Service Bureaus: The Unheralded Heroes of Our Industry

I just spent three days with a group of people who are dedicated, smart, hard-working, knowledgeable, and all the other superlatives you can think of – they are the people who own and work in the d... read more

SharePoint Alternative?

If you had been hiding under a rock for the past few years and were just starting to search for a collaborative content management system, you may get the impression that SharePoint is the only pro... read more

Security and the Cloud - Still an Issue?

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I was at a cloud conference last week and “security” was again a top issue for both attendees and developers. Quite frankly, I was surprised. Several days later I read a blog about cloud computing ... read more

Homeland Security Snooping on Facebook, Twitter, maybe this Blog

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Fast Company had an interesting report today about the Department of Homeland Security social media monitoring project. Link can be found below. While details are sketchy, and it is not clear w... read more

Is there an ROI in Your Cloud Strategy?

Is a cloud-based collaboration system in your strategy but those pesky accounting people want an ROI study? A content information management (CIM) system may be more difficult to calculate the ROI ... read more

Defining Cloud Information Management (CIM) Systems

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Are you looking into cloud information management (CIM) systems and getting confused? Are social networking sites also document management sites? Is storing files in a cloud storage application col... read more

It’s 2012 – Prepare for the Cloud!

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Is 2012 the year to start thinking about moving part or all ECM functions into the cloud? I know the word “cloud” is beginning to (has?) be overexposed but nevertheless, cloud technologies offer gr... read more

Where is Cloud Computing Going?

The news about cloud computing is astonishing – new companies are appearing almost daily, new services are being developed and offered, existing companies are quickly filling holes in their product... read more

Cloud Collaboration – What are the Benefits? Or, Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?

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Since my last blog about cloud collaboration and how easy it is to get started, I’ve been cruising some of the vendor’s web sites and several things have really made me think more about this phenom... read more

Cloud Collaboration: Get Started Go Viral

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Location, Location, Location is the saying and today the location for document management and collaboration is in….”The Cloud.” If you use a document management system, or struggle with a shared dr... read more

Plus Ça change, plus c'est la même chose

The more things change, the more they stay the same….. As part of client work that I am involved with, I have been interviewing other companies that have SharePoint installed and are actually u... read more

It’s the Users... An Old Story Repeated Many Times

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How many times have we talked and written about making the User the center of attention when implementing a new technology? In several recent engagements, I’ve found that the implemented system has... read more

PG&E Pays the Penalty for Poor Record Keeping - Again

In a new twist to the PG&E record keeping story, the San Francisco Chronicle reported today that, “Pacific Gas and Electric Co. was told by a record-keeping manager nearly two decades ago that the ... read more

Those Darn RFPs %$&@!!!

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Those darn RFPs - can’t live with them and can’t live without them. A friend sent me a blog about RFPs and how they are useless and a waste of time. The writer of the blog goes on to say that compa... read more

PG&E Misses Key Deadline to Produce Records

“Pacific Gas & Electric has acknowledged it will miss a key deadline by more than a year to produce documents on the history of weld problems over the past 55 years in its gas transmission system…I... read more

Redaction = ROI for Document Imaging Systems

In talking with a potential client last week, the client was interested in how ROI can be achieved and what other benefits can be realized through a document imaging system implementation. I used t... read more

The Future of ECM and RM

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Actually, the future is already here – cloud-based everything. And by everything, I mean simple to complex cloud storage, simple to complex cloud-based applications (and storage), and even a cloud-... read more

PG&E Update

Since my last post, the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has made several interesting rulings on PG&E’s inability to provide documentation and records on their in-ground gas transmissio... read more

Backfile Conversion Boot Camp

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In a recent conversation I had with a fellow consultant, he believes that only 11% of the businesses that could use document imaging actually are employing document imaging systems. This correlates... read more

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure?

In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle last week, “PG&E admitted that it would never be able to find all records for about one-third of its 1,800-plus miles of urban gas-transmission pipes.”*... read more

Do You Have a Paper Problem?

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Do You Have a Paper Problem? At some point in your business and office routines, you may realize that paper documents are not efficient and are causing problems for a variety of reasons. The pa... read more

The Devil's Triangle

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I was reading about a document management project fiasco and one of the bloggers introduced the concept of The Devil’s Triangle (TDT). Briefly, TDT is a relationship between three participants in a... read more

Don't blame box.net...

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or Huddle, or Amazon, or Google, or all the other emerging cloud-based document management collaboration applications. (note to self, don’t show your age by using document management.) I attend... read more

If you need a machine and don’t buy it, you pay for it without getting it….Henry Ford

Metaphorically speaking, scanning paper into digital files is the machine that many companies are not buying but ultimately paying for over and over again. Paper sitting in vast storage warehouses,... read more

Why ECM Projects Cost More Than Expected

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I was speaking with a potential client who said that one of their procurement problems was that project costs tended to grow and once started on the upward spiral, they were hard to control. I aske... read more

Document Imaging, SaaS, and a Service Bureau – An Excellent Starting Point

I have recently had several clients who wanted to get started with document imaging but didn’t have a big budget and lots of business or technical resources. I thought this was a perfect opportunit... read more