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Big Blue's Software Spending Spree
abb_road writes "IBM has gone on an aggressive acquisitions spree for document management packages in the past three weeks, spending more than $2 billion to pick up two companies. The companies, Webify and FileNet, are expected to become part of IBM's Information on Demand strategy. The acquisitions point to a larger industry trend: a focus on software for unified corporate data management. From the article: 'It's a crucial time to jockey for most-valuable-software-provider status, because companies want to buy more from fewer players, and they're tired of buying stand-alone pieces of software like customer-relationship management that don't fix real-world business problems. The new message to software vendors: Fix my call centers, don't just sell me a product. As a result, the lines are starting to blur between software companies that offer, say, Internet security, databases, and tools to manage nearly every part of the business. So, too, are the lines between service companies and software companies.'"
Good question.
;-)
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It's about control and structure.
The usual question is "why can't I just use our shared mapped drives?" - so here's what you DON'T get from shared mapped drives that you do get from a Document Management System (DMS):
* Metadata... Basic metadata on the document which can help searching, and can sometimes be sorted upon etc. The metadata often varies with the "document type" - so tender documents/procurement documents have an Account field, where meeting minutes instead have an Attendees field. Yes, this takes more time to fill in when saving a document into a DMS. This is why users hate the DMS. Business loves it, of course, because it makes things easy to find years later.
* Structure... You create the overall structure, and nobody can change it. We've all seen file shares that have had no control - they become an impenetrable mess of folders, because everyone has their own slightly different filing system they're adhering to. DMS software allows an organisation to enforce just one filing system. Users hate that, too.
* Conflict Prevention... Most DMS software has the concept of "checking out" a document, just like you would check out a book at the library. Whilst you have that document checked out, everyone can see you're working on it - and nobody else can check it out. This prevents two idiots^Wusers from applying changes to the same document. Checking a document out also allows for an audit trail to be built.
* Versioning... Beyond the versioning that you get in Word - this is literally keeping a copy of every version that was checked in. You can usually also add a metadata comment for each vesrion when you check it in, to say what you changed. Often, you can even do this for each draft. Oh, by the way, being able to mark documents as either drafts or versions is also handy, and many systems do that.
* Audit trails... Not your aneamic logs from an OS, but audit trails telling you who updated the document and when, often going back years. Very important in some environments.
* Approval/Review Cycles... Workflow is a common extension to many DMS implementations, adn allows for simple approval/review cycles in which the checking out/audit trail/versioning features are combined to allow one person and one person only to approve or review at a time. Quite handy, if done well.
* Records Management... Technically something else entirely, but records management often goes hand-in-hand with document management systems. Do all your invoices become unneeded after seven years? Fine - save 'em to the right place, and the DMS will handle that for you. Anything over seven years old simply gets removed, permanently, on a schedule. For you, this is useless. For a company GM's size, this saves hundreds of thousands of dollars every year.
* Searching... As alluded to above, most DMS software has a full-text search capability these days, and if it's "in the box" then it's one less thing to have to implement in your IT strategy.
There's more, but you get the idea. It's basically there to control the way people work with documents, making sure that it's less likely to descend into a SNAFU where you can never find what you want...
IBM used to invest in it's employees as much as it did technology. Now, however, it's been paying for it's recent acquisitions by offshoring thousands. While I have no real problem with offshoring (it looks fine on paper), in practice it results in companies sacrificing real talent for less expensive labor. At some point, the pendulum needs to start swinging back the other way.