FEBRUARY 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM 19DOUGLAS DUNCAN, CIO, COLUMBIA INSURANCE GROUPI f you asked a Ford executive what the company does, you might be told they are in the transportation business, not the car or truck business. Perhaps somebody at John Deere would say they are in the harvest automation business. An insurance company? The risk transfer business. The police department? Public safety. What business are you in? Whatever you answered, it is safe to say, you are also in the document business. Your documents might be mostly paper or mostly digitized, but it is almost certain they are the lifeblood of how you operate on a day-to-day basis. Larger companies will have more tools and processes around their documents, and how effective they are at managing that will play an ever larger role in their overall success.Do you need to do a sanity check on how this is managed in your company? Five basic checkpoints will help you evaluate where you stand, either on firm ground or shifting sands. Ask yourself how well you address each of these checkpoints, then create a plan of action where you need improvement.System Performance Do you know how long it takes to upload or download a document? Maybe your customers are complaining that it takes `forever!', but do you really know? Speed of download is the most critical measurement for assessing your document management system performance, at least from a user standpoint. Understand this number and what factors impact it, such as user location, time of day and size of document. Once you can measure this consistently you can improve it where needed, truly understanding the impact of each improvement. Other important system performance measures include the capacity of the system to scale as usage increases, for example, how well it handles peak usage during busy periods on a daily, weekly or monthly cycle. With larger systems, efficiency of storage becomes important and a cost per megabyte metric is very useful.Storage MethodologyHow efficient is your storage? If you have a smaller shop this may not be an issue, but at larger scales you will not want all your documents kept at the same level of readiness and accessibility. For Key Checkpoints in Document Management CIO INSIGHTS
< Page 9 | Page 11 >