DMS – Managing Unstructured Content

Document Management Systems are still evolving and banks, telcos, manufacturers and SMBs have started investing in this technology. Patni had an opportunity to express and voice over the current trends of DMS in India Segment. Exclusive extract of Conversation with Express Computer:  Vinita Gupta
Check this Link for more details: (Express Computer: 2009 Anniversary Issue: Article on Enterprise Software Services)

http://www.expresscomputeronline.com/20090323/2009anniversaryenterprisesoftwareservices02.shtml

 

EC: What is the market of DMS in India?
DMS market in India is catching up rapidly, unlike western countries where DMS is fully adopted and at matured stage. Large MNC have a foot print in India, by virtue of this, the SMB market is going to extend here too. Gartner and other analysts predict - Indian DMS market would grow by 18-20% compared to last year, but this may not be true under given Economic slowdown and tight IT Budgets.

 

EC: Mention the key drivers of this market
Licenses cost would be the main driver, as Indian players have a lean budget for coming years. Second would be the DMS product feature followed by how easy, it is to integrate with existing enterprise systems. No one wants to throw away the existing in-house portals or small custom packages built over a period.

And also it depends up to DMS skilled IT partner, who can sketch a complete ECM roadmap for Indian companies, will be the major decision factor for quick DMS adoption and implementation.

 

EC: State some of the barriers in the growth of DMS in India
Traditional India firms always believed in custom solutions and in-house developments unlike worldwide trends of Package software's. That's why you see - packaged solutions have not able to attract Indian market. But now, the significant change is visible.

Another barrier would be Localization to India environment, these DMS product available mostly illustrate the global standards, but Indian supplier and customer have a different style of collaboration, communications, workflows and DMS component need to be tailored, which is an additional cost.

 

EC: Discuss some of the key trends in 2008-09
Ux (User Experience), SaaS and Web 2.0 were launched sometime ago but not fully adopted and implemented in real sense; it's more at conception level. As we speak, some of the companies have completed the experimentations and you should see SOA, Web 2.0 and SaaS applications available and used for commercial/ business purpose.

 

EC: How do you perceive the SMB market for document management?
Because of their size and business volume, most of SMB players business is driven by competition, customer and product / services they offer; How fast they act and adopt latest technical know-how and capitalize would decide their market share. DMS systems would help them to collaborate and communicate in real time with their suppliers and customer and employee, which a major challenge for now.

 

EC: Tell us about some upcoming technologies in DMS.
DMS systems will be completely morphed into complete ECM solutions consisting of DM - Document Management, WCM - Web Content Management, RM - Record Management, WM - Workflow Management and DAM - Digital Asset Management.

With Web 2.0 and SaaS revolution, all these features need to be planned and implemented on a time scale based on the business goals and IT budgets.

Thereby ECM including (DMS) market would touch $4.0 billion by 2010 (Source: Gartner).

There is a technology DMS feature-list war happening between big wigs (Major DMS product vendors) Microsoft (MOSS2007), IBM Lotus Notes / FileNet, EMC Documentum, Hummingbird, Interwoven, OpenText, Stellent and Vignette. The time will tell - who will lead this DMS / ECM race.

 

EC: Future of DMS in India
Absolutely, India business houses are active participant of this Marathon and it would be at par with Global companies. Once the Economy rejoices, we should see DMS and ECM catching up Parallelly in India too.

EC: Given that a large number of PSUs are still using paper, India has emerged as a key market for DMS.
PSU are mostly control and budgeted by Govt and Bureaucrats. IT and DMS projects need a long term plan and vision, which is not the GOAL of PSU. DMS is still a distance dream for PSU for now. With eGoverance projects, coming up, the scenario might change, let's hope!

 

EC: Automation in document management, integration with other application and regulatory compliance are key drivers.
Automation is more of Business process re-engineering and establishing a governance model to integrate the enterprise applications. It's non-technical feature address by IT implementation partner than a DMS product itself. There are frameworks, standards and industry specific best practice which need to be adopted for successful DMS implementation

 

EC: For businesses that are driven by the need to reduce cost, implementing a document management system is the first step in the right direction.
Cost Reduction measures have various means and DMS implementation will assist to some extent but it can't be quantified and qualified as 1st Step. There need to be complete Business and IT alignment; Business goals and objective and business problems need to be strategized and implemented to gain cost reduction in phase manner.

 

EC: DMS have seen substantial changes during the past decade. With businesses expanding and mandatory regulations to follow, the generation of paper-based documents has also risen.
India business is governed by Policies and prevailing law, which need lot of paper work and also our book keeping and audit system is based on PAPER evidence, How Techie the firm can be, end of the day - sheet of paper is must. It will take some time change this mindset at root level. DMS can play a role here.