Content in Context: The right medicine for your business applications
- by Lance Shaw
For many of you, your companies
have already invested in a number of applications that are critical to the way
your business is run. HR, Payroll,
Legal, Accounts Payable, and while they might need an upgrade in some cases, they
are all there and handling the lifeblood of your business. But are they really running as efficiently as
they could be? For many companies, the
answer is no.
The problem has to do with the
important information caught up within documents and paper. It’s everywhere except where it truly needs
to be – readily available right within the context of the application
itself. When the right information
cannot be easily found, business processes suffer significantly.
The importance of this recently
struck me when I recently went to meet my new doctor and get a routine
physical. Walking into the office lobby,
I couldn't help but notice rows and rows of manila folders in racks from floor
to ceiling, filled with documents and sensitive, personal information about
various patients like myself. As I looked at all that paper and all that
history, two things immediately popped into my head. “How do they find
anything?” and then the even more alarming, “So much for information security!” It sure looked to me like all those documents
could be accessed by anyone with a key to the building.
Now the truth is that
the offices of many general practitioners look like this all over the United
States and the world. But it had me thinking, is the same thing going on
in just about any company around the world, involving a wide variety of
important business processes? Probably
so.
Think about all the various
processes going on in your company right now. Invoice payments are being processed through Accounts Payable, contracts
are being reviewed by Procurement, and Human Resources is reviewing job
candidate submissions and doing background checks. All of these processes and many more like
them rely on access to forms and documents, whether they are paper or
digital. Now
consider that it is estimated that employee’s spend nearly 9 hours a week
searching for information and not finding it. That is a lot of very well paid
employees, spending more than one day per
week not doing their regular job while they search for or re-create what
already exists.
Back in the doctor’s office, I saw
this trend exemplified as well. First, I
had to fill out a new patient form, even though my previous doctor had
transferred my records over months previously. After filling out the form, I was later introduced to my new doctor who
then interviewed me and asked me the exact same questions that I had answered
on the form. I understand that there is
value in the interview process and it was great to meet my new doctor, but this simple process could have been so much more efficient if the information
already on file could have been brought directly together with the new patient information
I had provided. Instead of
having a highly paid medical professional re-enter the same information into
the records database, the form I filled out could have been immediately scanned
into the system, associated with my previous information, discrepancies
identified, and the entire process streamlined significantly.
We won’t solve the health records
management issues that exist in the United States in this blog post, but this
example illustrates how the automation of information capture and
classification can eliminate a lot of repetitive and costly human entry and
re-creation, even in a simple process like new patient on-boarding. In a similar fashion, by taking a fresh look
at the various processes in place today in your organization, you can likely
spot points along the way where automating the capture and access to the right
information could be significantly improved.
As you evaluate how content-process
flows through your organization, take a look at how departments and regions
share information between the applications they are using. Business applications are often implemented
on an individual department basis to solve specific problems but a holistic
approach to overall information management is not taken at the same time. The end result over the years is disparate
applications with separate information repositories and in many cases these
contain duplicate information, or worse, slightly
different versions of the same information.
This is where Oracle WebCenter
Content comes into the story. More and
more companies are realizing that they can significantly improve their existing
application processes by automating the capture of paper, forms and other
content. This makes the right
information immediately accessible in the context of the business process and
making the same information accessible across departmental systems which has
helped many organizations realize significant cost savings.
Here on the Oracle WebCenter team,
one of our primary goals is to help customers find new ways to be more
effective, more cost-efficient and manage information as effectively as
possible. We have a series of three
webcasts occurring over the next few weeks that are focused on the integration
of enterprise content management within the context of business
applications. We hope you will join us
for one or all three and that you will find them informative. Click here to learn more about these sessions and to register for
them.
There are many aspects of
information management to consider as you look at integrating content
management within your business applications. We've barely scratched the
surface here but look for upcoming blog posts where we will discuss more
specifics on the value of delivering documents, forms and images directly within
applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards
Enterprise One, Siebel CRM and many others.
What do you think? Are your important business processes as healthy as they can be? Do you have any insights to share
on the value of delivering content directly within critical business
processes? Please post a comment and let
us know the value you have realized, the lessons learned and what specific areas you are interested in.
