"When everyone is looking for gold, it's a good time to be in the pick and shovel business." -- Mark Twain

Enterprise Content Management, by definition, is the ability to gather, organize, and distribute corporate information, regardless of its original format. The ECM industry is rapidly becoming the most highly sought after service for ’Corporate America’. Having said that, let’s first understand that ECM has no ‘vertical’ market. Simply stated, this means that there is no one type of business served better than any other. ECM can help a medical facility handle its knowledge base just as quickly and efficiently as it can help an attorney’s office manage their legal documents.

The second thing we need to recognize is that ECM has integrity. Think of it as an electronic library of knowledge. Similar to a library made of brick and mortar, once information is deposited, it becomes the central focal point for getting reliable data. In other words, you can depend on the reliability of the information because there is only one original copy, not five!

It is safe to say that ECM is not all things to all people. To be represented properly, it must be known as having a single focus; to afford a company the ability to reduce frustration in the office environment. How can it do that you say? By being a tool and by being the central repository for anything a computer can understand, staff only has to look in one place to find necessary information. Like a student doing a report, if you take them to a good library, they will find the information they need and the report will reflect it. ECM is that library! Additionally, the ECM library has security, accountability, reporting and audit-trails. Ooooh, if only the old-fashioned libraries had that kind of accountability, they would never loose a book!!

Thirdly, ECM is truly a ‘niche service’ and therefore, it needs a ‘niche market’. The interface that the end-user sees on the screen, in most cases, can be simply modified to fit the perspective niche. For example, you can address the specific needs of a medical concern with a medical ‘interface’. If you choose to modify the initial login screen to contain medical terminology, the users will believe it was created especially for them! I am not advocating deception, just perception, and positive perception at that. Now you have a niche product, addressing the niche medical market.

Lastly, ECM may be initially challenging to sell. It is not for lack of technology, but because of the business culture’s mindset. How so? Because corporate America still does not fully understand and accept a ‘paperless society’ or ‘automation’ in general. This is why we call it a niche. Perhaps ‘it’ is not as much the niche as the prospect you are looking for as a ‘niche’. The ideal candidate for ECM automation is youthful or more aggressive towards technology with a fairly high impetus to move in this direction.

It might be that in the past, they have lost a document that has cost them a tremendous amount of time, money or aggravation. We still must face the facts that even among those who are receptive, ECM represents a significant change in the accepted way of how documents are stored and handled. To offset the anxiety, we must show an apprehensive market how controlled document management is a gold mine, and that ECM is the 21^st Century’s pick and shovel industry.

Introduction recap:

1. ECM has no ‘vertical’ market - making it applicable to all.
2. ECM has integrity. Like a library –you can count on it.
3. It can be adapted to the audience, allowing it to fill a niche.
4. Sales can be challenging due to engrained corporate culture.

Regarding conducting an ECM needs assessment, the last class I taught actually taught me something that I want to share. Turns out there are actually two struggles that impede the success of both the sale and the proper implementation of a document management system.

1. Many [not all] ‘Solution Specialists’ aren’t properly trained and really don’t have the right tools to go onsite and gather the business requirements proficiently.
2. Many [not all] ‘Sales Reps’ don’t know how to ask to get paid for conducting the assessment [ouch].

Lets think these through:

1. SE’s or technicians are thrown into the fire and asked to ‘survey’ what the customer’s business and technical requirements are in regards to imaging. Most of their experience is with the output side (printing) and now they need to fully understand the input side of the workflow. So.. the tools they are likely to use are fabricated from existing output surveys, or worse yet; they quickly make a spreadsheet, guess at the questions, and hope it gathers enough data that when the system is configured it will meet most of the client’s requirements. KEY: Proper training and professional software toolkits can eliminate this dilemma and ensure the solution will fit the need [happy customer, happy vendor].
2. Most sales reps are experienced in ‘transactional’ selling. More frequently called ‘box-selling’ wherein the rep has a brief engagement with the prospect, qualifies, sells and moves on to the next opportunity. Now they are expected to realize this was yesterday’s way of selling, and today it is all about solution selling. In order to do this you must know the business requirements. To do that you must do an assessment. If you send expertly trained, certified staff to conduct the interviews you will have to pay them. The rep has to explain that to the prospect and ask to get paid. This changes the outcome from “your opinion” [done for free] to a professional observation [paid for]. The later will be taken seriously! KEY: Build the rep’s confidence and belief structure and he will see the value and not be afraid to ask to get paid [motivating training is needed].

I ask you: “What can CDIA+ do for you?” Before you finish reading this blog post, you will certainly know the answer to this question. Whether you are a document imaging professional interested in your personal professional success, a leader or manager with a vested interest in the success of your electronic document management (EDM) sales or service firm, or a records manager responsible for compliance, CDIA+ can do something for you.

First, let’s answer a more fundamental question: What is CDIA+? The Certified Document Imaging Architect (or CompTIA CDIA+) credential is an internationally-recognized credential for professionalism and competency in the document imaging industry; it is the leading standard when it comes to document imaging. In the mid-1990s, the Computer Trade Industry Association (CompTIA) and industry leaders recognized a need for establishing a global standard of proficiency for document imaging professionals. With support and assistance from industry professionals, CompTIA launched the CDIA program in 1995.

The exam itself was designed to test the candidate’s knowledge in the technical, interpersonal, and management aspects of developing and implementing EDM solutions. The exam is divided into five domains, weighted to represent the relative importance of each domain to the job requirements of an experienced document imaging professional. The domains and their corresponding weight are summarized below.

Whether or not you are a healthcare service provider, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) will have an impact on your business, because it has an impact on the document imaging that improves your business operations.

The purpose of HIPAA is to protect patients’ rights to privacy of their medical information. HIPAA has very strict security requirements regarding access to medical files, including:

• File encryption
• Access controls
• Tracking mechanisms
• Alarm reporting

Document imaging provides the best method to carry out the document management conditions described in HIPAA. Document imaging service companies, therefore, have been working to make their services fully compliant with current HIPAA regulations.

In the previous article, we discussed selling the EDM needs assessment. We succeeded—it’s sold, now what do we do? In this brief article we will highlight the technical and logistical considerations of conducting an EDM needs assessment. It’s one thing to sell the process; we have to deliver on our promises if we have any chance at selling the entire solution. Remember, the needs assessment has two purposes: designing the optimal solution to meet the customer’s business and functional requirements, and selling that solution. Keep in mind, the solution is NOT just technology—but part of a business solution. More on this later…

Where do we start? The first requirement is to establish your point of contact (POC) and chain of communication. The vendor/consultant project manager must have a single project point of contact on the customer side to coordinate the assessment itinerary. The consultant will need to meet with several representatives from the customer enterprise and must be given access to applicable corporate infrastructure. We always submit two documents to our customer POC. The first document is an itinerary, listing who we need to speak to and for how long. I detail the individual surveys below. The second document we provide is a boiler-plate that the customer POC can use to inform the interviewees of the upcoming meetings. There is nothing worse than having people pulled in a room to answer your questions when they do not understand who you are and the purpose of the meetings. Both these documents are provided to our students as part of our Needs Assessment Tool-kit.

Conducting the surveys:

I just finished a 2-day needs assessment class with several dealers. I always appreciate the night-and-day change in sentiment I see in students from the start to the finish of the class. We tell them before they sign up that by the end of the class they will be able to sell a needs assessment, perform a needs assessment, and sell the solution. I know they all doubt these bold claims. However, by the end of Day 1, they are absolutely convinced that they have the knowledge and the tools they need to position and sell a needs assessment.

How do we transition them from doubters to believers, you ask? This brief article will provide some insights and information that I hope will challenge you to explore alternative methods to position and sell needs assessments with greater ease and success. Well, I can’t give you the first day of training in a single post, but here is the general framework.

I find myself teaching another CDIA+ class in beautiful So Cal. Thinking it would be another “typical” class, with students asking basic questions about imaging [in general], posing situations that require them to use the recently taught info I just gave them, and helping them ready for the certification exam. I quickly found that it was not! Turns out the class was 50% System Engineers, with many of them having real-world experience with years of actual installations! I must say “It was refreshing”! This group was taking what I was teaching, applying it to their existing client base, and finding answers to some pressing issues. They had been struggling with the ‘finer-points’ of imaging [sales and technical] and once in a classroom environment they immediately capitalized on the info I gave them, combined that with their peers’ experience and came up with real solutions [to very real problems]!

All of this warms an instructor’s heart... All kidding aside, the CDIA+ class has morphed over the last ten years into so much more than just a prep for an exam. It now addresses current sales challenges, current mind-set challenges, and helps move the document management [as well as MFP sales person] professional into the year 2010.

Perhaps you should consider joining in on a class sometime. It just might be what you need to jump your “numbers” up to where you want them to be...?

When you are performing an imaging assessment, getting an accurate document count is crucial. You need this number to size equipment, both for imaging and storage. You also need to identify the volume for both primary and exception imaging process workflows--that is the main document type and the outliers. Counting documents is both an art and a science. In fact, an experienced consultant can walk through a facility and get an accurate count with the customer hardly even recognizing that he is busy counting away. Here's an example of how I do it in the field.

I count my documents in linear feet. Whether they are on a shelf, in boxes, in file cabinets, or stacked on a desk, I estimate in feet--2,000 pages per foot to be exact. If I walk into an office with four cubes, I first ask the person giving the tour if all the docs are to be scanned. They tell me which ones to include and which to not include. Let's say for example I see about half a foot on two desks, a foot on the other two. There is 1.5 feet of files in each desk. I open a couple cabinets and see a total of four more feet. Then they have a common wall-mounted three foot three-shelf unit for a total of nine feet.

Then I write down a few other pieces of information such as % density, % duplex (and % color if the customer wants color, and other sizes if present). Let's say the shelves contain all three-ring binders and all duplex; I would estimate 50% density and 100% duplex. That gives me 9 feet x 2,000 pages x 0.5 = 9,000 pages and 18,000 images.

Let's say the remainder of documents are in folders (90% density) and only 50% are duplex. That is 13 feet x 2,000 pages, x 0.9 density = 23,400 pages and 35,100 images.

I always do ask the customer to tell me what they think they have for documents, but I also prepare estimates in the manner described in this article to ensure I get an accurate number. In fact, I once had a customer with two tractor-trailer sized roll-offs full of file boxes. They had a detailed manual count of the documents. I, in turn, performed my quick estimate and derived a number just thousands off of their number (the result was in millions of pages). This system is quick, efficient, and with a little practice, extremely accurate.

We work very closely with CompTIA, the owners of the certification for technicians called PDI+. They were looking for a good case study to share with their contemporaries, so I reached out to a training client that became certified last year after taking our online training course. Our client's original intent for the training and certification was to add another certification to their long list of credentials to show-off to their clients. They got way more than they expected!

In short, here is what our client said about PDI+:

The old days of sorting through scads of paper files are fading fast!

Medical, legal, manufacturing and government all have one thing in common. Each day they produce or generate large volumes of paper files. If you add this to the already existing load of paper in the office, you can see it fast becomes unmanageable. This is a golden opportunity for scanning solutions!

The amount of ‘unstructured data’ in the form of scanned paper files is increasing at break-neck speeds! Also, this data has increased substantially in just the last few years. Moreover, this is true for any type of business. In the age of electronic communication, information overload is endemic across the public, private and nonprofit sectors.

Organizations are confronting the fact that capturing, archiving and storing data is a major undertaking. Massive amounts of important information must somehow be captured and converted into a useful form so that it is readily accessible.