Enterprise Storage Solutions For Data & Document Management Building the electronic document warehouse By Mitchell I. Gross, President Mobius Management Systems The Gartner Group recently reported that document mismanagement claims 40% to 60% of office workers' time, 20% to 45% of labor costs and 12% to 15% of corporate revenue. Yet more than 60% of enterprises today still process, store and retrieve documents manually. While many companies have implemented sophisticated systems to manage record-based data, the transition to electronic document management has been slower and more haphazard. With 80% to 95% of corporate information located in paper and electronic documents, there is a substantial productivity gain to be realized by organizations that are willing to shift their view of information management from "data-centric" to "document-centric." When they do so, most will find that they can achieve maximum productivity gains and cost savings by developing an electronic document warehouse (EDW) to house all the documents in the enterprise, thereby making them available quickly and cost-effectively to users. In developing a strategy for an EDW, it is important to keep in mind minimum standards of flexibility, scalability, and ease of use against which to measure your implementation. These should include: Document integration-The electronic data warehouse must be able to store and present, through a single point of access, virtually any type of document, including: computer-generated character documents; computer-generated laser-printed formatted documents (LPFD), usually created using IBM AFP, Xerox DJDE Metacode, Adobe PDF, etc.; images, i.e. scanned documents converted to electronic format, such as check images; user workstation-generated documents, such as spreadsheets, word-processing documents, etc. Flexible access-Leveraging client-server architecture, the EDW must make all documents easily accessible to all users, departmentally and enterprisewide, so that users: * do not have to know where a document is located; * can retrieve all documents relevant to a topic, regardless of format; * have a consistent, unified view of all documents. Device independence-The system must support the entire life-cycle of a given document, from the moment it is created until it is no longer needed, letting you move the document from storage device to storage device, transparently to the user and without reprocessing. Device independence gives you complete freedom to implement a hierarchical storage strategy, optimizing both productivity and cost-effectiveness by weighing the need for access against cost considerations while letting you transport the document as needed. Unlimited capacity-There must be no limit on the volume of documents in the warehouse. To assure scalability, supported platforms must range from departmental servers (Windows NT, OS/2, Unix, AS/400) to mainframes (MVS). Capturing documents Building an EDW solution starts with document capture. The mode of document capture depends on the document type and its source. However you choose to capture documents, it is paramount that they are stored in their original format. Further, images should be stored as they are originally converted. That is, if they are captured in TIFF format, they should be stored as TIFF. To understand the document capture process, it is useful to divide documents into two types: computer-generated documents and non-computer-generated documents such as external correspondence, turnaround forms, applications and remittance forms. In general, computer-generated reports, statements, and other mass-produced documents are captured directly from the computer system. Because computer-generated documents are voluminous, the capture process (and subsequent archiving) should occur on the same platform on which they are created to avoid the otherwise enormous overhead incurred by downloading or transferring them to another system. Non-computer-generated documents must be converted to electronic format and indexed externally. This is accomplished using scanners and indexing work stations. Documents are placed into high-speed automatic scanners that create the electronic representation of the document. Then, the documents are identified and indexed, usually through a key entry process. Once indexed, the documents are ready for storage. Archiving The heart of an EDW is its archive engine, which stores and provides access to your documents. Its most important function is to protect your data, ensuring its availability until its usefulness expires. In order to meet the criteria for flexibility, scalability and ease of use, the archive must be implemented using client-server architecture. In a client-server EDW, processing is split across platforms for optimum efficiency and user productivity. The client presents documents to the user for viewing, analysis, and export to other desktop tools such as spreadsheets and word processors. The server houses the archive engine and responds to requests from the client. Client-server implementations in a large heterogeneous environment invariably disperse millions of documents across multiple platforms. The success of your document warehouse will depend on the ability of your archive engine to find and access documents on any server and from any storage device-that is, to find the needle in the haystack and retrieve it without searching through every haystack. To accomplish this, the archive engine must have the following important features: * EnterpriseIndexing provides a powerful look-up capability that lets you create "virtual folders" of disparate documents related to a single task or topic. You can link documents across time, across servers, across applications and across document types and present them to the user in a consistent format for viewing. It also facilitates customizing a "view" of the document archive for individual users or departments. * UniversalArchive makes device-independence possible, storing documents in an open, standard format that makes them easily portable to or from any storage medium--disk, tape, optical, CD-ROM--without reprocessing. A Universal Archive architecture "homogenizes" document storage, facilitating simultaneous random access to diverse documents, ensuring against media obsolescence and guaranteeing that you can move documents as needed. * ServerTransparency enables a user to locate and retrieve a document without knowing where it is or keeping track of its movement from server to server or device to device. From a single point of access--a Windows-based desktop--the user can access documents on any server across the enterprise--MVS, Windows NT, OS/2, Unix, AS/400--and simultaneously view documents on multiple servers in multiple formats--character, LPFD, or image. Presentation services Presentation services encompass not just viewing, but the ability to analyze, manipulate and transform the data stored in your documents to turn it into useful information. Viewing is possible with either a generic or a turnkey viewer, such as DocumentDirect from Mobius Management Systems. DocumentDirect is a desktop-based tool that provides a range of display options for viewing documents of any type stored on any server and delivered over any network, including the Internet/intranet. Once documents are brought to the user's desktop, an extraction engine can be used to pull character data out of the document for export to other desktop tools, such as databases and spreadsheets, for analysis. In short, once at the user's desktop, the data in a document can be "mined" for useful nuggets of information--it can be viewed, sorted, tabulated, queried, graphed, screened and sent to other users or other applications. "Glue" Holding together the capture, archiving and presentation elements of your EDW, you must have communications facilities to get documents to the user's workstation. To support even the simplest environment, the EDW must support all common protocols, such as TCP/IP, LU6.2, and HLLAPI. Further, the EDW must be robust enough to support a large number of accesses to documents. For long-term stability and to protect your investment, the EDW and its communication facilities should be built on an open architecture, one that is based on a feature-rich set of application program interface (API) calls, so you can interface easily to other tools and in-house applications. Results Implementing a document warehouse need not be a lengthy process. Most implementations can be accomplished relatively quickly and painlessly, even within the allotted time and budget. Moreover, the resulting benefits will far outweigh the costs. The New England, a Boston-based insurance and investment company, made on-line viewing of documents a key component of a strategy designed to reduce the costs of microfiche and report distribution while also providing improved service both internally and externally. Their system leverages the power and capacity of the mainframe to capture, store, manage and migrate reports, and delivers Windows-based functionality to the user for viewing, browsing, editing, exporting, and analyzing data. And one of the most important benefits has come from opportunities to re-engineer workflow processes in ways that improve service to policyholders. Mellon Bank cost-justified their electronic document warehouse based on the conservative estimate that they could reduce the monthly production of 40 million pages of paper by 35% over three years. However, they found an added customer service benefit when they started using the on-line system to generate CD-ROM-based monthly reports for corporate clients. "The business people in the bank are viewing data on-line in the same way the customers are viewing it on CD-ROM," says Dennis Ziolkowski, VP in the bank's private-asset division. "Finally, everyone is speaking the same language." You can expect dramatic results from the implementation of a full-featured EDW: productivity improvements that streamline the organization; cost savings that contribute to the bottom line; more rapidly available information that makes for more timely and accurate decision-making--all are important in the new era of global competition. Increasingly, however, it is the customer service component of a business that is coming to define who wins and who loses. It is no longer enough to have a competitive cost structure and stay one step ahead of the competition in the rush to bring new products to market. New technologies and intense competition have escalated customers' expectations--questions must be answered in a single call, account information must be available 24 hours a day. Meeting these expectations means reaching across departmental boundaries for customer-related records; it means cross-referencing documents from different applications; it means delivering the data in a way that best suits the customer. Perhaps in no other area can the ability to have rapid access to any document in the enterprise have a greater impact on your business. Mobius Management Systems has been a provider for more than 15 years of fully scalable, enterprise-wide electronic document warehouse software. Mobius products are installed at more than 2,000 sites worldwide, including almost 60% of the Fortune 100. Mitchell I. Gross is president of Mobius Management Systems. For more information, call 914-637-7200 or visit Mobius at http://www.mobius-inc.com.
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