2014/12/25 07:00:00

Agile ECM

For any new event or paradigm, there are always prerequisites that led to their appearance. There were also prerequisites for Agile ECM (can be translated as a 'flexible, easily adaptable enterprise information management system'). We will conditionally divide them into two groups.

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Business Environment Changes

The first group includes changes to the business environment. Undoubtedly, one of the most important factors changing the business landscape was increased competition in almost all markets. To one degree or another, this is due to continued globalization, when borders between countries are erased and foreign competitors come to previously closed national markets. This creates the unification of business processes, in turn facilitating the penetration of new transnational players. Another feature of mature markets, which cannot but be noted, is the high professionalism of the players. They require thorough knowledge of the market, its requests, the ability to offer sought-after products and services. And for serious promotion, super-efforts are needed - to bring a product or service that is revolutionary or anticipating the current requirements of customers to the market. Even to maintain the current position, companies must constantly improve their products, invest solid funds in their own development.

It is no secret that in a number of industries, market regulators have established extremely strict rules for participants. Moreover, these requirements are constantly expanding and tightening. There are also industry-specific rules, for example, for public companies, in the field of taxation, etc. And the companies themselves assume "increased obligations," striving to meet requirements that are not mandatory, but indicate the maturity of the organization and the high level of products or services (ISO group of standards, MoReq requirements, etc.).

Finally, the third factor that can be attributed to external is the increasing flow of information. Company archives grow by 25% annually, the total volume of paper documents in the United States alone exceeds 4 000 000 000 000 (four trillion), each year this figure increases by 880 billion copies. Companies have to process and store more and more documents, manage more and more. This not only increases the direct cost of information management, but also complicates compliance and discovery tasks.

Thus, the increasing competition, pressure from regulators and the growth in the volume of information processed are far from a complete list of external factors that change the conditions for business.

Changing the business paradigm

The second group of prerequisites for emergence Agile ECM is the changed paradigm of doing business, including the style of managing a company. Vertically hierarchical structures are replaced by network structures that unite enthusiastic employees around leaders. This process also affected large companies, monolithic teams of which are transformed into small initiative teams connecting to the vertical through their leaders. Commands can be created on an ongoing basis or for specific tasks. In the latter case, we are talking about the design style of management.

In addition to the management style, the nature of interaction in companies is changing. The number of horizontal connections is growing, and the communications themselves increasingly resemble a social network. In a work environment that is set up for effective interaction, it is quite common practice to send a task not only to your colleagues, but also to the manager, from linear to general.

And another factor that should not be forgotten is the "mobilization" of users of corporate information systems. More and more employees work remotely (at home, on business trips, in branches scattered around the world), using all kinds of mobile devices. Both the vendors of information systems and the companies themselves have to answer this time challenge by creating and maintaining communication channels, applications and services for remote work.

So, the main internal factors of changing the business environment can be considered changes in the style of management, the nature of interaction, the widespread use of social technologies and the increasing mobility of workers.

How Agile ECM Solves Time Calls

The changing business environment under the influence of internal and external factors dictates new requirements for enterprise information systems, especially those that support the company's business processes, provide their participants with the information necessary for making decisions. Such information systems undoubtedly include ECM systems.

The concept of Agile ECM appeared as a response to time calls. The ECM system must adapt to a constantly changing business environment, support new styles and management methods, while maintaining control over the progress of business processes, clarity and regularity of their execution. Several features inherent in Agile ECM can be distinguished.

Support for flexible business processes

The main value Agile ECM is the ability to quickly adapt the system to changing business processes. To survive, companies have to respond to changing business conditions and, as a result, rebuild their own. business processes Agile ECM allows you to change business rules without significant costs, reconfigure existing typical routes and create new ones. This flexibility must be embedded not only in the architecture of the system, but also in its ideology.

Include content in business processes

As a recent study has shown, IDC knowledge workers spend up to 50% of their time searching for information. To improve efficiency, it is vital to reduce the time required to find the right information and documents. Ideally, all information should be available without search. The novelty Agile ECM is that ECM is no longer considered as a passive document repository. In Agile ECM, content is initially included in, the business processes execution environment of which contains all necessary, documents instructions, support and methodological materials.

Focus on solving business problems

There is still a misconception that ECM systems solve auxiliary administrative tasks, such as: registration of incoming and outgoing documents, organization of archival storage, etc. According to the concept of Agile ECM, the key to the success of the ECM project is that the key business processes of the company are automated first of all. This seriously expands the geography of the project, the focus is not on clerks, but on information workers. The ECM system is now an infrastructure tool that ensures the joint efficiency of the company's employees, and the use of ECM itself becomes the key to the fact that business tasks will be solved effectively, and management will receive a mechanism for controlling executive discipline, will be able to keep its hand on the pulse of the company.

Rapid application development

The modern ECM system is a platform for developing content-oriented applications. Agile ECM will allow you to develop an ECM application without significant effort and without involving a vendor in a short time. Development should be carried out in a friendly environment, with a minimum of programming. The lower the involvement of vendor or integrator employees, the more the system complies with the concept of Agile ECM.

The applications being developed should provide easy and efficient access to the content stored in the ECM system with maximum performance and flexibility of business processes.

Fast System Implementation

Modern companies cannot afford a months-long implementation of an information system. This means that Agile ECM you must have the quality of being able to implement quickly. This target requirement is broken down into a number of more detailed requirements:

intuitive interface and system logic. The system does not require costly and long-term user training;
Complex actions in the system should be broken down into simple, understandable steps;
availability of built-in help and training materials in the system.

In addition, quick implementation of the system is possible using business solutions, which are a ready-made technical consulting product, which will be adapted without significant costs to individual customer requests.

Mobile and Remote Support

As mentioned above, today's business realities are such that more and more users are working remotely, using both traditional computers and all kinds of mobile devices. Agile ECM must be able to work remotely over the Internet in Web access mode. Support for mobile users means that the mobile interface of the system must support the design restrictions inherent in mobile devices, as well as possible restrictions on the speed of Internet connection and the amount of data transmitted. As practice shows, the most effective ways to organize mobile work are to create mobile web access and develop applications for mobile OS, which allow mobile users to perform basic operations: view and review documents, perform tasks and send tasks, work with reference data.

Summary

Agile ECM is a new stage in ECM development. This is an ideology that was a response to new market requirements, changed conditions of the business environment, as well as new business practices. ECM systems implementing the ideology of Agile ECM will allow business to quickly respond to changes in the business environment, adapt to changing company management methods and styles, organize the work of both small project teams and large teams. Agile ECM will allow you to transform your business processes to new requirements with the least effort. At the same time, the qualities originally inherent in ECM systems are not lost: monitoring the execution of business processes, predictability and clarity of their passage.