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Colleges and universities across the country have realized that they can no longer rely on outdated, manual processes that hamper productivity and drive up costs. Changing the way staff works, however, is easier said than done.

According to recent research conducted by The Economist Intelligence Unit, 80% of the organizations that have implemented formal initiatives to improve business processes over the past three years have faced employee resistance. Three major causes of this reluctance to change were:

Colleges and universities—awash in paper and digital documents, forms and files—are increasingly adopting technology to pull it all together, yielding big savings in time and money.

The technology, called enterprise content management, or ECM, enables users to capture, manage and securely store all manner of business materials, everything from scanned paper documents, to Web forms, audio files, e-mails and more. Even more significantly, ECM automates the document-driven tasks that keep colleges and universities running.

Life has gotten a lot calmer recently for workers in the Contracts Administration department for the Texas A&M Health Science Center (HSC). At one time, pushing contracts through to completion demanded the skills and steely resolve of a private eye: it wasn’t easy figuring out where the contracts were, who had looked at them and which ones were approved. It was a time-consuming, nerve-rattling experience for everyone, says Kristin Nace, HSC Assistant Vice President, Fiscal Services and Budgets.