Enterprise Content Management and Product Lifecycle Management
Content is and has always been an important asset for organisations. Business decisions are based on documented analysis, agreements are made explicit in contracts, and patent files hold Intellectual Property. We use letters and e-mail to communicate on business issues, we inform customers by using web sites. The electronic age has brought new formats for content, and of course it has caused an explosion in the amount of content. Many organizations have used new IT technologies to enable new ways of working with content and in many cases innovative uses of content can be a source of competitive advantage.
On the other hand, in recent years it was found that sloppy management of content can have serious consequences: non-compliance with rules and regulations can result. Also inefficiencies in time and effort spent in search and retrieval of relevant content result. At present compliance is the number one business driver for ECM improvements.
In fact this holds throughout the entire profit and non-profit sectors. Other important ECM business drivers include collaboration and communication.
These can have different origins and per sector impact can vary per business function (product innovation, customer interaction, supplier interaction…). Finally, the cost of storing all this content is exploding. In practice, a combination of these ECM business drivers is observed in all organizations throughout the entire profit and non-profit sectors.
Atos Origin vision of ECM
Based on the work of analysts (AMR) and from its own feedback from Customers, Atos Origin has identified seven business initiatives to drive enterprise content management deployment across the enterprise:
- Customer Support
- Back office Productivity Improvement
- Information Worker Productivity & Knowledge Management
- Market Agility Improvement
- Advertising, Marketing & Promotion
- Compliance mandates
- Product Lifecycle Support
Those initiatives are supported by Atos Origin's ECM Components
- Document Management & Doc Centric Collaboration
: Core component of the ECM system, Document management deals with all type of non-structured information such as Documents, Office Files, Rich Media …
Capture : Component dedicated to collect, digitalize and populate content databases with the information produced from different sources such as desktop, postmail (documents through scanning), email, EDI, documents data flow…
Web Content Management : Component dedicated to create, manage and publish contents on the Web
Records Management : To support the identification, classification, archiving, preservation, and destruction of records including the processes for capturing and maintaining evidence of and information about business activities and transactions in the form of records.
Email archiving : to control, manage and archive emails and attachments,
Fixed documents archiving : Also known as IDARS (Integrated Document Archiving and Retrieval Systems), this EMC component focus on the storage of high volume of fixed documents
Output Management : ECM component dedicated to enterprise publishing, for any type of information such as invoices or marketing correspondence
Portal & Collaboration : To provide the user with a unique and easy to use interface, supporting content management
Human BPM (Workflow) : To manage processes associated to any content management, most of the time with user interaction (closely related to System Business Process Management based on Enterprise Application Integration)
Search : Component dedicated to support the user to find the relevant information he is looking for, in the vast bases he can access to.
ECM: An Atos Origin Distinctive Offering
Atos Origin recognized that ECM is one of the biggest areas of interests for Customer to achieve business improvements and cost reduction and, therefore, decided to make ECM as one of its few distinctive offering.
This status will provide Customers with a clear and consistent approach on ECM, pre-packaged solutions to be deployed and dedicated resources to address associated needs.
Cross Service Line approach:
Some characteristics of ECM make its unique in the enterprise:
- Everybody in an enterprise deals with contents: ECM concerns all the internal and externals stakeholders of the enterprise processes, to improve either core business and administrative content management/
Change Management is important: ECM has a close interaction with the users and application and, because users have an important cultural feedback working with content, Change management is a very important factor in the success of an ECM Program
ECM has a significant impact on the infrastructures: ECM program have, more than often, a significant impact on the storage and network infrastructure. This aspect has to be taken into account from the very beginning of a project, up to the operations.
ECM implementation is not simply an IT project. with its unique Consult-Build-Operate capabilities, Atos Origin can handle almost any type of project from the idea to the operations. Atos Origin Services Lines work together to provide Customers with:
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Business Consultancy to define business issues where ECM can improve Customer position on its market, providing high service
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Systems Integration to select and propose consistent IT solutions,
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Manage Operations to outsource and operate those solution in Client infrastructures,
Cross Countries Strategy
Atos Origin has developed since many years a consistent approach to deploy ECM, with the same vision of the different components, to share experiences, lessons learned and leverage best practices.
This approach has been adopted by all Atos Origin Subsidiaries, among we can list the following with dedicated ECM Champions :
- The Netherlands
- France
- United Kingdom
- Germany
- Spain
- Belgium
- Poland
- India
- Asia Pacific
- United States
- Brazil
Expertise:
With more than 1 000 dedicated resources across Europe in ECM, Atos Origin in one of the leading service company to help Client implementing enterprise wide content enabled applications.
Atos Origin is developing new resources and skills on ECM every years an plan to double the size of the ECM Team by 2009.
Partnership Leverage
Atos Origin can help customers on almost any type of technology.
However, to leverage best practices, Atos Origin has developed expertise on the main ECM technologies and is closely working with partners such as EMC-Documentum, IBM-Filenet, Microsoft, OpenText;
Atos Origin is closely working with all these partners, with different areas of interest.
Atos Origin Solutions
Besides the standard approach to provide Customers with answers to specific requests (Requests for Proposals); Atos Origin proposes a global structured and documented methodology to deploy progressively ECM across the whole enterprise with pre-packaged solutions such as :
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ECM-SCAN: Business consultancy to understand where an organization stands in the ECM Maturity matrix and identify where content enabled applications can improve efficiency, reduce operational costs and meet management goals,
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ECM tools selection: To analyze client requirements, constraints and priorities in ECM components implementation, and assist in the choice of the technologies that will support Client business initiatives.
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Solution to urbanize ECM: Technical Consultancy services to integrate ECM in a customer IT infrastructure, to better interface with existing applications and serve users,
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Data and Application Migration: Atos Origin has developed a set of services to help client to migrate existing applications and databases from one technology to another.
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Outsourcing: Atos Origin can support the development of large ECM programs with complete Outsourcing or in building ECM Centers of Expertise in Customer organization.
In addition to this, Atos Origin proposes vertical applications for specific markets
Information Management for Engineering Projects.
Technical Document Management for Operations