Three Months to Correct a Typo?
Blog: Kofax - Smart Process automation
What if every process followed the standard IT release cycle?
- Yesterday’s news would be delivered three months from now (during the quarterly release).
- Wedding invitations would need to be requested a year in advance to ensure they’d be delivered on time.
- It would take six months to publish an article to your organization’s web site.
This is of course unacceptable; we all expect immediacy these days. So why do organizations accept this from the document-output platforms that generate their invoices, correspondence, reports, quotes and contracts?
The most likely culprit is tradition. Document generation was typically an IT responsibility, so even the smallest template change (even changing a comma to a period) could take months before it was fully deployed. It might be that product owners are red-lining their documents and specifying the changes they need on their templates. And then request those changes to be implemented on the actual templates by expensive IT resources. Feels like a duplication of effort, right?
So how do web content editors work? A typical website will likely have a fully functional framework; an editor is able to write his/her post, submit it, have the editor-in-chief approve it, and publish it within a couple of hours.
IT is, of course, still responsible for all changes to the platform (e.g., integration with another system), and those changes still follow the release approach, but content will follow a different life-cycle to allow for faster publication.
As document generation has evolved into customer communication management (CCM), responsibilities need to evolve as well. A modern CCM platform allows for the same separation of responsibilities found with web content management, which separated IT responsibilities from content work.
The Role of IT in CCM
IT needs to make sure the platform is up and running and connected to your back-end systems and processes. Maybe you want to integrate your CCM capabilities into your CRM so you can send acknowledgement letters straight from your CRM. Or perhaps you want to send correspondence through a new channel. These are changes that need to follow the IT release cycle.
Business Responsibility for Content
Your legal team can now write and manage legal disclaimers used in your outgoing communication. Business users can add new text blocks to their correspondence. But why stop there? These people know what message they want to get across to your customers so why not let them “own” their document templates, in a fully compliant way, with all approvals, within hours.
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