Guest 8 things post by Danny Johnson from NetDocuments...
I’m obsessed with technology, especially document management (DM). I’m also obsessed with reality TV, and specifically The Jersey Shore. So last week, as I was watching the crew following their daily GTL (Gym, Tan, Laundry) morning routine, I had an epiphany: I realized how many parallels there were to the two seemingly distinct worlds I lived in and how one, Jersey Shore, embodied the future of the other (document management). I’ve broken this down into 8 things and shared it with you below.
Numbers 1-3 are GTL (Gym, Tan, Laundry)
[JM note -- I will admit in a clear sign of being post 50 that I know nothing about this Show other than the people on the commercials give me the creeps -- And I'm originally from New Jersey!]
8 Things the Jersey Shore Taught me About the Future of Document Management
1 -- “If you don’t go to the gym, you don’t look good” – The Situation.
In the past, when businesses contemplated moving their DM to the cloud, the prevailing idea was that some robustness and security had to be sacrificed for mobility, price and nimbleness. Well the SaaS world has been spending mornings in the gym drinking gallons of protein shakes. Features like check in/check out concurrency control, Office integrations, PDF conversion, auto versioning and drag n’ drop that were staples of the traditional DM, are now included in the leading web based systems. I would even argue that the SaaS DM has gotten to where it is just as robust as any legacy system. Now couple that with all the inherent benefits of any SaaS application and not only do businesses benefit, but so do their customers with whom businesses are collaborating with and sharing critical content.
2 -- “If you don’t go tanning, you’re pale.” – The Situation.
Once you’ve gone to the gym, the next stop is the tanning salon and in the Jersey Shore, the tone of your skin is directly correlated to the number of friends you have. In business, your friends are you customers and customer centric DM is becoming an important competitive advantage for firms.
Using a financial advisor as an example, I’d like to share my vision of a truly customer centric DM. Wouldn’t it be amazing for an advisor shop to have its DM integrated with a service like Mint.com whereby their client not only managed his or her banking accounts, personal financial information and investment statements with Mint.com, but had a tab or integrated single-sign on page within Mint.com to access the investment advisors work and documents being shared with him or her through the DM’s secure client portal? With DM’s already integrated with most CRM systems, the client related documents should be accessible and embedded within the client’s financial management portal as a secure link from advisor to client. The Mint.com or whatever service it may be “truly” becomes a client portal to his or her financial world. Communication by the advisor would be direct with the client via the related document and collaborative portal provided by the advisor but linked to Mint.com for a single client portal. Furthermore, the accountant and the lawyer who works with the same client could also share via the DM portal, thus making all communication secure and compliant across industry regulatory boards.
3 -- “If you don’t do laundry, you don’t have any clothes.” – The Situation.
Social is the new web, and if you don’t do social, you might as well not wear clothes. Salesforce has led the way for social enterprise software and the DM world is certainly following its lead with dynamic discussion threads, user profiles with histories, secure sharing, etc.
4 -- “If the shirt don’t look good, the whole product is bad.” – The Situation.
Snooki is to the Jersey Shore, what Google is to search. By no means is she the most beautiful, but she is probably the best and most entertaining. Don’t get me wrong, I love beauty as much as you, but at the end of the day, functionality and personality are what really matter. In document management, content is obviously king and the creativity and innovation employed by DM engineers in recent years has been remarkable. Things like secure yet simple sharing, dynamic document comparison, mobile apps that provide document creation functionality and more are the beasts behind the huge amount of innovation going on in the document management scene. We will always expect a pretty user interface, but in the end, I’d rather watch not so pretty Snooki eat a fried pickle than beautiful JWoww doing whatever she does.
5 -- You Still have a Nickname?
Remember when everyone called you Mike Baller Dog and your email was and then you went to college and got really embarrassed? Yeah, me too.
But if you still have that letterman jacket with your nickname written on it, it’s time to proudly wear it again, at least that’s what Snooki, JWoww, DJ Pauly D and the Situation have shown us. In the software world, web-based is now SaaS, internet is now cloud and enterprise is now enterprise 2.0. With the pace of new innovations and ideas in the DM scene, new terms and nicknames will continue to be used.
6 -- Mixing it Up.
What’s better than one ridiculous person in a house? A group of them. There are too many vendors trying to live in a house by themselves by providing a “one solution fits all” approach, attempting to offer everything and the kitchen sink…which only confuses the customer and provides less than best-of-breed in each solution. However, marketplaces like the Salesforce AppExchange and are now connecting powerful applications in a way in which businesses are seeing the value of finding services that do their specific function well and integrating those with others.
When speaking with Bruce Moulton, creator of the XLR8 overlay for Salesforce, he said there are four essential applications needed in every RIA firm: 1) portfolio management software, 2) financial planning software, 3) contact relationship management (CRM) and 4) document management (along with backend email archiving for compliance purposes), and every firm should have the choice of best in breed products/services. This makes sense to me. The advisor interface throughout the day is typically their CRM. Document management should not be offered by the CRM provider but should tightly integrate, and the same for any financial planning software. I assume this scenario could be applied to any vertical market.
7 -- Fresh and Bold.
The Hills was cool, I guess, until Jersey Shore came around and had ratings that made The Hills look like the Vista OS. In the content management scene, the cloud and social DM has snuck in the basement door and is taking over the neighborhood. In every vertical market from legal to health care and financial services, businesses are learning to rely on the cloud to provide secure, compliant software.
This movement has benefited businesses as they are now shifting IT personnel and costs to more productive and value based functions thus giving them higher ratings where it really counts. And that’s on the balance sheet.
8 -- Guilty Pleasure.
Snooki loves eating fried pickles, and I love watching her do it. So what? We all have a guilty pleasure. My other guilty pleasure is cloud computing and how it is revolutionizing the world of document management. About a third of those with whom I work at NetDocuments have been in this industry since the 80s when they started Soft Solutions and it’s fascinating to hear them talk about the powerful things that new tools like the iPad, HTML5, etc. are doing to enable DM services to provide customer-centric, social document management systems.
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Danny Johnson is a marketing analyst with NetDocuments which launched in 1999 as one of the world first SaaS companies. Their goal was to elevate content by helping businesses easily create, edit and share documents from anywhere in the world. NetDocuments is based in Utah and provides SaaS document management to businesses of all sizes including law firms, financial advisors and health care professionals.
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