Most people aren’t particularly fond of the way their organizations create and maintain the critical documents their businesses need. Here are some comments we’ve heard:
“We don’t have just one document system, we have many. We’re paying for the same functionality over and over.”
“Our IT people don’t like to be bothered with making document changes. They have higher priority items on their to-do list.”
“The business line managers are frustrated because the documents aren’t the way they want them, and they can’t get them changed.”
“Every time regulations cause us to update our documents, it’s a huge, time-consuming project.”
The trouble with legacy document generation systems is they’ve been around for a long time. The software you use to communicate with your customers was probably written some time ago, when requirements were different. It may have been designed before new technologies like omni-channel communication, hyper-personalization, and big data even existed. Organizations address underperforming document composition software in two ways. The first approach is often initiating an IT project to modify the application. This usually works for a while, but over the years, the collection of patches, workarounds, and add-ons becomes an unsupportable mess. Eventually, IT decides any more upgrades will destabilize the system and declares the software “frozen.” The second tactic happens when departments within a company can’t get the results they want from the current software. To solve their problem, business units often purchase a new point solution. You can see how this might become an issue; after years of installing department or application-specific solutions, organizations find themselves spending lots of money on multiple systems that do basically the same thing — create documents. In a time of widespread mergers and acquisitions, this problem becomes even more prevalent as each merged organization brings applications built with different document composition systems. Indicators that signal your document generation solution no longer satisfies your current customer communication needs include:- Changes require expensive and in-demand IT resources that may not be available for months.
- New customers or applications force you to create a new set of static templates, thus adding to an already expansive template library.
- Your software makes it difficult to communicate in all the channels your customers demand (or worse, you must buy separate software to support each output channel).
- Business units can’t add data-driven marketing or personalized messaging to increase the value and effectiveness of transactional documents.
- Your document system has become unreliable and could cause you to miss deadlines or neglect regulatory commitments.