Understanding the Document Management System through Market Research

Simplifying Existing DMS Market Research

As is the case with all research geared toward helping organizations make purchase decisions, the analyses in the Magic Quadrant and Wave will attempt to summarize market and vendor information quickly before summarizing it thoroughly and in its entirety.

Quick summaries are useful, but oftentimes not all-encompassing. It will be up to prospective DMS buyers to decide whether it is in their best interest to use what may be the easiest means of selecting the best document management system vendor as opposed to relying on several diverse sources, including an internal analysis of their own organization’s needs.

However, both Forrester and Gartner offer more specific research insights for prospective technology buyers than the Wave or Magic Quadrant provide: The Gartner Interactive Magic Quadrant and the Forrester Wave tool each allow prospective document management system buyers to input information specific to their organization, providing more individual assistance in the technology selection than a single report can provide.

However, from this input, not all vendors will be available in the results, so prospective buyers should still explore other options as well.

Analyzing the Document Management System through Market Research

Commerce is now driven by content, and without the document management system technology and strategy to transform it into knowledge, information limits organizations. “The Information Age” does not just encompass the proliferation of data creation technologies—it also denotes organizations’ reliance on these technologies in lieu of their ability to derive knowledge from them.

Organizations with unstructured content can lose access to this content’s information within a second; as this second transpires, it may become a mistake that takes hours, weeks, months, and perhaps even years to recover from—particularly if this information impacts customer experience or satisfaction. Additionally, losing access to information can also result in opportunity costs, legal costs, and an organizational image that subtracts from the bottom-line.

Document management system delivery models and technologies are changing drastically. Therefore, as DMS vendors spearhead innovation, their contribution to users’ understanding of their solutions is imperative.

Now, going paperless in and of itself is neither a sufficient information management policy nor a means of gaining a competitive advantage for mid- to large-sized organizations: 80% of any given organization’s content is digital—and without DMS’s strategy and technology to automate the structure of this content, your employees will continuously perform the duties of a librarian in one capacity or another—detracting from the revenues to be earned within the scope of their actual roles.

Often, DMS is viewed as an ineffective resolution to the ills of corporate disorganization—one that does not account for the subtleties and nuances of individual roles in the workspace, let alone each organization’s role in its respective industry.

However, no matter what organization you run, the majority of what you do is creating, managing, and processing information through human capital to make informed decisions, and given proper training and implementation, a document management system provides the features, benefits, and simplicity to expedite the attainment of these results.

Going paperless alone is not the singular value of DMS. Rather, this involves the management of paperless information, because although there may have been an organizational process and storage guidelines when paper was there, uploading and digitizing it without a storage infrastructure has created content chaos in mass—a phenomenon that impinges the productivity of knowledge workers and the economy as a whole alike.

A document management system offers executive leadership and administrators in the fields of education, business, and government the power to extract actionable insights from content.

DMS is designed to support content throughout all lifecycles in an organization at the levels of its IT infrastructure and organizational strategy.

Document management is an equalizing technology-leveling the playing field among small to mid-sized organizations striving to compete with larger, paper-dependent ones. In a business climate that is rife with competition and economic uncertainty, organizations must do everything in their power to reduce expenses without sacrificing output, and use of a document management system is one of the foremost ways to effectively achieve this goal.

To learn more about what a document management system is, visit eFileCabinet’s website today.