Laserfiche

It's all very well and good to talk about the need to do more with less—as if this necessity has escaped anyone's attention these days. But how exactly do you achieve this objective in an efficient, rational (and humane) manner? Increasingly, one way organizations are streamlining and gaining efficiencies is through integrating siloed IT systems, eliminating the time-consuming practice of jumping between multiple applications. And when it comes to integration, using enterprise content management (ECM) as integrative middleware offers profound advantages.

John Hermes, vice president of information technology for Oklahoma Christian University, knew the school had problems. Despite a reputation as a pioneer in education technology and as a very high-tech university, Oklahoma Christian (OC) was lagging further and further behind in its business processes, says Hermes.

On any university or college campus, information is held in numerous content-related, department-specific applications. For example, HR likely has its own system that allows staff to easily access information through a primary portal; accounting may be set up the same way. And so it goes throughout the campus, with departments utilizing their own systems to conduct business. That would be fine if all the information required to get the job done was confined within that particular application, but that's hardly the case.

The workplace shouldn’t feel like a scavenger hunt, where you’re constantly on the prowl trying to locate this document or that contract. And yet many college and university employees spend countless hours doing exactly that. There are better and more cost-effective ways for staff to spend their time. 

This is why many colleges and universities are turning to enterprise content management (ECM), sometimes known as enterprise document management in higher education, to manage and track information, says Linda Ding, education program strategist for Laserfiche.

Even for smaller colleges and universities, managing personnel records is often onerous. Now imagine having to do this for thousands of full-time and part-time faculty, sprawled across 17 schools and colleges. This was exactly the situation facing the staff at the University of Southern California (USC) Office of the Provost. By 2005, the Provost’s Office was drowning in mountains of paperwork and struggling to become more efficient.