META Group study reveals organizations' Document Automation capabilities are still in the dark ages

London, Tuesday 10th May, 2005

Compliance, changing infrastructure standards, acceptance of mobile devices, and changing user requirements and expectations will increasingly force firms to address Dynamic Document Automation.

In a recent survey conducted by META Group (now part of Gartner Inc.), an investigation was completed into understanding the intentions and requirements of organizations needing to generate high value and high volume content. This sort of content generation is known as Dynamic Document Automation (DDA), or Document Generation, and is prevalent in communicating trade confirmations, insurance renewals and other information that requires fast, highly personalized correspondence. The research identified how the implementation of enterprise technologies affects the growing compliance, volume and channel delivery demands.

META Group interviewed senior-level executives within large enterprises across EMEA and the US. The report was sponsored by Thunderhead, the provider of highly usable document generation technology. Key findings of the survey included:

¾ of organizations are unable to ensure appropriate versions of regulated content are inserted into finished documents across an enterprise within 24 hours - with many taking considerably longer.

55% of EMEA and US line of business managers feel out of control of their document implementation and maintenance.

32% of organizations are unable to track content usage and a further 26% of organizations take days or weeks to accomplish such a task.

82% of respondents thought it was essential or advantageous to be able to format output for multiple delivery channels, with 86% indicating they actually considered it would reduce their costs.

This current lack of control is unacceptable in today's modern market place while regulatory compliance issues continue to test firms' operational agility. META Group believes organizations addressing document automation from a strategic point of view are much more likely to realise important benefits beyond the expected time and cost savings.

Consequently, the demands on the technology and response times in this space are growing. According to the report's author, Jeffrey Mann, Vice President, META Group, "As customers expect faster, more personalized communications, the onus needs to move from the IT departments technical controls on development, implementation and maintenance of communications and focus the responsibility within lines of business to increase operational agility and effectiveness."

" In the light of increasing user requirements and customer expectations, companies are looking externally for new technology solutions to meet their growing needs. Standard documents and manual efforts will not be enough to respond to these requirements while 70% of firms still cite increasing production costs as an organizational challenge from working in this manner. In particular, the need to support multiple delivery and consumption channels will make it necessary to do this better," said Glen Manchester, CEO, Thunderhead.

Simultaneously, as DDA technology evolves to meet customer requirements, companies also face the prospect of regulatory compliance issues continually changing. An organization's operational agility is shown in its power to respond to these changes in a timely fashion. Yet, certain simple tasks still seem to pose a great deal of difficulty for many firms.

" With either out-dated manual processes orsystems constructed in a piecemeal fashion, resulting flaws are inevitable," commented Glen Manchester. "This study clarifies the tangible business drivers and benefits of implementing dynamic document process automation tools that are based on open standards, are secure, scalable and compliant, and support multiple delivery channels."