Jo Caudron,
Founder,
Duval Union
Consulting
INFORMATION CAPTURE
PRINT
IT
RESELLER.UK
Going through the phases
15
Held every two years, the Fujitsu
Information Capture Conference
(ICC) is an important event for the
scanner manufacturer’s reseller and
partner community. Over two days
in September, Fujitsu welcomed
more than 400 people to this year’s
ICC, which took place in Waterloo,
London. As well as highlighting new
solutions, the event gave delegates
an insight into key trends in content
management.
The ICC is part of Fujitsu’s programme
of channel education, which it sees as
fundamental to future growth. Indeed,
in his opening address Mike Nelson, Vice
President at PFU (EMEA) Ltd, pointed out
that resellers who attended the 2014 event
enjoyed an additional 12 million euros of
scanner sales in the year of the conference
–and as much as 30 million euros when
you take into account other services and
ancillary equipment such as storage.
So what was there to learn this year?
Jo Caudron, founder of Duval Union
Consulting, set the scene by explaining
how we are entering the third wave of
digital disruption. Unlike the first wave in
1995, which transformed the music, video
and photography sectors, and the second
wave in 2005, which impacted print
media, TV, travel and HR sectors, Caudron
warned that the third wave was touching
every industry, including retail, healthcare,
automotive, finance, education, telecoms,
FMCG, food, banking and insurance.
Evidence of this transformation
was revealed by changing ‘business
touchpoints’ e.g. the transition from
meeting room to conference room to
virtual reality; from paper storage to digital
storage to the cloud; from paper to PDF to
real-time smart data; and from the office to
home office to new ways of working.
Caudron pointed out that the rate of
change was deceptive. Because businesses
are adopting digitisation at different rates,
a supplier could convince themselves that
it was possible to carry on as normal losing
only a few customers each year. To them,
he put the question ‘what percentage of
customers can you afford to lose year after
year?’.
He added that the need to support
customers at every stage of the digital
adoption curve means that businesses
must master the old world and the new.
Phase Three
John Mancini, chief evangelist of AIIM,
made the same point in the context of
electronic content management. He
argued that because successive stages in
the evolution of document and content
management don’t replace what has
gone before but are layered on top,
organisations will have to connect the dots
between traditional ECM systems and new,
third wave mobile solutions.
In his keynote presentation, Mancini
identified the three distinct phases of
content management that have emerged
over the last 35 years:
Phase One: Document Management
and Workflow
– the automation, mainly
by Fortune 500-type organisations, of
complicated, mission-critical processes,
such as insurance policy admin and
cheque management. These solutions were
expensive, complex and highly customised.
There were no standards and people had
The new era of enterprise content management, as outlined at the
Fujitsu Information Capture Conference (ICC)
to undertake week-long training courses
to use them. This didn’t matter, said
Mancini, because typically just 1-3% of
knowledge workers in an organisation
were responsible for back-end processes.
Phase Two: Electronic Content
Management (ECM)
– by 2000
document management had morphed
into ECM. This was promoted as an
enterprise layer, but in reality it was still
driven by business departments, resulting
in knowledge silos. ECM had started to
spread down into mid-sized businesses, but
it was still mainly a big company game.
Phase Three: Mobility & the Cloud
–
in the late 2000s things started to change,
explained Mancini, as first Sharepoint
(2007) and then enterprise ‘sync and
share’ offerings like Box upset industry
price points and precipitated the shift from
ECM specialists to knowledge workers.
There was a fundamental change in how
solutions were adopted, but usability
and mobility were still a problem. Phase
Three, dominated by mobile and cloud, has
changed all this. Today, process owners can
implement their own solutions; business
processes can be ‘appified’; mobile is at
the centre and not an afterthought; and
usability is essential – any solution that
takes more than 10 minutes for people to
learn how to use is a non-starter.
Explaining the key differences between
legacy ECM systems and Phase Three
ECM systems, Mancini said: “Legacy ECM
systems are all about technology; modern
ones are all about applications. Legacy
ECM was mostly a large company thing;
now it’s relevant to just about any size of
company. In the legacy era, usability and
mobility were an afterthought; now they
are core. In legacy land we said ‘someday’
about the cloud; today people want the
cloud now. We went from an environment
where IT was buying technology to one in
which businesses are buying applications
(Gartner says that by 2020 80% of the
IT spend will be by the business rather
than IT). We’ve gone from a legacy world
of costly, very complex integrations to
one in which people want to configure
not customise. And, lastly, the focus has
gone from 24-36 month projects that
set out to change everything to modest,
application-specific improvements that can
The need to
support
customers at
every stage
of the digital
adoption
curve
means that
businesses
must master
the old world
and the new
Continued...
