User talk:Trygved

Does your company have a document strategy?

There are many companies in different sizes that have problems answering this question. If I ask about the strategic thoughts around storage, network, servers or PCs, I often get a long speech with solid arguments for the choices made. If I ask about printers, faxes, scanners or multifunctional products (MFP’s), I often get an answer saying that printers are the IT department’s responsibility, whereas copiers and MFP’s are handled by the purchasing department. Why haven’t organizations considered document handling as one strategic area that needs to be aligned? Gartner Group states that document management is the last bastion within corporations that hasn’t been audited, and any company can save at least 30% by consolidating the document platform.

In order to consolidate, it is clear that the responsibility for choosing the new platform must be done by one department and not several. The purchasing department often has long and strong relations to the copier vendors, whereas IT has the same relations towards the printer vendors. The question is which one should have the mandate to run the project, and what would be the key evaluation criteria’s. In my opinion the choice of responsibility is quite easy. As long as the platform is networked and needs to be administrated, the responsibility falls within IT. As to criteria’s, the most commonly accepted are price, service level and performance. These criteria’s are often called open cost as the can be seen in the balance sheet. On the other hand, Gartner Group, HP and IDC have mentioned what is referred to as hidden cost. These costs are estimated to be 50% of the total investment, but are rarely addressed. The most important according to Garner and hp are::

Administration: A document platform must be administrated through one tool build on an open standard. If the vendor uses a proprietory management system only able to manage its own HW and SW platform, it means you are stuck with one vendor only. Make sure the management tool has multi vendor support, and is built on an open standard.

Network traffic Driver language and technical architecture design determines the size of the files transported through the network. The challenge is the limitations to the network, which makes it impossible to transport larger files without jamming the network. Research made on network traffic has discovered that over 60% is related to print and scan. In that sense the driver architecture and compression technology should be an important selection criteria.

Downtime There is a difference in downtime and the agreed repair time. What counts is the total uptime of the platform, and not only how fast a faulty machine has been fixed. Ability to measure total downtime and agree on the terms and conditions with the selected vendor is important.

Security More than once I have read in the newspaper about sensitive information falling into the wrong hands. A while ago, there was a story in a Norwegian news paper about a consultant working on a workforce reduction program at a quite large company. After sending the document to the printer, the consultant suddenly received a phone call and forgot to pick up the print. The one picking it up was the workers union leader…. Security has become more and more important for all businesses, and need to be addressed when a new platform is implemented.

Next time you consider investing in a new document management platform, my recommendation is to contact specialists which can assess your organization reel needs. Remember that document management is a vital part of your IT strategy, and need to be handled by skilled IT people. Do not copy the tender you used last time. Search for new ways of doing things with new digital technology. The possibility to achieve a competitive advantage combined with a reduction in cost is just waiting for your action.

A document strategy
A document strategy has been proposed for deletion. An editor felt this information might be based on your own conclusions or research, rather than published ideas. Please review No original research for the relevant policy. If you can improve the article to address these concerns, please do so, citing sources.

If no one objects to the deletion within five days by removing the "prod" notice, the article may be deleted without further discussion. If you remove the prod notice, the deletion process will stop, but if an editor is still not satisfied that the article meets Wikipedia guidelines, it may be sent to Articles for deletion for consensus. NickelShoe (Talk) 04:51, 15 December 2006 (UTC)