As digital workflow becomes the standard for the document factory, companies are considering the further advantages of linking various islands of workflow across the enterprise. Organizations are also coming face-to-face and screen-to-screen with the difficult reality of efficiently and affordably coordinating these processes. Chris Ahearn, a longtime document industry veteran and vice president of sales and marketing for nowdocs.com, shares his insights in the first of two columns on the challenges and rewards of taking digital document workflow into the enterprise.

"This trend is seen in many industries, but especially in paperwork-intensive environments like insurance and finance," says Ahearn. "The documents central to their general business are typically not complex applications, and the volume of actual impressions is very small. Traditionally, companies just print and distribute a bunch of forms, and this is their base application. The workflow usually involves requesting information and getting various levels of approval."

Moving Into Complex Territory
"Any time you have an application that leaves one specialized functional area for another for approval, data gathering or some other activity, you run into enterprise applications. This is when it gets complex because each group has its own way of doing things," he notes.

Some departments completely manage their flow of paper from approval to archive, and it does not move into another area without a break in the workflow. With multiple paper forms and process islands, it may take weeks to find and process information when a claim or other query comes in. Clearly, seamless document flow has its advantages in these situations.

"One insurance company I consulted with had eleven claim forms, and the latest revision was from 1979. All forms had the same information, and no one could identify who owned them. We recommended that the company convert to one form produced digitally, and they could save money."

The Business Advantage of Reduced Liability
Another significant business advantage of linking documents to enterprise-level workflow is the ability to control revisions and ensure that people are using the right documents. For some industries, like insurance and finance, this can mean reduced risk and liability.

"For example, to stay accredited or to satisfy regulations, a bank or healthcare institution may have to request certain information from patients, subscribers or applicants, or share specific data with them," Ahearn explains. "If the version in circulation doesn't include that information, or if someone has the wrong form, you could open yourself up to liability. When forms are available digitally, you don't have to figure out what is the most current one and or what is old and should be thrown away.

"It's amazing that organizations with huge data banks of scanned images don't take into account the hardware and effort it takes to scan these documents, and they still can't do much more with the data. When it's done right, companies can reduce the servers and other resources required to capture and manage information," he says. "If they can get documents into a common digital form, they gain advantages of reduced risk, better customer satisfaction, more manageable inventories and the ability to revise."

Watch for the second part of this interview, when Chris Ahearn talks about digital workflow genetics, problems with selling enterprise workflow, and implementation Catch 22.