How do you manage the unmanageable? Documents, whether paper or digital, are everywhere and each year businesses create more content than all of the materials currently contained in the Library of Congress. You know that this content should be treated as an asset—with a lifecycle and process to manage it better. However, the pace of content growth, combined with the prevalent method of sharing through email attachments, means information moves in, out, and around organizations with little manage¬ment or control.

You know there must be a more efficient way to automate key processes like document approval, expense report routing, approval of training and accounts payable, yet you still use email and continue to route print documents despite the inefficiency and errors involved. Even though the fact that process automation would benefit your business, the large expense and time-to-deploy keeps you from acting.

The good news is that enterprise content management (ECM) applications address these and many other business challenges. Proven ECM technologies improve the effectiveness and efficiency of information flow within your business, which then ensures that the right information gets to the right person when and where they need it without compromising privacy and security of intellectual property. Unfortunately, many buyers, either at the department or enterprise level, find these systems expensive or overly confusing. Even if the decision has been made that ECM, or document manage¬ment, can solve big problems for your organization, you may wonder how you can complete the implementation, or where you will find the funds for the project. At this point, on-demand, or Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based document management might become of interest.

While no guide is absolute, we have provided some prac¬tical questions to consider as you evaluate your proj¬ect. Each question addresses a different facet of the SaaS advantage. If you find that your project shares several of these characteristics, a SaaS solution can deliver great project success at a dramatically lower cost than deployed software. If you find that few of the characteristics apply, then an on-premises solution may be best for you.

Test 1: The Breadth Test
Q: Do you need a solution that integrates many differ¬ent ECM components? If your application does need one or more components not often found in an off-the-shelf and integrated package, SaaS is a good option. Examples include:

• The ability to receive and send faxes directly from the application
• Optical character recognition (OCR) to transform faxes and scanned materials into text-searchable documents
• Scanner integration to convert paper documents into electronic content
• E-forms for combining form-based data with other docu¬ments, or for augmenting document processes with structured data
• Zone OCR to read specific fields on forms and to extract key information for indexing and organizing content
• Advanced workflow for document-centric process automation

Integration costs for these components in a deployed software model will introduce complexities and time delay. Customizing the various user interfaces to work in tandem is often challenging, and if you don’t use these components frequently, justifying the expense is difficult. By integrating mul¬tiple technologies once and distributing the cost among all users, SaaS typically delivers broader functionality than other options at a dramatically lower cost.

Test 2: The Speed Test
Q: Do you need a solution that functions, not in three months or a year, but right now? Most traditional software projects follow a proven process: analysis, RFP if in need of a new vendor, vendor selection, and then implementation. This process has worked well for decades, but it requires months to complete. Another variable to consider is the number of organizations that may be involved: IT to perform the analysis; purchasing and legal to negotiate the deal; software ven¬dors to promote their solutions; system integrators, VARs, or internal IT to design and implement the cus¬tomizations; and training to make end users produc¬tive.

In many situa¬tions, whether due to competitive pressures, project timeframes, the need for immediate results or all of the above, you don’t have months or even weeks to allow for the standard process, and the looming risk of delay is unacceptable. You need an answer and you need it now. If your situation fits this description, a SaaS document management solution is well-suited for your project. You can often evaluate a SaaS solution for a trial period in which you receive 30 - 70 percent of your final configura¬tion. If you subscribe to a SaaS solution after a trial period, final deployment is further expedited because your busi¬ness process is already largely configured.

SaaS solutions are developed to meet the majority of many industry specific needs. Due to the fact that these develop¬ment efforts involve input and refinement from hundreds of customers, SaaS solutions deliver comprehensive func¬tionality right out-of-the-box.

With a SaaS solution, you can literally be up-and-run¬ning in hours. You simply have to define the amount of users and provide their email addresses, and then the system alerts them to initiate their accounts. The high¬est quality solutions will also offer extensive, configurable capabilities that enable you to modify key aspects of the application’s appearance and to better suit your individual needs. If rapid deployment is your key project criterion, SaaS offers undeniable benefits.

Test 3: The Cash Flow Test
Q: Is your project restricted to a limited budget, or do you want to limit your upfront budget and link cash outlays to the benefits received? Implementing a new software system in any company involves effort and costs. Regardless of the promises software vendors give of low license fees, the cost of implementing a traditional document management system involves much more than just purchasing and installing software. In simple terms, a rough estimate of your five-year cost may be six times the application software license costs. The reason becomes evident when you consider the varied costs associated with a deployed document management software solution.

By comparison, the SaaS model eliminates virtually all these costs and replaces them with a modest monthly fee. This monthly fee is usually contingent upon the number of users in an account or a similar measure that increases only as deployment, use or other success criteria flourish. The advantages of this approach include no large up-front cost or cumbersome budget approval process, no annual maintenance fees, and a direct link between the value the solution provides and how much you pay.

Test 4: The Evolving Needs Test
Q: Is it critical that your software application evolve easily as your needs change and new technologies emerge? With deployed software packages you incur the cost of maintaining and updating the applica¬tion. However, one of the biggest surprises with deployed software packages is the difficulty created when launch¬ing new functionality or installing a new version, which is primarily due to the customization required for deployed software.

Although these customizations enhance the utility of the software, the more extensive customizations often cannot be automatically migrated to the next version of the under¬lying document management software upon upgrade. As a result, when the application package is upgraded, the company faces one of two choices—either to upgrade the application at high cost and experience delay as the new features are evaluated, or to continue using the older version of the software package without taking advantage of the upgrade.

SaaS can eliminate this frustration because upgrades are applied at the data center and avail¬able to all users immediately with no installation or delay. The administrator can often approve upgrades through configuration screens, and as there is no software to install at each client site, software upgrades may be made more fre¬quently. Because they access the same core appli¬cation, new ideas and feature refinement feedback benefits the entire user community.

Test 5: The 80/20 Test
Q: Can you accomplish your goals with an 80 percent solution—one that provides all the key functionality that you need but maybe not every bell and whistle that you desire? One of the SaaS model’s key differentiators is its use of the same software application for all clients. This is opposed to traditional ASPs that took a commercial package, customized it for each client, and then ran each customer’s software in its own environment. As explained above, a SaaS solution will benefit from the collective wisdom of the market and evolve more quickly to meet the changing needs of the majority of customers.

However, even thought SaaS solutions tend to be expandable, some SaaS functions may be configured differently than a custom solution. In addition, some applications may require specialized functionality that a SaaS application cannot provide, even with integration and configuration. To understand which side of this line on which your application falls, we suggest that you utilize a six-step process:

1. Write a definition of what you want to accomplish, which includes the other systems, facilities, groups and companies that will affect the proposed application.
2. Sketch the workflow of the business process, detailing what happens at each stage.
3. Focus on the business processes you need to support, not the technical details.
4. Share the definition with the vendors you are evaluat¬ing. You can conduct this initial research through a formal request for proposal or an informal email.
5. Request a demonstration of the SaaS system as it applies to your requirements.
6. Carefully evaluate the vendor’s ability to meet those requirements.

After such an evaluation, you should have a clear idea of how much coverage the SaaS application will provide. Ultimately, it is a tradeoff between the incremental benefit of a truly customized solution and the cost, deployment, and evolution benefits of SaaS.

--Dan Carmel brings more than 20 years of executive lead¬ership experience to SpringCM . Prior to joining SpringCM as CEO, Dan was president and CEO of Itemfield; vice president and general manager of the Legal/Professional Services business unit for Interwoven; and vice president of marketing and business development for iManage.

During Dan’s career he has been instrumental in guiding new ventures to become market leaders in CRM (Vantive), Internet Commerce (Selectica), and International Payments (Sonnet Financial). Dan holds a BS and MS in mechanical engineering and applied mechanics from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.