Oscar Dubbeldam doet verslag vanaf de On Demand. Veel leveranciers blijken nog productgedreven en missen de brede focus op communicatieketen van hun klanten. Het boek Designing a Document Strategy uit 2000 van Kevin Craine blijkt nog steeds zeer actueel!

Another day of talking with vendors and understanding there ideas and vision about output management. From an american perspective it seems the vision frequently starts with, “Due to the economic recession, …”. The emphasis on the difficult times, reductions and restructuring is mostly used as an excuse and luckily sometimes also tranformed to an opportunity.

The excuse is more related to not succeeding in selling the product features and functions, the success is related in talking about business opportunities and value proposition. The need for a strategy in document based communication seems to be needed more then in the early 2000’s.

Surprisingly the book about Document Strategy from Kevin Craine already dates back to 2000. But it becomes now even more vlid then ever, or I can suggest taking the new version in Document Communication Strategy I’m talking about frequently.

Designing a Document Strategy
Kevin Craine

Having discussions today with some of the big printer vendors.
Unfortunately I must say that most of them are mostly hardware vendors with some products, but no business vision. The pleasant exception still comes from Xerox. With the presentation today from Sophie Vandebroeck, (CTO of Xerox), it became clear that Xerox from an innovation and vision perspective is still miles ahead of its major competitors.

The solutions as discussed by many of the EOMS envangelists which deliver real business benefits are still difficult to create. The discussion about multi-channel communication, lean manufacturing, marketing campaign management and an enterprise document management and communication environment reamin a technology challenge. Following some discussion and presentations, they are still very technology driven and cost and labour instensive due to the system integration. The components are there, but the architect who has the knowledge about all EOMS products and knows how to integrate them remain scarce. Too many times I had the response, “That’s not my area of expertise, I only know (my small) bit” .

Surprisingly when having similar discussions with the “other” side of OnDemand, being AIIM. The answers are very different. Integrating EDMS, with e-mail management, records management and archival is known by most. Maybe not at a detailed level, but at least the knowledge is there about functioality, integration and business value.

Output Management can mean a major difference for an organisation.
Documents are for most organisation critical to important in doing the day to day business. Why are we as an industry still struggling to explain that at a strategy level to organisations.

Tomorrow the last day. Just some wrap-up and hopefully the time to give you my closing comments.