Management Role In Todays Paperless And Process

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Abstract— Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists. As the amount of unstructured information that is being captured in an organization continues to grow, we are presented with unprecedented opportunities which can be capitalized on only if we can address some key issues that have come along with the explosion in content. Unstructured information represents the largest, most current and fastest growing source of knowledge available to businesses and governments world-wide. … [It] includes the documents found on the web, plus an estimated 80% of the information generated by enterprises around the world…"

While we often refer to structured and unstructured information in absolute terms, in reality is more of a discussion of the degree to which the information is structured. At some level all information has some basic structure and standards to which it conforms. At the very structured end of the spectrum, there are fields of data in a database or a structured XML file. At the less structured end there is web content contained within structured html or audio files formatted using an encoding such as mp3. What matters though is not so much the degree to which the information is structured, but rather the degree with which we are able to analyze and search the information. Without the ability to search for and retrieve relevant data from the structured and unstructured information, it is worthless.

The key challenges that can be addressed in the Enterprise Content Management Strategy to enable this ability to quickly search for, retrieve and ultimately measure consumption of relevant information are:

1) The use of open, industry standards that facilitate integration.

2) Creating the unstructured content in a manner that facilitates the parsing of the information using semantic analysis.

3) Tagging the content with key metadata terms that describe the content in a more searchable manner.

4) Elimination of duplicate copies of the same content.

5) Removal of outdated content.

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Keywords— Enterprise Content Management. BPM – Business Process Management.

INTRODUCTION - Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems evolved from the same fundamental requirements – to categorize/classify and index documents on a network for easy retrieval as a part of a business workflow process. These documents, or "containers", represent all types of files that need to be managed for access, security, revision, distribution, and eventual destruction ( over and above the capabilities provided by the operating system). Corresponding to business drive for productivity, information re-use, data-integrity, information provenance, audibility, and regulatory compliance, these systems evolved to manage the "content". However, the requirements for managing Web content, for example, are completely different than the requirements for managing the engineering design basis of a power plant. So, the functional and system infrastructural requirements for these two types of system diverged, fuelling separate software markets for ECM.

ECM Disciplines and corresponding strategies

DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT

A document management system (DMS) is a computer system (or set of computer programs) used to track and store electronic documents and/or images of paper documents. It is usually also capable of keeping track of the different versions modified by different users (history tracking).

‘Document Management’ is being expanded beyond the traditional definition of documents that are capable of standing alone or of being part of a larger package. These traditional documents include digital assets such as presentations, whitepapers, support documents and manuals. The expansive view includes practioner assets such as program code and other high-value reusable assets development simplicity. The development guidelines stress delivery over analysis and design and active continuous communication between developers and customers.

STRATEGY

ECM FileNet: A single ECM FileNet repository will be established to form the basis of the Document Management strategy. Through this repository, all relevant documents will be made available. The method of bringing together the document sources will need to be determined. It will most likely be a combination of federation of other sources into the FileNet repository as well as having the FileNet repository become the underlying storage structure for the documents. With this single repository, then the question about where to place documents becomes irrelevant because regardless of which system they are placed in, they are available in the ECM FileNet repository and will be accessible by other applications and by Enterprise Search. Standards will be established about metadata that is required for documents, based on a common taxonomy. This will enable more effective lifecycle management of the documents as well as improving their visibility in Enterprise Search.

Document Imaging

Physical documents are part of every organization process. However completely shifting to a paperless environment has not been completely successful and this has to be carried out in parts for business continuity. ECM itself has some capture tools like the FileNet capture professional which have been successful to some extent in implementing a paperless environment/solution.

STRATEGY

Datacap: This tool has good capability of OCR and ICR built in. The task definition helps to create a process which would include several components and interactions between them. It also provides interfaces where document management systems can be plugged in. It already has a built in interface with FileNet repository which means that once the paper document is digitized it can be pushed into the ECM system with ease. There are several output formats to which a document can be rendered and one of those is a searchable PDF document. This when pushed into the FileNet repository will be available for full text indexing and therefore available for content based retrieval.

Business Process Management

A business process is a set of activities performed by people and machines to achieve a business goal. Business processes have been used as long as businesses have been in existence because every aspect of a business involves processes. Organizations achieve their objectives by implementing and controlling a diverse set of business processes. Most of these processes are not automated, or are only partially automated. Business process management involves techniques and tools to manage and automate business processes that are performed by people, applications, and external sources. Automating and streamlining business processes helps organizations to get the work done effectively and efficiently. Managing, transforming, and optimizing business processes are the primary focus of business process management.

An ideal business process management solution should provide the following basic functions:

Process automation

Workflow

Integration with external systems and applications

Process optimization

STRATEGY

FileNet BPM: FileNet Business Process Manager (BPM) enables organizations to create, modify, manage, simulate, and analyze business processes. One of the key advantages of FileNet Business Process Manager is its ability to work with active content.

Active content refers to the ability of content to trigger or affect business processes. For example, content such as a loan application or a claim application, received via fax, e-mail, or Web, can trigger a process in FileNet Business Process Manager to process the loan or claim automatically. Active content includes the delivery of information in a way that is more unified, accurate, and contextual to the business processes. It enables a wide variety of process management scenarios.

FileNet Business Process Manager can be used in many areas, including banking, insurance, manufacturing, health industry, and government. Examples in the banking and insurance industries include applications for processing loans, claims, credit card approvals and policy underwriting.

There are other bpm products within and FileNet does support connectivity to these, however the limitations need to be assessed before proposing any of them.

Case Management

Certain business applications performed by knowledge workers require a great deal of flexibility, adaptability, control and collaboration to achieve successful outcomes. Traditional enterprise content management (ECM) systems and the structured control of business process management (BPM) are insufficient to meet the requirements of these applications. In certain domains, such as health care, insurance, and the legal profession, case management is fairly well understood. The case management approach, however, can be successfully applied to a broad set of business applications, giving knowledge workers and businesses the capabilities they need to achieve their business objectives.

Case management is built around the concept of processing a case, a collection of information and coordinated tasks, by knowledge workers (or case workers) to achieve a desired outcome.

STRATEGY

Case Manager: Case Manager enables users to manage structured and unstructured processes and content in dynamic, highly collaborative, and flexible ways. Case Manager supports the agile methodology by providing an environment in which users can design, develop, validate, and test case solutions iteratively. Case Manager also provides a rich set of tools for administration, template management, import and export of solutions, and for transferring solutions from a development environment to a production environment.

It also provides the capability of integration with rules management like ILog JRules, forms processing like P8 eForms and IBM Forms, analysis tool like Cognos RTM, collaboration like sametime, etc…

Records ManagemenT

In a corporate environment, documents are created or captured in a decentralized environment with no overall oversight. Documents are named and filed according to the individual’s preferences and often are subject to duplication. Documents might be kept for too long, which can lead to increased storage cost. If litigated, companies must spend resources to locate documents (eDiscovery). The best practice is being able to dispose of records according to an auditable schedule, thus reducing the eDiscovery scope and production costs. In certain cases, companies cannot locate the documents or cannot locate them within the required time, which can lead to financial penalty, sanctions, or worse, damage to a company’s reputation.

The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 154891 2001 standard defines records management as "The field of management responsible for the efficient and systematic control of the creation, receipt, maintenance, use and disposition of records, including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records."

STRATEGY

Enterprise Records: FileNet Records Manager is designed to uniquely combine content, process, and connectivity into a compliance infrastructure to automate and streamline records-based activities, eliminate unnecessary user participation, enforce compliance, and create business advantage through a compelling return on investment.

The key differentiator in FileNet Records Manager is its innovative ZeroClick technology, which is designed to enforce records management policies without additional workload or participation from users. ZeroClick eliminates user-related error, reduces time and cost factors, and most importantly, ensures best practice records management. FileNet Records Manager supports the full lifecycle of records. Enforcement and compliance become both achievable and cost-effective.

Web Content Management

"A web content management system (WCMS) is a software system that provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools designed to allow users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages to create and manage website content with relative ease."

STRATEGY

ECM IConS: The future strategy for web content management is to continue enabling the adoption of ECM IConS for more adopters by lowering the adoption costs and shortening the adoption lifecycle, allowing even the small websites to have the content managed by ECM IConS at a cost that is competitive with the basic solutions they may have already had in place.

Proposed solution and ECM’s role

Data model: Develop a hospital data model with the help of health care consultant and incorporate the same in the FileNet Repository which would store information about patients including several parameters.

Processes: Define the process for each appointment which would start from the support staff and extend upto the doctors. These processes can be bifurcated further into the type of appointments taking place such as a simple OPD consultation to a surgery. These workflows would then be implemented using the FileNet BPM suite.

Case management: Using the Advanced Case Management tool the appointments can be modeled as a case. The workflows defined about would be tied to each of these cases. The attributes of the patients will be tied to the case. One such attribute can act as a differentiator (primary key) to identify an individual which can be a SSN in US or a passport number in other countries. When a patient visits the doctor he/she can pull up all the related cases and get the medical history.

Physical Records Management: The records currently in the paper format cannot be managed either by scanning and uploading into the FileNet system. This would require effort of digitization and subsequent upload as well. Another way of handling this would be to use the PRM tool. The assumptions here would be that the records are being managed in warehouses and are charged in and charged out under some supervision. The entries for the records can then be created into the RM system which can be used for lookup and search from portals.

Analytics: The Cognos BI component which forms the part of the ACM suite can be used to create reports/dashboards to the management which can have a sneak preview on the various cases being addressed and other parameters for the smooth day to day functioning.