Optical Image Technology (OIT) client BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina will be featured in an informative discussion about business process automation at the 2010 ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, May 25 at 3 p.m. Dennis Lenge, Director of Document Management Systems for BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, will share practical tips to help business leaders automate their business processes effectively and achieve optimal outcomes.

The presenter will showcase several of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina’s process automation projects using OIT’s DocFinity software. Companion Property & Casualty, which was the first process automation project of the parent company, processes more than 250,000 claims annually using DocFinity to scan, import, and route thousands of faxes, emails, images, documents and letters daily. DocFinity electronically matches appropriate claims applications with agent letters, correspondence, medical bills, declaration pages, loss history documents, audits, and other forms to enable quick, accurate, and cost-effective processing.

Mr. Lenge will also speak about Trailblazer Health Enterprises, another subsidiary. One of the largest Medicare processors in the United States, Trailblazer deployed DocFinity to streamline medical claim processing. Turnaround time has been reduced from ten days to four, and seventeen staff members have been repurposed from manual tasks to higher-level analytical work for which they were hired.

The conference session is entitled How to Maximize Your ROI from Business Process Automation. Open to conference attendees, the session will impart practical information about integrating document management and business process management software with legacy systems, line-of-business software, and communications software to expedite processes, eliminate human error, and deliver better service. The value of large enterprises using a Linux/zLinux-based solution will also be discussed.

read more

Adobe's Creative Suite 5 launched today and offers dramatic advances in supporting creative editorial workflows, bringing together online review and approvals with the help of Acrobat.com as well as marketing analytics capabilities acquired from Omniture. These advances risk being overshadowed by the bigger drama resulting from Apple’s decision last week to ban developers from using rival programming tools like Flash for the iPhone 4. It’s too bad, because in CS5 Adobe compellingly pulls together its design tools to broadly support all mediums across all devices – with added workflow and analytics. Highlights of CS5 include:

This week I have been thinking a lot about how poorly we manage data and information. The quality of the data and the lack of needed data has historically been an issue at work. We have focused a lot of our time on data mining but never really recognized that one day there would be too much data and information for our staff to sift through. Recently, our managers proposed two new data sources for the operational staff to review and I decided that it was time to hit the panic button that we’re currently giving out more information to our workers than they can handle.

When a business presents too much information to their staff it is a lot like catching deer in your headlights. If the deer is too overwhelmed to run and you don’t steer the car out of the way then no good can come to both car and deer. This is where I think we are at work and we’re needing to slow things down a bit to give both driver and deer time to think about their next move. For the moment at least, I’m personally at a lost on how best to solve our issues with information overload.

read more

This week I have been thinking a lot about how poorly we manage data and information. The quality of the data and the lack of needed data has historically been an issue at work. We have focused a lot of our time on data mining but never really recognized that one day there would be too much data and information for our staff to sift through. Recently, our managers proposed two new data sources for the operational staff to review and I decided that it was time to hit the panic button that we’re currently giving out more information to our workers than they can handle.

When a business presents too much information to their staff it is a lot like catching deer in your headlights. If the deer is too overwhelmed to run and you don’t steer the car out of the way then no good can come to both car and deer. This is where I think we are at work and we’re needing to slow things down a bit to give both driver and deer time to think about their next move. For the moment at least, I’m personally at a lost on how best to solve our issues with information overload.

read more

Anyone who has worked in an underwriting office understands the challenges of managing files, processing underwriting documents efficiently, keeping track of agents and clients on the move, and making sure customers are happy. Unitrin Direct, based in Chicago, Illinois and with offices in multiple states, recently made these processes easier by integrating diverse technologies and leveraging their effectiveness to offer faster and better service. Their vision and success resulted in the company receiving the Insurance Accounting and Systems Association (IASA) Technology Achievement Award in 2007. This was merely the beginning of what Unitrin Direct plans to accomplish as they enhance services to their customers.

Unitrin Direct, an insurer that sells direct-to-consumer automobile and homeowners insurance in 25 states, is a rapidly expanding company that conducts its business over the Web, by telephone and by using tools such as strategic partner sites to gain new business. Initially, management had a vision to expedite services by automating the processing of returned mail, incomplete customer submissions, and pursuit of signatures that were required on underwriting documents. By integrating digital workflow with their third-party automated call system, policy management software, third-party capture and indexing provider, claims management system, and data review criteria stored on their Web page, the company aimed to leverage the value of each of these technologies and do more work, faster. This increased efficiency has enabled the company to continue to grow without adding staff, and it has positioned Unitrin Direct to handle future growth effectively.

read more

Palm Beach State College serves approximately 47,000 students in one of the largest counties in Florida. Composed of four campuses, Palm Beach State receives approximately 20,000 applications per year— usually between 12,000 and 15,000 during their main semester.

Like most colleges, Palm Beach State had concerns about disaster recovery. Indeed, the College had legitimate cause for anxiety. Palm Beach State is located within the Florida hurricane zone, and the 2005 hurricane season had been particularly destructive. In early 2006, after two failed attempts at implementing an electronic document management (EDM) system, all of the institution’s critical documents were still paper-based.

Chuck Zettler, Director of Information Technology Project Management at the college explains, “We were intent upon finding an EDM system that suited all of our needs. Disaster recovery was a driving factor, as was a need for space and for improved efficiency.”

Palm Beach State hired a consultant and built a business plan. As part of that process, they discovered other pressing issues that could be improved with an EDM system. As Zettler describes, “Our infrastructure is an urban, multi-campus environment. Students must travel across different sites, and procedures were often constrained by the limitations of paper. Staff would have to make numerous phone calls and send faxes in order to verify student information. There was a need for staff to access information from Web browsers, and a need for simultaneous access to information.

read more

Have you ever had the need to produce a web site that needed dynamic CMS features and capabilities but felt that using one of the usual suspects (Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, etc.) was the equivalent of using a sledgehammer to kill a fly?

That’s certainly the feeling I had when finally getting around to refactoring a small site of mine that has been on the Internet since 1997.  There had been numerous updates and tweaks made to the site over the years, but it was still based on static html pages and a bunch of customized (and poorly organized) javascripts.  Adding or modifying content was a manual process.

I had almost talked myself into using Wordpress….

Read the remainder of this article.

How we create, write, and edit individual documents (for the purposes of this essay, a document is something that comes out of a word processing application such as Microsoft Word, Open Office, or WordPerfect) typically reflects the writer’s individual style.

How much is too much?

By this I do not mean how the actual words on the page are written, but rather how we manipulate and edit the text after the initial draft is created.

This may sound simple but that’s decidedly not the case. The way that we edit and refine a document does not just affect the author. Our work has become increasingly collaborative; documents are often touched by multiple knowledge workers, so the manner in which changes and edits are made has a ripple effect on everyone who is part of the process.

It seems as if every knowledge worker has a slightly different way of managing this aspect of the document creation process. Some print out the document and mark it up by hand; others use features built-into the word processing software; and still others have developed their own protocols for indicating changes, additions, and comments.

To find out more about people’s individual styles and preferences, we created a brief survey, which you can access by clicking here.

Participants will receive an Executive Summary of the survey’s findings and can also enter a drawing to win a $200 gift card from American Express. After you complete the survey, please share the survey link (www.basex.com/docs) with colleagues or forums where knowledge workers congregate; the more people participating in the survey, the better we will all understand how to manage documents more efficiently.

Jonathan B. Spira is CEO and Chief Analyst at Basex.

Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

Many of my readers have heard me preach about the value of intelligent content, as if up until now, all other content was dumb. Well, there’s a certain amount of truth to that. But, to understand this line of thinking, it might help to grasp the concept of intelligent content.

Intelligent content is content which is not limited to one purpose, technology or output. It’s content that is structurally rich and semantically aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable, reconfigurable and adaptable. It’s content that helps you and your customers get the job done, often automatically. It’s content that is limited only by our imaginations.

With intelligent content you can:

• Automatically deliver to multiple channels
• Personalize content and deliver it dynamically
• Enable customers to easily find the information they need no matter how complex their requirements
• Let your customers build their own unique information products
• Deepen your customer relationships
• Share content across organizational silos
• Manage content throughout its lifecycle
• Rapidly adapt information to changing needs

To enable intelligent content you:

• Develop customer personas
• Design the content with those customers in mind
• Structure the information before you create the content
• Create metadata that supports search, for both authors and customers
• Apply metadata to content at a level of granularity that supports its final use
• Manage the information so that it remains up-to-date and relevant.

Want an example?

If you’re managing a website, you can ensure that your customers can find the information they are looking for. Because the information has been tagged with metadata during the content creation cycle, it’s easily discoverable by search engines. And because you’ve thought about your customer and structured the information in a logical way, you’ve already given them a helping hand when finding information in your content by organizing it in a logical manner — now that’s smart on your part. More importantly, because it’s tagged, you can personalize the content for returning customers, so they see only what they want or need to see.

Another one?

If you publish material on a website and on paper (a journal, magazine or newsletter for example) you can create content specifically for each of those outputs. Depending on your needs, the content could be the same, with differences in visual style, format, and language. The content could be different; more detailed in the print version perhaps, or extra supporting information, such as animations, videos, or geographic information (maps, directions) in the online and/or mobile device versions. Translated versions of the content could be made available to readers with alternative language preferences. For the visually impaired, you could provide an accessible version that could be read aloud by the display device. The content could also be formatted using much larger fonts to make it easier for the visually challenged to see. And, when you change the source information, the updated content would be available immediately for publishing via all media, according to your requirements, formatting rules and schedule and in alignment with the personal preferences of the end-user content consumer. Automatically.

By adding intelligence to the content, you can have it do the formatting work for you, on-demand, only when it’s needed. That’s the smart way of providing the right content, to the right people, in the right format, at the right time, in the right language.

But it doesn’t stop here. When content is presented to a consumer, the content itself can trigger computers to perform automated tasks. Perhaps after you find the answer to a problem using an online help system, the content itself alerts the company customer satisfaction department. A few days later, you receive a customer satisfaction survey via email designed to find out how the company is doing and how they can continue to provide excellent service. You click on a personalized URL that records the answers to the survey and automatically triggers the company email system to send you a thank you letter and a gift certificate to the company online store. When you buy an item in the store using your gift certificate, the e-Commerce site records this information in your personal profile. While you’re checking out, the system asks you if you’d like to join the company’s product-specific online service, where you can find useful tips and tricks, meet and network with other product owners like yourself, upload and watch videos, write and read blog posts, leave comments, provide feedback and more.

This is, of course, only the tip of the iceberg. And, it all started with — and is driven by — intelligent content. The types of automation that intelligent content makes possible are nearly limitless. Governments, educational institutions, and organizations of all types are starting to see the value of using intelligent content to perform business tasks that were traditionally handled manually. Automating these processes makes them more consistent, less error-prone, and much more affordable, freeing up scarce financial and human resources for value-added tasks that many organizations today claim they don’t have time to accomplish. By admitting that humans aren’t always the better choice for performing tasks, and creating and managing content in intelligent ways, we can improve our content offerings, provide better service, and enjoy fewer errors. And, did I mention save money? Tons of it.

Smart. You betcha!

Want to learn more?

If adopting intelligent content approach is something your organization could benefit from — and come on, how could you not? — consider attending our second annual Intelligent Content conference, The Magic Behind Intelligent Content, February 25-26, 2010 in beautiful Palm Springs, CA. You’ll hear presentations from practitioners who are making intelligent content work in the real world. Our two featured presenters include:

• Gabor Fari, Solutions Strategist within the Health & Life Sciences Industry Unit for Microsoft, the chief architect and driving force behind the company’s Intelligent Content Framework, with the mission to introduce an entirely new way of managing Enterprise Content in Regulated Industries, based on the latest XML technologies.
• Bob Glushko, Adjunct Full Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in the School of Information, the Director of the Center for Document Engineering, and one of the founding faculty members of the Information & Service Design program. In 2008 he co-founded and serves as a Director for Document Engineering Services, an international consortium of expert consultants in standards for electronic business.

The event will feature 2 days worth of presentations by more than a dozen industry veterans covering topics as varied as social media, marketing, technical communication, training development, publishing, mobile communications, and much, much more. It’s an intimate event. Attendance is capped at around 100 people, making it easy to network with one another and share information with your peers. Sponsorships are available, but are limited. Contact me for details.

For additional information, stop by The Rockley Group website and check out the intelligent content whitepapers.

And, of course, keep an eye on The Content Wrangler blog and The Content Wrangler Community. We’ll be publishing articles, reviews, and case studies about real-world implementations of smart content projects over the coming months.

If you’ve got an intelligent content project about which I’m unaware — or even one in the works — let me know I’d love to know about your success/horror story and/or lessons learned and best practices.