To a colleague looking at Datacap and other, similar solutions, I would explain these positives and negatives and then I would let them make the decision. However, from my personal experience, it's working out well with IBM Datacap. We have not had any failures; we have our own success stories.

We have plans to employ IBM cloud solutions, but that's still under discussion because we are a healthcare company. There are some legal challenges and compliance challenges going with cloud solutions, but that's under discussion. We are you considering it because that's the way everyone is going; saving costs is one thing. Basically, centralizing everything and saving costs are the major drivers.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for my organization, we also have Watson and another team is working on that. They're using it big time for healthcare. We have a lot of patient-related information that initially we weren't able to make sense of it. Now with Watson, they just started building it. That project just started. We are very hopeful that we will be able to provide better care with the help of Watson.

Regarding existing services that we're now able to provide better than we were previously, as I’ve mentioned, we just started. Previously, we were on the FileNet Images Service platform. Everything was desktop based, thicker client applications. Now, we are with FileNet P8 and thin client; definitely rolling out applications and using them becomes a lot easier. Customers are happy with that.

Change is never easy, so initially we had some internal and external customer experience hurdles due to the implementation of Datacap. We have multiple projects. Our first project went live in May. That particular one, that line of business, was using a heavily customized FileNet capture solution. Moving on to Datacap, they wanted to have everything like to like, but the Datacap desktop UI is not that easy to customize. We didn't have all those features that the heavily customized FileNet capture solution offered and they didn't like it. However, over a period of time we built it and we made it even better than that. They've seen improvement in their service transactions per hour. That's good. Now they're liking it.

We have plans to include mobile, however that's just in the pipeline. That's a future roadmap. We have plans to include mobile. We are even considering going paperless with Docusign.

Datacap usability is good. However, there are definitely a lot of areas with room for improvement, in terms of Datacap desktop or the ICN UI for indexing. That's a data entry application. Data entry people don't want to use their mouse. They have to finish data entry within a certain amount of time and provide a high throughput. Still, for a few things, Datacap doesn't support out-of-the-box hot keys. You have to customize for that. For lookups, Datacap gives links. Now users have to click those links with the mouse and that increases their indexing time. They're typing with something and they're grabbing mouse and then they're clicking. Considering they're doing thousands of indexing, thousands of batches every day, that takes up a lot of time. We faced those challenges. That's why the users didn't like the solution. We did our own customization, added our own hot keys and changed everything.

It's good. It takes time to mature. I think that it is only a matter of time to make it scalable or optimal; it takes time. That’s the only reason I have not rated it higher. Other than that, it's a good, robust solution.

We are not yet considering employing IBM cloud, hybrid or box solutions. That’s definitely a compliance issue. There are a lot of things that we are currently working on. Definitely, at some point, we might.

As far as any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization, there are a lot of different strings within the company that work on that. I’m unable to comment on that, but it's mostly on the ECM side. But there are ways we can look at synergies between ECM and analytics. That's where I think the focus of IBM World of Watson was. I think that was one takeaway for me for the future.

There are definitely existing services that we're now able to provide better than before. I think that's the purpose of having Advanced Case Management. We were using an old technology and with the move to FileNet, we now have new capabilities, new features, and a new roadmap. That's definitely an advantage for us.

We do not yet have plans to include mobile, but definitely sometime in the future. There are a variety of use cases which we might use more of in the future.

Look at the cloud and hybrid cloud. I don't know a whole lot about other solutions such as OnBase or Documentum. I've heard things, but I can't really evaluate. Look at the cloud; whatever you can offload, be it storage or whatever and so on, to save money, would be cool.

I have rated it to reflect where it excels, such as scalability.

There was a quote from one of the sessions at a recent conference. I think it was IBM's CEO. “Where you invest the money, your house is in order,” or something like that. I think that is how I look at FileNet. You use SharePoint for project content that's around for a short period of time, but for your system of record, your system of authority, that’s where you spend the money. It's where you force users to properly classify things, so it's not a garbage-in, garbage-out situation.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with, if we're just talking about vendors that help out doing migrations and so on, I like case references. Generally, I'm pretty familiar with people I've worked with in the past. When I was in the private sector, I talked to some people at Fairfax. They helped us out. They did a great job. I would use them in the future.

I saw something at a recent conference that used Imagine Solutions. It looks like they had a really good experience. That, to me, means everything; just that reference account, essentially.

Moving to the cloud with IBM ECM is not allowed. In Saudi Arabia, the cloud infrastructure is still non-operational, potentially for the next two to three months. Static clouds are prevalent among foundational enterprises such as IBM and Oracle. IBM offers its cloud insights, maintaining its cloud ecosystem.

IBM's efforts to enhance the user experience within its ECM platform are lacking compared to competitors like OpenText. Progress in implementing new technologies and features seems sluggish.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Now, particularly, there are some somewhat lower-cost solutions. But they are also solutions that are more modern and built on more modern technologies, so I would probably look at those first; they are lower cost. Also, look at the requirements. If you don't necessarily need records management capabilities, then there are some other solutions that we continue to evaluate ourselves. We are looking constantly at licensing costs when it comes to renewing with IBM.

Look at all the different integrations and all the different products that it talks to. Look for a holistic solution, when you're integrating with Box and other front ends and back ends and so on. It's a lot easier to get something from one vendor than to try to cobble together different systems.

If this project goes successfully and everybody's happy, I would give this product a perfect rating.

Look at my presentation, Lessons Learned from Implementing an ECM Stack, which I gave at a recent WoW conference.

A couple of other things: Make sure you have sufficient people in place. Make sure that you understand how complex and what the support requirement is. Make sure you understand that you can't just turn off the legacy systems or put them in sunset mode, because they're running the business. It takes a while to get things migrated to the new platform. You need to staff accordingly. You need to have some guiding principles, because the new platform that you're putting in probably has additional features that your old one didn't.

You don't want to just take the old system and pour it into the new system. You want to re-engineer business processes, as appropriate, and make sure that you've got the right tool for the right need. That's probably the two biggest pieces of advice.

I think overall, now that it's in place, it is a very powerful, complete platform.

For a new setup, I would advise employing IBM's help at the earliest possible stage. Don't try to figure everything out by yourself. Of course, a lot of research beforehand would be beneficial, before even starting to put hands on the keyboard. I think a lot of planning is required. As I’ve mentioned, employ IBM's help early on, don’t include them only after you're having trouble already.

As a group, we are thinking of employing IBM in more of a hybrid approach. As far as I know, we have not finalized any strategy yet in terms of usage of cloud. We are fairly new to that space, so I think that's where that's coming from. I don't see any technical hindrances from our side as far as going to a full-blown cloud solution, but the nature of it is, we're a big organization. Things happen more slowly, or more slowly than other, more agile organizations just because of the nature of our size. That's why I think it's more of a hybrid. We want to go to a cloud solution because that's where, I think, things are going, but doing a hybrid approach allows us to get our feet wet first, then go to the final product.

I’m not aware of any new analytics applications that we're now able to provide for our organization as a result of using this solution, right now.

There aren’t any existing services that we're able to provide better than we were before. We have been using IBM's Content Management suite of products for a while now. I don't know if we have anything better, aside from moving to newer versions every time they come in. We're reaping benefits from that, but I'm not sure if anything major has improved in the last few years. I'm not aware of that.

We definitely have plans to include mobile. We are seeing a lot more business users requesting that kind of capability, where they can search for documents, they can view images using their mobile device; maybe even capturing documents, scanning them from a mobile platform. I hear a lot of demand for that kind of thing.

In the last few months, even within the last year, I have seen that more users are going to our Content Manager custom application for things like researching legal requirements or figuring out what is involved in some kind of audit request for documents. Before, they would rely on more traditional approaches, such as going to an engineer who is responsible for databases. That engineer would search in the database and would figure out where the corresponding documents are. Within the last few years, we have enabled those users – whether in the legal department or somewhere else not related to loan origination, which is our primary user base for my small team – to use our custom application. Instead of those lawyers or legal personnel requesting things from us, we can say to them, "Why don't you just go to the source?" They can do whatever search they need to do.

Usability is okay. As I’ve mentioned, once you set it up, once you have it up and running, it's fairly easy to figure out, to maintain, to keep running. I don't have any complaints around that.

When selecting a vendor to work with, we want someone who has the resources to stick around and be available for any kind of support, such as for production issues or for major upgrades that we are doing; to help us out in setting up; and also someone who's committed to helping customers, not just sell to customers, and help them use their products to their maximum abilities, to take advantage of all its features and so on. I think IBM is doing a good job with that.

My rating comes from a place where I have grown more familiar with it. I've grown more comfortable with how it works. I appreciate the complexity of what it's trying to do. Granted, it's my first experience with anything related to content management, so I'm a little biased because I haven't seen anything else.

Do the same route that you normally do. Do the evaluation and what works best for you. I don't really have any specific recommendations, such as saying, "Oh, it's better if you go this way or that way." Not all things are for all people.

You have to be very careful about what you choose because that's what you're going to have to live with. You want to make sure that it's configurable to what you currently have. Unless you're starting from scratch – which hardly anyone does these days – it has to integrate with what you currently have.

I haven't used other products because we chose these, but for us, the support and IBM’s ability to move the product forward has been great in my opinion. If someone were to ask me, "Can I recommend another product?", I probably couldn't, for what we use it for.

We are considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions to reduce cost and to add functionality. Also, we are currently looking to expand our data centers and, as opposed to expanding physical data centers, going to cloud will give us the same ability to expand data across multiple data centers, as well as applications.

As far as new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization, what we are implementing through Datacap is the ability to read script and signatures, to work with Docusign. We have it implemented, but not the new features of 9.0. We're also looking at implementing Box along with that.

We are doing a lot with Datacap. We are looking at unstructured data, not just scanned data - our unstructured data that comes through digital content, such as email - as well as scanning in previous documents, older documents, like contracts, that are usually written in paper. We're going to start incorporating those into Datacap, so that we can scrub them for data, do analytics on it. Datacap, for us, is becoming more of an integrated solution, not only just analytics, but also capturing and storing documents for the long term.

Regarding existing services that we're now able to provide better than before, we are just now bringing on Content Navigator. Content Navigator is going to be the forefront of pretty much everything. We use image services. We use PA. We use Datacap. Content Navigator is going to be at the forefront of that. For our image services solution, we're looking to go to the cloud. ICN will be on-prem, but it will be used for everything in the book; the cloud and what's on-prem.

We do not have any plans to include mobile, which is not to say that my clients don't. Mobile is not new to us. It's just that before, as an IBM solution, we haven't had the business push us to use mobile.

As far as how the experiences of your internal and or external customers have changed since implementing Datacap, I think it's really sparked their interest in learning, in knowing that there's more functionality out there that could be used. There’s more functionality that could be used with the application and looking at those functions. What we started to do is create services around those functions. Our clients have been very eager to start using those services. It has added something new, something it didn't have before.

Depending on what you’re looking for, I think Datacap does a really good job. I'm looking at some of the mobile stuff and it looks very cool. I wish we were getting into more of the mobile because I would like to see that. Depending on where or the way you are looking, I would say, look closely at Datacap. I think it's a really good tool.
It's very powerful. It does what it's cut out to do.

Speed of the build and being easy to work with are the most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with. They don’t have to be local; that didn’t seem to be an issue. Our last application was built by IBM and professional services did a great job.

The most important decision for enterprises to choose a ECM platform should be a clear IT vision(ECM roadmap 2-3-5 year) and requirements(business area expectations and maturity to accept-adopt change).Then the decision point would be to go with a major-industry-expensive tool(Documentum-D6 or Filenet5.2.x $$$Millions) or cheap/open-source platforms(Al-Fresco,iManage,Nuxeo etc $Thousands) criteria while selecting a vendor .

Also many smaller and cheaper market vendors have great product roadmaps,swissknife functionalities and are very proactive and responsive to the customer's needs and with rapidly changing IT and then there's the new hybrid cloud SaaS offerings (Google Docs or Office 365...) so is it even worth investing Millions into an on-premise ECM tool in 2017 with a 3-5+ year ROI ..

Any advice I might give depends on where your reports come from.

I'm sure there's always room for improvement in things, but we've used it for so long and are so comfortable with it, we're happy. I would give it a perfect rating if it had a little more ease of use with getting the distributed combined into one repository.

The most important criteria for me when selecting a vendor to work with are good support; a strong vendor that's been around a while, that's steady; and, in this world, cost has to be a factor.

As far as how our internal or external customer experiences have changed after implementing CMOD, in the beginning of our first instance of internet banking, we just had a text-based statement, the data that our service provider gave to the customer. We sent them a file and they provided it when the customer asked. Now, we send them a link, they pick the date, they come back and get the statement; it looks just like what would be mailed.

Usability is very good. We've been using it for a long time and it works.

We are not yet considering employing IBM on cloud, hybrid or Box solutions. We are still in the discovery phases. I attended a session at a recent conference about movement to the cloud. I said, with being a bank, we are not quite there. We do not have a good cloud strategy, yet. We are not looking to move anything to the cloud. That would be an advantage to have the same product on multiple platforms.

There aren’t any new analytics or content management services that we're now able to provide for your organization, yet, but we are looking at analytics on CMOD.
We do not have any plans to include mobile at this time.

Know your processes, know your business requirements. It's one thing to technically be able to do something, but why do you need to do it. What is the business justification? Know those requirements and that will guide you to the right software, and the right implementation and the right partner.

When selecting a vendor to work with, the relationship is very, very important; that they respect what we do and understand our business. Also important is the industry reputation; that they have that experience, that they have that connection and are developing features that we don't have to request or customize it. They are built into the product.

The experiences of our internal and external customers have absolutely changed since implementing the solution. I think it is a pleasure to use the system, to manage the data. We are more organized, we are more agile, we have more information and we can react to that information better.

I would rate it a nine out of 10. There is always room for a little bit of improvement, but it's functioning very well.

I would recommend not going with ECM 8 and going with FileNet instead. It seems like that is the future of the lower-volume repository. It seems like they are moving away from ECM 8.5 so I think we're going to have some challenges coming up, getting off of that technology.

This is a good and stable solution. It is a solution that you can trust and is, indeed, the best solution that we found out there.

We try to search for vendors that provide good support for our development and also, we look for out for those vendors that have great cases and other clients, that we can compare with our case.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Local support.