Woolworth’s. American Motors. Circuit City. Rexall.
The litany of closed, bought out, or just defunct U.S. companies is long and replete with once proud and popular names. Some were victims of changing tastes and times, others may have morphed because of failure – or success – into other, unrecognizable entities.
For many, the record of their existence is the memories of customers who moved on, but still recall the names. Yellowing advertisements buried in library collections and hard to find may be the only solid evidence left that any of these companies existed at all.
Memories fail, too, and paper dries and crumbles to dust. That’s why more and more companies and agencies are investing in content management, business process improvement and simple electronic archive systems. The immediacy and permanency of the digital record, easily transferable to other formats as technology evolves, guarantees the records will always be there, through all the changes.
The more things change, the saying goes, the more they stay the same. Thanks to evolving technology, that’s truer than ever.
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Has this happened to you? You call customer service and are asked to enter your account number through your phone keypad. Then, when you reach a customer service rep, you’re asked for your account number again!
If you’ve already given this information once, why should you have to do it again?
Having to repeat account information is a redundant input task, which is contrary to good processes. It suggests a lack of system and data cohesion in the organization. Good, reliable access to information creates efficiency and customer satisfaction. Without that access, you get delays, uncertainty, and mistakes. In other words, process failure, delays, customer disappointment.
Information is at the heart of every business and government process workflow. Organizations with systems that don’t talk to each other or share data don’t make much sense these days.
What’s the hold up?
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If you’ve been reading the reviews about Apple’s new iPad, you may have recognized a familiar theme. Reviewers spend most of their time either praising or criticizing the amount of content available through the iPad rather than the device itself. They recognize that regardless how cool the device is, content is what users really want.
We’ve been making this same point for years about document management projects. We’ve watched a good many purchasers buy granddaddy content management systems for all the bells and whistles when what their users really needed (and wanted) was more basic and far less expensive.
The truth is, most users don’t use the “shiny, sparkly” features that only add cost to those big old document management systems. Mostly, they just want to capture, store, retrieve, and share documents. The tragedy is that after the bloated purchase price and overlong, expensive implementation, the customer runs out of money for the content conversion of all the paper documents needed to populate the system!
Image API’s “Start Specific, Scale Specific” approach, backed by the most advanced .NET iCenter content management system available, lets government and business clients get what they need, when they need it. Sure, we have “bells and whistles.” But these are optional modules. Our customers can address their specific requirements in a cost effective way without restricting future growth.
Oh, and there’s plenty of money left over in the budget for scanning and indexing backfile and day-forward paper documents. Afterall, content is king.
Tags: content, document management, iPad
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