Since the beginning of the IT era, new innovations, models or tools have fulfilled any possible dream inside techno believers’ minds. This is basically due to the fact that always, with the exception of Walt Disney, the techno vendor incepts the idea and then injects it to believers’ minds. For the idea to be “catchy” there must always be some troubled situation, a villain, a princess and a savior prince. But as always a dream can become a nightmare when the villain prevails and the princess left alone without her prince (and the white horse…)

Cloud Document Management System is probably the most indicative case of transforming a dream to a nightmare. Cloud DMS had all the ingredients of a blockbuster. There is the troubled situation where the princess has to digitize and version practically everything from her paper-piles, there is the arch-villain cutting trees somewhere in the Amazon rain forest and you have myriad vendor princes willing to save the princess by offering their Cloud Document Management System!

The truth is that the majority of the Cloud Document Management Systems cannot cope with the 21^st century business environment. To survive in this environment you have to collaborate and to manage your documents. But, managing documents is not what used to be a decade ago. Nowadays a knowledge worker needs to:

• be notified (at near real time) about which document has been modified and by whom in her activity stream.
• View, edit, delete based on her role lock the document (subject to her role’s access rights)
• distribute the document (WITHOUT SENDING E-MAIL)
• define access rights for a document
• have full versioning capability
• choose the desired document’s version to download and work upon
• link a document to a task, project, customer, CRM, Project Management, Business Intelligence or any other business entity
• upload a document to the company’ wiki

DMS era has gone. It has been passed to business oblivion since the advent of collaboration platforms. It is a natural evolution (successful mutation) that the IT-nature undergone to cope with the fast-paced knowledge economy and constant demand of boosting productivity. In this economy, you prevail by circulating “knowledge commodities” rather than simply copying and storing…

The post Cloud Document Management System: Fact or Fiction? appeared first on Comidor Low-code Automation Platform.

Look around you in the SaaS market and you will see that more and more vendors choose to “integrate” with third-party apps in an attempt to offer users an illusion of “functional completeness”. No matter the core offered functionality, you’ll end up having CRM coupled with DMS -DMS with Tasks management – Accounting with Resource Management -20% Project Management, 60% File management and 20% e-mail integration- CRM Project Management and so forth. That is not bad per se, as long as you know the recipe that satisfies your SME’s functional hunger. You just pick the right ingredients and cook them appropriately right?

Wrong. First and foremost, functional completeness is achieved through good organization business process analysis. It’s not about the applications (legacy or not). Business processes should be mapped to functional requirements and functional requirements to tools. All torments come when you try to operate a vertical application horizontally and vice versa. For example when you want your CRM acting like a DMS for your sales team or a productivity management system, or when your Calendar is over-stretched to cope with your project management needs.

There was a reason back then when the first IT gurus came up with this terminology. Vertical applications support a specific business process and target users with specific skill sets and job responsibilities. Due to this fact and contrary to horizontal, vertical applications are more complex and often require extensive customization in order to be integrated with other vertical ones.

There is no doubt that that technology and especially Cloud  changed rapidly and to a large extent (almost liberated) the way we operate our business. In these economic turbulent times the cost effectiveness of cloud solutions was the prominent factor of mass migrations without second thoughts. But with great power comes great responsibility, and it’s the responsibility of the IT manager to handle the cloud power with care. Saving money from dumping your legacy systems and spent it all in multiple heterogeneous SaaS applications, not capable of providing seamless information integration, is not wise and soon you’ll end up having operational “holes” in your business.

So, plan your migrations with care and if there is no optimum solution for your needs yet, then let it be. Better stick to your legacies (knowing the costs) than trying to manage operational holes (without knowing the costs). Use the (n+2) rule of thumb as much as a benchmark to calculate the number of functional bridges required for having smooth information integration across your operational spectrum (n+2, n: the number of SaaS deployed – that is perceiving each SaaS as a node with one arc coming in and one leaving out). If you end up exceeding (n+2) then consider twice before making any purchase decision.

Can you make it with less than (n+1)? I believe yes. There are some awesome SaaS apps out there that truly worth any buck spent. They provide smooth, customizable and seamless information and functional flow as they integrate all the necessary tools for covering operational needs within their very own platform. Look out for those as they set the pace for next decade’s cloud market.

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