correctly archived, it seems that enforcement of deletion policies after the due life of a record is proving more difficult than with disposal of traditional boxes of paper.

Taming the E-mail chaos
As might be expected, content management vendors are keen to demonstrate their ability to bring order to this chaos, adding additional modules to their document management systems to cover e-mail capture and dedicated records management, as well as the traditional document scanning, forms recognition and business process workflow capabilities. There is much debate about whether users can be trusted to make their own decisions about what e-mails should be passed to a central records management system – and by whom – but in the majority of organisations it is not even an option for users. In these cases Outlook provides the supposed archive system, frequently stored at random on local, network or back-up tape storage. In almost all of these cases, filing is based on individual e-mail folders, and searching across other user’s e-mails is not possible – including those abandoned by staff no longer employed.
   

Ironically, those who claim to print important e-mails and file them in the filing cabinet are probably the least vulnerable, but of course, sharing and searchability is going to be very limited, and it takes up even more trees and filing cabinet space.
    
Electronic parallel
Providing an electronic parallel to this process to pick up e-mails and pass them to a controlled repository is relatively simple, and the filing task can be eased by a mixture of manual and automatic suggestions based on the content of the e-mail. It is a decision to be made as to whether the e-mail repository is stand-alone or forms part of a more extensive content management system taking in a much wider range of documents across the department or enterprise, including faxes and scanned documents.
    
Two additional functionalities have brought change to the ECM community in the last year, bringing giants such as Microsoft and Google into play. Collaboration tools such as Sharepoint use a document-centric approach to project management, inviting participants to share and edit documents associated with a mini-website for the project. This can reduce the proliferation of escalating e-mail attachments by maintaining single copies of the latest versions.
    
Version control can also be applied ensuring that everyone is working from the current revision. In a wider sense, collaboration spaces become publishing portals, displacing intranets and public internet sites with a more dynamic content library, yet without reducing security and sign-off control.
    
Meanwhile, enterprise-wide search tools from Google, Fast and Autonomy have offered the promise of doing away with filing schemes, and providing a single-screen search across diverse repositories of both unstructured data (documents and files) and structured data (databases within financial and CRM systems).
    
Many public departments that invested in conventional content management systems to handle Freedom of Information requests may be wondering if a Google “Search Appliance” could have solved their problem more easily. However, search alone will not resolve any of the record-keeping issues such as security and disposal timescales, nor will it allow a structured storage scheme based on content categories. So Enterprise Search joins the toolset within the ECM umbrella as a useful integration tool, as well as one that has forensic uses to expose unusual patterns and exceptions. It does not, however, replace a structured content repository.

Departmental or Enterprise
National initiatives such as the Electronic Patient Record System (EPRS) have massive implications for all kinds of citizen’s information and operational processes. However, these major (and frequently troubled) projects are in danger of overshadowing the many other areas where productivity, staff management and customer service can be improved by careful application of document and forms processing systems. Whilst long-term thinking seeks to provide direct keyboard capture of information at the point of collection or from the web, mid-term improvements to the current processing methods for forms, correspondence, invoices and survey data may be overlooked. These first steps can provide the basis for organisation-wide control of documents and information.
    
Procurement, legal departments, building services and statistics collection could all benefit from business process analysis and subsequent consideration of document capture systems. Scanning invoices and providing automatic matching facilities can produce considerable savings in productivity and error reduction. Work sheets, defect reports, service applications and planning data can all be candidates for electronic capture and automatic reporting. Health and safety procedures and service reporting can also benefit from electronic dissemination and e-portal document access.

Business or IT?
Business unit managers are constantly under pressure to both cut costs and improve service, and indeed IT managers are also subject to this. Consequently, they may have little time to investigate local solutions despite the potential impact on business processes that can be achieved with modest levels of investment. It is important, therefore, that business managers familiarise themselves with the potential mechanisms and benefits of document imaging solutions for their particular departments. Working with the IT department as a business improvement team can then ensure that the implementation runs smoothly, that all of the participants buy-in to the change, and that the rewards are achieved in the shortest possible time.

AIIM is the international association for Enterprise Content Management. It represents the Information Management community and supports the interests of users and suppliers of technologies and solutions used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver information.

For more information
www.aiim.org.uk