ECM: How to Do More With Documents Than Just File Them Away

Whether it's in the name of going green, saving money, improving collaboration or meeting compliance goals, banks increasingly are going paperless. And while each of these drivers is a worthy reason for the shift, the strategy is impossible without a means to organize and manage the influx of now-electronic documents and data.

Enter: enterprise content management. ECM encompasses several facets of data management. At its base, enterprise content management is merely a structured system of classifying, arranging and storing electronic documents and other information. More advanced ECM capabilities, however, include automated workflow, image recognition and cleanup, document preservation and distribution, and even information security.

Despite the fact that not all ECM systems are created equal, a financial firm can create a competitive advantage by leveraging its system's capabilities smartly, stresses Ron Ruckh, managing director of financial services for Devon, Pa.-based global expert services and consulting group LECG. "The wave of the future is not that we're going to build all this new technology," he says. "The wave of the future is that we're going to use this technology to help us do things better. That's where innovation comes from."

Ruckh says he believes a better understanding of data as an asset -- and not the ECM technology itself -- will lead the next evolution in enterprise content management. While in the past it has been a race to deploy the best system for document capture, management, workflow, delivery and storage, today it's a matter of knowing what to do with the documents and data now that it's all electronic, he asserts. "It's not just a technology project," Ruckh says. "It's a business project."

Getting Started: Defining Goals

Whereas implementation of an ECM solution depends on a bank's IT organization, Ruckh continues, it's up to the institution's business leaders to define content and how to use it to create value. "So from a business perspective, that end user has more of a stake in what's going to happen," he emphasizes.

Westfield Bank, a community bank with $1.2 billion in assets, formed this sort of IT department-bank management partnership over the past several years. Andrew Weibel, assistant vice president of information systems, was charged with deploying an ECM system across the bank's 11 branches and Westfield, Mass.-based corporate headquarters. In order to accomplish the bank's goals for the content management system, he says, his IT department "had to have the cooperation and buy-in from senior management and staff from all of our departments."

Deploying Westlake, Ohio-based Hyland Software's OnBase solution across the enterprise, Weibel relates, wasn't simply a matter of plugging in the software and dictating how the bank was going to use it; rather, it was a collaborative process between Westfield Bank's IT department and each of the bank's business units to model the solution so it would meet specific business needs.

"The business needs to understand that," LECG's Ruckh says. "And that's the projection the technology side needs to make: 'We've got all the tools -- we can be very innovative in what we build. But we need to build a product that actually makes sense.'"

In Westfield Bank's case, the solution that made sense purely for the organizational elements of its ECM strategy was technology that gave each department access to a system that electronically mimicked many of the bank's preexisting paper file management and storage systems. While it might not sound like the most innovative technology, Weibel says, in terms of document organization, the system worked for the bank's staff.

"The system isn't the bottleneck," he stresses, supporting LECG's Ruckh's assertion that defining business goals for the technology is more important than the specific ECM system. "Mostly," Weibel adds, "[the challenge] is determining how staff wants to use it."

Getting There: Building Capabilities

Nara Bank is a Los Angeles-based institution with $2.9 billion in assets that serves the Korean-American community on the West Coast and in New York and New Jersey. The bank has been rolling out an enterprise content management solution over the past year and a half. "The reason why we started looking at this type of technology was because we had an initiative to make the bank more efficient," relates Mona Chui, the bank's IT manager. "In the past the bank was paper based, and we realized that wasn't going to work."

Noting that one of the biggest gains from incorporating ECM has been the ability to transport documents from location to location faster, Chui says Nara Bank's solution, from Long Beach, Calif.-based LaserFiche, was not difficult to install, but that the bank had to determine how to meet compliance requirements and establish a workflow that made sense. It took Nara Bank between six and nine months to customize, install, test and deploy the new ECM, she adds, and once the tool was ready, a good deal of time was dedicated to scanning existing documents into the system.

"The other thing we are going through is, we're taking all the internal forms and creating electronic forms," Chui adds. "With the electronic forms, we are able to send those through the system."

Westfield Bank's Weibel points out that in addition to establishing business requirements and workflow, successfully installing an ECM system means allocating enough space to store all of the new data. "We planned ahead for the storage," he says. "Storage is always a challenge; backup is always a challenge. We scaled large from the beginning, and that's really paid off."

Next Steps: Innovation

But simply installing an enterprise content management system and uploading electronic documents to it is not enough. To get the most out of an ECM system, LECG's Ruckh says, a bank needs to examine what information the ECM is capable of managing and, ultimately, how to gain value from it.

"What's happening more and more is, people are starting to realize it's not just paper [that needs managing]," Ruckh adds. "So what are we defining as our content that we're trying to manage? It's files. It's data. When we say 'enterprise content management,' that includes data." And that's where the innovation really begins, he suggests.

While Nara Bank is using its new ECM to create and distribute electronic forms for easier coast-to-coast collaboration, for example, Westfield Bank is using its content management system to improve security. Westfield is leveraging its ECM technology to add a new layer of security afforded by employee access rights to information and a concrete audit trail that shows exactly when various documents are accessed and by whom, according to the bank's Weibel. "We're fairly unique in how we use this," he contends, describing how the bank has built the ability into its ECM technology to record and store voice records to verify commercial transactions.

Westfield Bank also is using its ECM capabilities to secure commercial clients' wire transactions. As an added layer of protection for commercial clients conducting wire transfers, in addition to signing and sending a form to Westfield, which uploads the document to its content management system, they also can verify the transaction by leaving a voicemail, which is converted into a WAV file, verified and stored electronically with the signed transfer order, Weibel reports. Content management no longer means merely paper storage; it's the organization of all data, regardless of file type, he notes, adding that it's just a matter of adjusting the ECM system to accommodate various data formats.

"Businesses are saying they need to look at what their data is, and they realize they need to use it as more than information, but as an asset," LECG's Ruckh explains.

"[Content] is constantly growing, it's constantly changing," adds Westfield Bank's Weibel. "[Content management] will never be done because there's always new information, there are always new media types coming in. And there are always new processes."