The Sheer Luxury of Paper

By Angela Childs

There’s nothing quite like the sweet fresh smell when you open a new ream of paper.   The white sheets of limitless possibility ready for ink and staples, file folders and cabinets.    How could we not want to print our emails and file them away in a drawer?  What kind of heartless monster could resist the allure of sharing a paper invoice?  Who doesn’t want to look important in a meeting when everyone has to wait while you run to your office to get a document?  The power is irresistible. 

Can you imagine an audit without the thrill of digging through boxes?  That exhilarating feeling you get from the danger of paper cuts.  Oh how you and the auditor share a laugh when documents are missing.  Good times.

Paper a little too exciting?  We get that and we can help.  Need to go cold turkey and have someone scan documents for you?  We can be with you every step of the way.  You don’t have to do it alone.

IOS partners with AllShred Services for Document Destruction

Columbia City, IN – Jan, 25, 2012 – Imaging Office Systems, Inc. (IOS), a leading provider of content management systems, scanning and data capture, systems integration, custom software development, and records management services,  announced today that it has partnered with Allshred Services of Maumee OH, to expand its Records Management Services division and begin offering secure document and data destruction services.
 
Allshred will manage and provide fulfillment services for both bulk and scheduled shredding services across IOS’s entire customer network.  IOS customers will receive full NAID (National Association of Information Destruction) certified services regardless of their location and each customer will receive a certified document destruction notice after each shredding event.

IOS hires Records Management Specialist

Columbia City, IN – Jan, 20, 2011 – Imaging Office Systems, Inc. (IOS), a leading provider of content management systems, scanning and data capture, systems integration, and custom software development, announced today that it has created a specialist program to promote Box Storage, Document Destruction, Scan on Demand, and Records Management Consulting Services.

Andrew Myers is IOS's new Records Management Specialist.  Andy will based in Indianapolis out of the Emco office and will support all central Indiana businesses.

Imaging Office Systems, Inc. 
Deriving 100% of its revenue from content management, IOS has installed over 600 imaging systems in the Midwest.  In addition to its records storage and destruction services, it provides document management solutions from its partners Hyland, PSIGen, Canon, FileBound, and Fujitsu, plus IOS has an in-house Professional Services Group that performs system integrations and conversion, workflow and custom programming. With its multiple facilities IOS is also one of the largest document conversion service bureaus in the United States converting more than 5 million pages a month.

Click here to learn more about IOS's Records Management services.

Using Tablets for Employee Onboarding

By Angela Childs

I love a good process improvement story and we recently had a customer approach us with a great idea for just that for their employee onboarding process.   This customer has stores across the US and their existing process was paper intensive, labor intensive, and error prone.  With all the technology options we have today they were sure they could do better and came up with a great concept.

For their onboarding process, when they hire a new employee for a store, they have the employee go to that store to fill out all their paperwork.  That paper is then sent to corporate where someone keys all the information into their HR system, follows up on anything that’s missing, and files the documents.  Their new idea – how about instead of filling out a bunch of paper forms, they’re handed a tablet PC.  The tablet then walks them through the process of reading and completing all their paperwork.   As long as it was developed with a super simple interface that guided the employee through each step, they could add technology without piling tech support and software trainer to their store managers work load. 

With this idea, in one step, your new employee is giving you all their data, electronically, ready for import into your HR and content management systems.   

• You eliminate multiple people touching the same documents.
• You eliminate paper shuffling and lost documents.
• You eliminate the delay between when the employee gives you information and when it’s ready to use.
• You add error proofing to your process. 
• You eliminate keying and filing tasks freeing your staff to focus on what’s really important.

This type of project is one of the main reasons Imaging Office Systems created their Professional Services Group, to take a customer’s idea and turn it into something real.  

In this case, we got to design a solution that could be molded to match different needs with automation like on the fly conversion of handwriting to text, pushing common data elements to all forms, and output to multiple systems. 

Have your own ideas?  Let us help you develop a solution.

Four IT Security Lessons to Learn from Anonymous' Stratfor Hack

By Kaitlin McCready, Hyland Software

On Christmas Eve, while most of us were immersed in the holiday spirit, others were immersed in the sensitive information of Stratfor Global Intelligence Service’s client list.

A group of hackers, associated with the collective known as Anonymous, breached Stratfor’s systems, obtaining the credit card numbers, passwords and home addresses of the company’s customers. The group has already used this stolen information to make donations to charities, such as the American Red Cross.

Breaches like this are happening so frequently (just follow the medical community for the evidence) that they’re becoming ho-hum. But that’s even more reason to question how they can happen in the first place. This is 2011, after all, and technology in organizations should, in almost every case, protect against something like this.

To help you ensure you don’t become the next Stratfor, here are four lessons in IT security that you can take to your organization.

1. To protect against data breaches, it’s not just the database that needs to be protected – it’s the documents.

The full picture of exactly what content was compromised from Stratfor is still unclear. But we do know that it went beyond the database to things like emails.

The reality is that sometimes, documents like PDFs and Word files have sensitive information like credit card numbers on them. To make sure they’re securely managed, an enterprise content management system should be able to provide granular levels of security down to the single document level, and can store them in an encrypted format.

2. An email might be a communication tool first. But when it contains sensitive information, it needs to be treated as a record.
We’re in a world where the amount of information is exploding, making it more complicated to determine which needs to be deemed necessary to manage within an organization’s content management system.

Hopefully, the Stratfor situation will put the focus back on the need to better manage sensitive emails and the way they’re archived, a piece of the IT security puzzle that’s often overlooked. Typically emails kept in Exchange or an email archive solution aren’t archived in an encrypted format. To create a complete solution, you should be able to configure an enterprise content management system to delete emails in the respective mail client once the email is archived in that system.

3. Encryption should be built into your software.

Storage and data archiving vendors, like EMC or IBM, provide a lot of security and data integrity controls in their systems. But you shouldn’t rely solely on your hardware to administer security on where your documents are residing.

ECM software should be able to encrypt documents and images at the physical storage level, protecting the data from unauthorized access to the physical drives. Documents that are archived in this way then can only be opened and viewed with ECM software interface, ensuring that the security controls imposed by the software are respected at all times, regardless of what happens to the hardware.

4. You can’t fully control your employees’ actions. But you can protect against it.

Every company has disgruntled employees, even a few willing to give up their login information to your enterprise systems - or more commonly, employees who mean well, but are fooled by hackers from time to time. Here’s how you can combat these situations (to a degree).

When it comes to documents, most ECM systems offer the capabilities to either automatically or on an ad-hoc basis do redactions on sensitive information that the majority of users in the organization don’t need to do their jobs. So, authorized users can still get access to the physical documents, but only certain people can see the actual information on the document, like a credit card number. This level of security is becoming more talked about with PCI compliance regulations.

The IT tools are out there to protect organizations. Hopefully this incident (and these tips) lights a fire under the IT departments who aren’t yet taking advantage.

Mobile ECM: Your Content In Your Pocket

By Glenn Gibson, Hyland Software

The world of computing has changed. Forever.

These days it seems archaic to have to wait until you get home or to the office just to check your email, because now your email is in your pocket. The idea of printing off maps before heading out on a journey seems crazy because GPS on our phone gives us turn-by-turn directions. Lively pop-culture debates over a pint are now a thing of the past, because we can look up the answers on the internet immediately.

Yes, mobile computing devices have changed the world and changed us.  We expect instant access to information from wherever we are. The iPhone and the iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7 and the Blackberry give us this access like never before.

So what does the explosion in mobile computing have to do with ECM?  Everything.

Think about it. What is one of the primary driving factors behind an organization developing an ECM strategy? The need to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time. That’s what ECM is all about.

But what if the right people are in the wrong place at the wrong time? What I mean is, what if the people who are responsible for making important decisions, from approving a critical business expense to agreeing to hire the perfect candidate, can’t physically get access to the information and systems they need in order to execute business decisions, simply because they are traveling or not in the office?  

The reality is that these individuals spend a lot of time on the road and out of the office. This lack of real-time access causes bottlenecks in your processes as the decisions have to wait until they get back online. This causes on-the-fly workarounds with emails and phone calls to get someone, anyone, with authority to make the decision. And once that decision has finally been made, it is very difficult to track all the activity that supports it.

Yup, bottlenecks and workarounds caused when people who play a critical role in business decisions are out of the office have come to be expected as a normal part of business because, until recently, that’s just how it was. There was no other choice.

But, the world of computing has changed. If the ability to access email from anywhere in the world is not only a reality, but expected in today’s world, why is it any different when thinking about your other important business content and processes?

It shouldn’t be. And when you partner with an ECM vendor who understands this, it is not.

Today you can put your ECM content in your pocket. With mobile ECM applications you are able to not only able access your important content, but also participate in business processes, reviewing, approving and denying requests from wherever you are, directly from your mobile device.

Now it is likely, for many good reasons that you may not want to make ALL your business information available via mobile devices. If mobile access to your information is part of your requirements when you are choosing an ECM vendor, you should look for a vendor which allows you to control what type of content and processes to make available via these mobile devices. You should choose an ECM system that can truly deliver on the promise to get critical business information into the hands of the right people at the right time, wherever they happen to be.

For your business this is both simple and profound. No more waiting to get back to the office. No more driving to coffee shops just to get access to your system to approve a request. No more bottlenecks caused by business travel. No more un-documented workarounds. 

It is that simple. It is that revolutionary. Because now your content is right there in your pocket.

Lessons Learned from Apple, 3M and Johnson & Johnson

By Angela Childs

Three companies that changed the conversation.
 

What do these three companies have in common?  They all have invented products that dominate the space.  When you have a cut, do you ask for an adhesive bandage?  If you did, you'd probably hear "you want a what?"  I know I'd ask for a band-aid.  Their brand name is now what we call bandages regardless of who makes them.  Another example - there has been some progress made by all those other companies to get us to call adhesive notes “sticky notes” but they’re post-it notes and they will always be post-it notes.   I could go on with other examples, but we get it and this is already a long post.

Apple has created a similar phenomenon...twice.  In the MP3 player space there are iPods or…everything else.  For tablets, you have the iPad and…everything else.  Whichever side of the Apple argument you fall on, love them or hate them, no other manufacturer has been able to rise above the noise of a competitive marketplace. 

Where am I going with this?  Would you believe it’s to that old build vs. buy conversation?  Yep, I’m going there.   

When you think "Should we just do it ourselves?" what should you consider?

When the topic is developing software, my mind always jumps to the future first.  I start thinking day-forward, after implementation.  You might think I’m wondering what the burden of end user support will be on the IT staff, but that’s not number one on my list.  The first thing I think about is on-going development and not just enhancements and the inevitable changes required to stay in step with changes in business over time, but the pure technical development required.  If there were never any enhancements and you never had to make changes to the core requirements, you’d still need to update what you built to stay compatible with changing operating systems, databases, browsers, etc. 

After weighing the risk of day forward compatibility development, I leap back to the beginning.  To develop something properly you need to analyze the business requirements, develop a scope of work, estimate the time requirements, assign costs, then get agreement internally on cost and scope.  This front end work requires a set of skills that is different from that of a developer – more often than not.  Now we’re developing a team, ideally an experienced team, all working on this project. 

Next I’m on to the development itself.  You have development tasks, project management, change control, risk mitigation, testing, documentation, implementation, and training.  If this is development on something that’s not directly related to your core business – do you know enough to know what you should be worried about in terms of risk?  I haven’t even gotten to IT resources for day to day end user support.

When we really start to break down the concept of build vs. buy, we go from the question “Could we develop this ourselves?” to “Do we want to develop this ourselves?” 

It’s a similar discussion when it comes to whether or not a backlog scanning project should be done internally or outsourced.  Like with a software development project, it boils down to resources, time, cost and risk.  You need to have people that can do it, the hardware and software required, enough time available, a person or persons that can manage the people and the process, and a quality control mechanism.  What you get back from the effort is related to what you put in to the effort so you need to make sure you have a good process and good controls.

So what does this have to do with the beginning of this post?  Commit to what you do and do it really well.  We need focus and we need to be thoughtful.  We need to look at everything that we could do and then pick what we should do.  We need to set ourselves up to succeed, not sprinkle the path with pitfalls.  We won’t all cause a paradigm shift, or develop a product that becomes the next genericized trademark, but we can have products and services that are competitive and highly regarded; and we can enjoy that success.  

So what’s the answer - should you build or buy?  Seriously?  Are you joking?  Did I not just blather on for almost 700 words explaining that this is not an easy yes/no.  

Having your own build vs. buy dilemma?  Contact us and we'll help you weigh the pros and cons.