Digital Landfill

The latest AIIM Industry Watch survey - Process Revolution: Moving Your Business From Paper to PCs to Tablets - is hot off the presses and available for download.  Just as a reminder, the downloads are FREE.

The report is the latest in AIIM's ongoing Industry Watch series, prepared by our in-house analyst Doug Miles.  Some of the other recent titles you may have missed...

• The Paper Free Office - Dream or Reality?
• Records Management Strategies - Plotting the Changes
• Social Business Systems - Success factors for Enterprise 2.0 applications
• Using SharePoint for ECM - How well is it meeting expectations?
• State of the ECM Industry 2011- How well is it meeting business needs?
• Capture and Business Process: drivers and experiences of content-driven processes
• E-Discovery and ERM - How is records management performing in the new spotlight
• Content Analytics - research tools for unstructured content and rich media?

Some of the highights of the Process Revolution survey:

1. 52% of respondents report that administrative staff in their organization would be a third or more productive if their processes were work-flowed using scanned forms and documents, with automated data capture.
2. 70% consider that the use of scanning and capture improves the speed of response to customers, suppliers, citizens or staff by three-times or more. Nearly 30% put the factor as ten times or more.
3. Despite the acknowledged benefits, a third of small and mid-sized companies and 22% of the largest have yet to adopt any paper-free processes. Over half report that 10% or less of the processes that could be paper-free have so far been addressed.
4. Only 20% of organizations surveyed actively evaluate all processes for driving out paper.
5. Lack of management initiatives or mandates is the most likely reason for the prevalence of paper in so many business processes. Staff are also to blame, preferring to handle and file paper - feeling it’s more reliable - and also driven by the perceived need to physically sign signatures.
6. 67% of respondents consider mobile technologies to be important or extremely important to improving their business processes. 31% consider tablets to be more important than smartphones, with 24% seeing smartphones as more important.
7. Whilst two-thirds acknowledge the importance, over three-quarters have made no progress towards mobile-enabling their business processes. 20% have sound security reasons, 32% have evaluated but not made a move, and 24% haven’t even thought about it.
8. A third of organizations have not optimized their public-facing websites for mobile. Of those that have, only 8% specifically test access to all pages and forms.
9. 76% have no mobile access to their DM/ECM system. 5% rely on non-optimized browser pages. Only 7% have dedicated apps.
10. 45% of respondents suggest a 33% or more improvement in productivity if field-based or travelling staff were able to connect to back office processes. The average assessment was a 36% improvement in productivity.
11.  45% of respondents consider that the speed of response to customers, suppliers, citizens or staff would be improved by three-times or more by the use of mobile information access, process interaction, and local capture.
12. In 5 years’ time, 33% of respondents consider that over half of their employees will be using iPads, tablets or digital clipboards for filling-in forms – compared to 2% now.
13. For customer processes, 75% consider mobile technologies to be important (50%) or extremely important (25%). This compares with 71% who consider social technologies to be important (57%) or extremely important (14%).
14. Only 30% of organizations have effective rules and policies regarding the security of data on company-issued mobile devices and on personal mobile devices. 70% have rules but only 30% of respondents feel they are being actively used and enforced.
15. Half of responding organizations would consider adopting a 3^rd party or Government cloud system for active content management, although most (35%) are waiting for security and reliability to mature.
16. Strategically, 11% would go fully cloud-based for their ECM, whereas 14% would look to a mixed on-premise and off-premise system.