Content Management: Taming the Info Flood

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | August 11, 2003

It used to be that computers stored neatly categorized information, such as names and addresses, in nice searchable records. Everything else went into filing cabinets. But all the stuff in the filing cabinets is starting to creep into the computers as well. Today, Gartner Group estimates, more than 80 percent of all information stored electronically is unstructured information. And the amount of data that's going digital is increasing at a rate of 80 to 100 percent a year, according to IBM.

Boston Capital Corp., which develops real estate investment funds, is a perfect illustration of this trend. Until the start of this year, the company used a complex paper filing system to keep copies of contracts, property photos, blue prints, and property quarterly reports.

"There's a huge amount of information that flows in on a regular basis," said CIO Tom Gardner. "Million of pages of documents a quarter. You can imagine our off-site store rooms, with boxes and boxes of information."

Not only were those files expensive to keep, but it was cumbersome for employees to access the information they needed. At the beginning of 2003, Boston Capital started to digitize this mass of information. The firm may be coming a bit late to the process but, as a result, it is able to use the latest, most efficient technology to streamline the conversion and make the newly digitized data easy to use. This includes collaboration technology, a hot trend for financial services firms, and regulatory-compliant archiving and record retention management.

Gardner opted for an enterprise content management system from Pleasanton, Calif.-based Documentum. Over the past seven months, his team of staffers and interns has classified the boxes of paperwork into categories, assigned commonalities, attributes and key properties, and digitized a full third of all the paper. He expects all the core paperwork to be in electronic form by this time next year, with the core businesses done in the first quarter of 2004. In addition to the core business of property deals, there are a number of other departments-including compliance, sales and marketing, and accounting-that need to be digitized.

"It definitely takes a lot more commitment, more resources and more time than you'd think," he said. "Because information can be so unstructured, especially in organizations that have been around for a while. We have information on oilskin paper, handwritten documents, and that's information we now have to classify and digitize."

After the papers are scanned, 90 percent of them are destroyed. The rest have to archived for legal reasons. Now, employees can get data in a minute that used to take days-if they even knew how to find it. "It provides immense returns," said Gardner of the digitization process.

Meanwhile, between 20 and 30 percent of incoming information is in electronic form. The rest still coming in as paper-it's digitized once it comes in. "We're working diligently with our partners to make that number the opposite," Gardner said. "But it's a challenge. We work with a variety of external constituencies that provide information to us. Some are used to providing things in hard copy, law firms for example."

Currently, Boston Capital's 200-odd Boston-based employees have immediate access to new and old digitized information. By the end of the summer, Gardner plans to extend that access to outsiders, including attorneys, developers and other partners. The total number of users will be in the thousands, he said.

One of the major benefits of using Documentum's technology, and one of the reasons he picked that particular product, is because it doesn't just allow for scanning and searching. It creates an information management platform that a company can build on, said Gardner. "From all the solutions we looked at, it was much more of a platform than an application," he said.

He added that Documentum's financial stability was a factor. "In this day and age, you have to look at a company and its financial strength to make sure that it's going to be there in six months to a year."

That's because Boston Capital has longer-term plans for what to do with all the new information that employees will now have at their fingertips. "One of the ultimate goals of this sort of solutions is to pull in external constituencies to work in a collaborative space," he said. "We'll use it as a work environment in 2004. Realistically, the third quarter of 2004."

In fact, tools like collaboration more than a major selling point for Documentum and similar vendors. Documentum boasts over 200 financial services customers, including J.P. Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch Japan, Putnam Investments, Scudder Kemper Investments, Salomon Smith Barney, T. Rowe Price and UBS Warburg.

The company started 13 years ago with a core document management system. Then it added the ability to manage Web content in the late 1990s, then the ability to manage videos and graphics, records retention and compliance, and now, finally, collaboration.

"What we're really trying to do is bring together content, compliance and collaboration into a single-platform environment and we do that as both a platform, a part of your company's infrastructure, and we also create, package and sell specific applications," said Naomi Miller, Documentum's director of product marketing.

Collaboration allows multiple users to work on the same documents while keeping track of who did what and when.
"There's a lot of interest in our eRoom product, which helps companies collaborate," said Steve Robins, director of industry marketing. "It's a workspace which includes a virtual meeting and a virtual white board. People use it to share information, edit content or develop new content, exchange files and make things like a deal closing happen very quickly.

Another one of our clients is Wilmington Trust, and they set up a whole service offering, called cyber-closing, where you can bring together different parties to your transaction, exchange information, make closings faster-no FedEx expenses, no faxes left and right.

If collaboration is combined with a rules-based work flow process, it can be a powerful tool to streamline operations in a company. And, by automating an approval process, it can lower the costs of compliance for a Wall Street firm, Robins said.

"In the last year, content distribution-or content syndication-was big on Wall Street," Miller added. "Say you have large reports, equity research or portfolio, with many different companies that require those reports. What they were doing is printing them off and sticking them in the mail. Then they were using e-mail to distribute those reports. With our capability, we automate that entire process, and you can set up subscriptions to content and we can automatically copy that content that comes into the repository, align it with the right subscribers, and then, on as frequent a basis as needed, send the content out."

Another hot area on the Street today is e-mail and instant messaging archives. "It's only in the last six to nine months that almost every financial services company that talks to us, talks about compliance," said Miller. "Before that, financial services companies were not spending much in the area of compliance."

Documentum already has an e-mail archiving tool in place, and customers are already asking about instant messaging. Documentum plans to roll out a product by year-end.

"One aspect of compliance is SEC regulations around retaining information about a stock transaction or communication with customers," said Robins. "We help companies track that information as well. A record will be captured of that information and then it will be retained for a specific period of time. What you want to do is keep it for the exact amount of time and not a second later or a second shorter. You don't want to keep it for any less time than you need it-but you also don't want to keep it too long because it could be part of a discovery process."

One of Documentum's major competitors on Wall Street is Costa Mesa, Calif.-based FileNet Corp., which counts Bank of America, Chicago Board Options Exchange, Fleet Boston Financial, Nikko Securities, Oppenheimer Funds, and Wells Fargo Private Client Services among its customers.

The company has 925 financial services customers, including 21 of the top 25 U.S. banks. Like Documentum, FileNet Corp. is offering work flow management to its suite of content management tools.

"Where we're seeing a number of areas that Wall Street firms are interested in, is straight-through processing, particularly exception processing," said David Cornelius, VP for financial services solutions at FileNet.

With work flow management, an employee processing an exception would automatically see all the relevant data, whether it's a voice clip or a digitized image. "It allows somebody in trade support to have all the data that is required to correct the trade," said Cornelius. "We're introducing the idea of actually capturing the voice clip from the investment manager to the sales trader, so there's a record of the actual voice conversation that goes along with the electronic trade. That can be a great help when looking at any issues around a particular trade."

FileNet and Documentum aren't the only players in the game. IBM, for example, offers its DB2 content management product, as well as a full suite of collaboration tools. And Meta Group expects Oracle and Microsoft to offer strong enterprise content management products within the next couple of years.

IBM's DB2 content management product can handle e-mail and instant messages, said Brett MacIntyre, VP of IBM content management, in a way that's compliant with SEC regulations, as well as video archives and other examples of unstructured information.

"The unstructured data we're going to create in the next three years is as much as over all of previous recorded history," he said. "There's this tidal wave of information coming that companies need to deal with."

According to IDC, enterprise employees may lose as many as three hours per day on often-futile information hunts, causing an enterprise employing 1,000 knowledge workers to waste nearly $2.5 million per year. Being able to find information quickly, work on it with colleagues, customers, and other partners, and then automatically pass it along to wherever it needs to go next, will help save a large chunk of that money.