Content Management Tools Grow to Embrace Work Flow

By Maria Trombly | Securities Industry News | February 9, 2004

February 9, 2004 - Boston Capital Corp. last year was busy moving its files out of paper boxes and into electronic form. It was a huge undertaking, with off-site storage rooms housing boxes and boxes of information, involving millions of pages of documents each quarter.

Now that the information is digitized, and employees are familiar with the new computer system, CIO Tom Gardner said he's ready to take the next step: adding work flow management.

"It's one of the hot items on our list for this year," he said.
Boston Capital will use the work flow management tools that are built into the company's content management solution, a product from Documentum. Other Documentum customers include Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, ABN Amro, Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs.

Documentum's biggest rival, FileNet Corp., also offers those tools for its content management clients-which include the Chicago Board Options Exchange, TD Waterhouse, Wells Fargo and Oppenheimer.

"We've seen a trend over the last six months that the content management and document management companies are building more and more work flow capabilities into their tools," said Scott Claus, managing director for the financial services technology group at BearingPoint. The consultancy uses work flow tools from Documentum and FileNet, together with enterprise application integration systems and custom-designed programs to build work flows for Wall Street customers.

"It's a good thing," he said. "It allows you not to have to glue different packages together. The downside is that because these companies are traditional document management companies; there are some constraints."

As a result, firms often consider three different methods to manage their business work flows, he said. Document-oriented work flows are easily managed using tools from content management vendors. Meanwhile, middleware vendors like IBM, BEA and Tibco are called on for transaction-oriented work flows. Finally, custom design work is needed to shore up the limitations of both approaches.

"They used to do it all the hard way," Claus said, adding that custom design gives firms the kind of flexibility that they need. "They're looking at these engines to ease maintenance and future development. It's one of the most difficult things to custom build."

However, the tools do have their limitations. In order to reach beyond the world of the content management application-the particular set of documents that it controls- companies need to integrate the tools with the enterprise business process management engines. In addition, the work flow tools often lack high-level security and personalization. However, Claus said he expects the tools to evolve quickly to address these gaps.

According to David Cornelius, FileNet's VP for financial services solutions, FileNet's work flow management tools are increasingly being used to improve STP. TD Waterhouse, for example, is using the technology for exception processing.

"They found from their back office that getting back queries from customers and field agents was taking a long time and lacked consistency in response time and quality," he said. "Now all requests go to one service center, through integration of the back-end system and rules-based business processes, making sure that the right content gets to the right knowledge worker."

Not only does FileNet's content management system keep track of past versions of documents, and who made what changes, but it can also ensure that documents are consistently routed through the appropriate governance and compliance review steps, Cornelius said.

"We've deployed File-Net's business process management solutions in our operation within retail and institutional lines of business," said Marc Beerman, SVP of TD Waterhouse Investor Services. "Benefits include better control over processing of information, improved efficiencies, streamlined and more effective management of reporting and analytics.'

Improved efficiency was particularly apparent for Wells Fargo Trust and Investment Centers, where work flow management allowed the company to decrease the dispersion of discretionary payments from weeks to days.

"Trust administration has traditionally been an incredibly paper-intensive and slow process," said George Leis, SVP and national director of Wells Fargo Trust and Investment Centers, adding that FileNet's eProcess toolset allows his employees to manage more than $90 billion in trust and custody assets, with more than 10 million pages of documents, through Web-based access.

But the core strength of content management software remains managing outward-bound and inward-bound communications, such as e-mails, statements, research documents, Web site content and print mailings.

Like Documentum and FileNet, IBM offers work flow capabilities as part of its content management system. IBM also sells pre-built work flow solutions, such as a Sarbanes-Oxley product.

Currently, 39 out of the top 60 banks use the IBM content management product-and most of them also use some type of work flow management, said Debra Taufen, IBM's director of marketing for enterprise content management.

"It's almost impossible to do content management without work flow," she said.

According to Jin-Chul (Gene) Kim, an analyst at International Data Corp., IDC has identified data management as a top-10 issue for the capital markets in 2004 (see story on page 5). Work flow management, as a subset of this issue, is also becoming more important, he said.

"Where you're starting to see it is in regulatory compliance," he said. "You have Sarbanes-Oxley, anti-money laundering, Patriot Act, Basel standards. A lot of this stuff seems to require that you access the same information over and over again. We're hearing from our customers and from the vendors, who are hearing from their customers, that they have to reinvent the wheel every time and it would make more sense if they had all this stuff pulled together, so that we create the wheel once and then reuse it."

Some back-office processes are also starting to see some automated work flow, such as fund accounting and some of the transfer agency pieces.

"It's not across the board but pockets of it. People are playing with these things to get better productivity," he said. But he added that work flow management isn't going to be fully mainstream until 2005.

"To get there, we're going to have to go through the data management rationalization process," Kim said. "Sometimes, all that's required is that you have a sense of what data you have and where it is. Once you do, you can figure out where the overlaps are and eliminate them so you get to virtual golden copies. After that, it's less work to layer on automated work flow tools."

Raj Shah, senior technology strategist at Sapient, recently worked with a top 10 brokerage that wanted to redo its inbound processes. The firm used Documentum for the content management side, and to feed content to the Web site. Tibco was chosen to handle most of the business processes.

Once the Tibco rules engines were reached to put information into a document, they would trigger a Documentum work flow process, Shah said-say, for example, a billing process.

"Documentum would push the process along to make sure the bill was formatted correctly, that it had the right corporate logo, that there weren't any notes that needed to be attached," he said.

Today, many companies have little work flow silos, he added, packed away inside document management or content management areas.

"As more and more companies are starting to look at their business processes as a whole, for things like outsourcing their business processes, I have a feeling that a lot of the work flow is going to shift to a more centralized system."