If you have started your Digital Transformation by digitizing your documents – then you
1_know the value of sharing electronic documents vs. paper documents,
2_understand that your information is much more secure – not just sitting in file cabinets for some surprising fire, flood or wind disaster, and
3_have started or plan to start taking the tedious, repeatable processes – like invoice or order processing – and automating them with workflows that boost your productivity.
These are the basic concepts for content management strategies in your organization.
So what's next on my journey?
Every business process is not always repeatable and an ideal candidate for automated workflows. In your organization, you likely deal with incidents or cases that include people outside of existing systems including vendors, visitors and contractors. Your systems may not be set up to store their information and enable the team working on a case to have access to all the necessary information.
In most organizations, there are groups of people who need to consult, review, add to the file and follow a set of processes to obtain a resolution. All these details also need to be safeguarded to ensure confidentiality yet keep the authorized participants in the case connected to their responsibilities.
Take control. You can leverage your content management solution to guide a variety of staff members on how to handle incidents and provide consistency in how the incidents are reported. Otherwise, different people will document events each in their own way making for inconsistent information.
In Conversation
We recently sat down with Mike Thomas, Konica Minolta's Eastern Regional Sales Director our Content Management practice to discuss Case Management. His first-hand interactions with customers uncertain about case management provide an insightful conversation:
Mike, can you define case management?
"Case management is a term that is thrown around a lot. It is important to understand what we are talking about when we refer to case management. It's not just case workers or legal cases, it's really the idea of consolidating information about a constituent or piece of property or same asset – person, place or thing, and giving a 360 degree view of information related to that asset... true case management where you see documents and data together so you have a full picture of what is going on within your constituents whether that is a person, place or thing that you are managing for a business process."
Can you contrast an automated workflow with case management?
"The lines between digital content and paper content have blurred so much. I think to my own kids, the way we receive report cards – the fact that my wife and I will get regular updates of the kids' grades on a day-to-day basis. Well, businesses have that same stream of information that used to be a report that came out once a week or once a quarter – printed out was the way that information was relayed. It became the bell weather of how information came through the organization."
What do you listen for to help you see that I could be doing case management in a different way?
"It's the nouns and the verbs. It's the doing things with things. That's the key identifier.
- When a client says, "I enter data into a spreadsheet or I fill out a checklist or I populate information in a Lotus Notes database or I email this certain person or I save this file to the network share." All of these trigger the case for Incident Management.
Tasks are a key indicator that a process needs to be updated because there is probably a better way to centralize and manage the information... we want to limit the amount of information that needs to be copied or entered into these other systems.
We also want to consolidate platforms. We have some customers that we work with today that had started with as many as 100 or 200 different disparate systems that they were working with. Different Access databases, custom home-grown systems – we want to limit the proliferation of Sequel databases and things that were built from a custom perspective to make things similar for users to work with and also make it more efficient for the organizations. It's really about finding new tools to replace old tools and to make the organization more efficient."
"You don't necessarily have to take your organization from a paper-based operation or a physical, manual data-entry process all the way to complete automation with artificial intelligence and robotic process automation. You can find interim steps. We can find paper-based workflows and electronic workflows that compliment the way you do business today, and work as maybe a 2, 3, or 5 year plan that's going to get you to where you want to be as a corporation."
Sounds like you are helping a company build a road-map – putting it in phases and helping them prioritize.
"I think that that Enterprise Content Management brings to the table the ability to help craft a journey that really enables customers to build their own road-map... ECM helps our customers get to the point where they can be more self-sufficient, and they can start to build upon the tools and technologies that are available to them."
Available through OMNIA Partners, Konica Minolta offers members an expansive product portfolio of Management Print Services, Content Management Solutions, IT Services and Marketing Services. Contact Us for more information.
