Miguel Zubizaretta is Hyland Executive Vice-President, CTO and Employee Number 3. He played a vital role in the development of the OnBase ECM platform in the early 1990s and has spearheaded its successes in the global information management market. IDM asked Miguel to outline where he sees the positioning of OnBase as it ramps up its efforts in the APAC market.

IDM: There are many, many applications and uses and definitions of ECM.  I mean, how do you describe it?
MZ: The definition of ECM continues to expand and evolve.  Most modernly you’ll see case management as a primary driver.  ECM can provide significant cost efficiencies in transactional processing, even in some markets where the electronic record is still not recognised as a legal official record, and they have to keep the paper copy of an application.  If they can process it using workflow and using business rules, they can process the electronic image of it that much faster, and still keep the original paper copy if that’s required.  I see those paper copies as being records, and sure, there is a place for ECM as a records management system.  But ECM is really about transforming a corporation’s ability to interact in the 21st century. 

Imagine a small manufacturer in Australia who’s trying to sell their parts, their pumps, their goods, in the European market and in the American market.  Those sales people, and maybe field engineers that are out there, do they want to have seamless instant access to all their corporate records?  When you’re sitting there with a customer in Europe, do you want to say “Well, I know you need this information about what you ordered in your last order, and maybe where we stand on that warranty on that particular part.  I’ll get all that stuff for you tomorrow, because Australia won’t be open till tomorrow, and then you can have it the day after that, because we’re going to be in the weekend, you won’t get it till the following Monday”.  That’s not a way to do business in the 21st century. 

For the small provider ECM transforms their ability to compete against the big multinationals that might have completely different service levels.  And it allows them to react quickly, to provide complete information, and to be able to transact business regardless of the time zone or the date line.  ECM can be the basis for that kind of a distributed sales service and worldwide workforce.  It is also about automating the back office processes, and ensuring compliance by guaranteeing that you can find all missing documents, all records are complete.  You don’t have to guess whether your audit’s going to come out right.

IDM: What is the main challenge of ECM that you’re attempting to meet with OnBase?
MZ: What really makes something enterprise class as opposed to just another tool that can be deployed for a department?  One of the things that I think is key to an enterprise class solution would is it can be practically deployed across an entire enterprise and must be easy to upgrade when it’s appropriate for an individual department to do so.

Many companies today have different tools deployed for the payables and the receivables and the HR departments. With the OnBase product, we have since 2000 been engineering an incremental upgrade methodology into the software.  So we can actually go in and upgrade the accounts payable department to version 14, and the whole rest of the organisation could still be running on 10, and maybe even within that department you would only upgrade two of the payables clerks, make sure everything’s working well, then you get across the end of month and then you deploy half of the department and then you get across the end of quarter, you deploy the entirety of the department. 

But in the meantime, maybe it’s the wrong time of the year to be doing something with the HR department, because they’re doing their audit,
Will you ever be able to align every single department within an organisation so that they all want to upgrade on the same day?  You want to be able to treat every department like it’s the most important department in the company, you want to be completely attentive to their needs. 
When Hyland Software is asking you to pay maintenance every year, at some point in time there are some new products with some new capability. Most people, when they’re in that situation, “Oh, if we could only use it, but you know, we’re two versions behind, and we’ll have to wait till we upgrade” et cetera.  Because of our approach to the incremental technology use, it means that an organisation who’s paid their maintenance could say 'Well, you know, I want to use this new capability.' 

Maybe I want the new version of the OCR engine that can do line item retrievals and just deploy that on just two or three machines to capture that data.  Once the data’s captured into the system, the whole system won’t know which version it came from, so you could actually install the latest technologies and take advantage of the latest technologies without necessarily having to have an upgrade cycle for the entire organisation.
So we’ve got customers today who are on a version that’s two years old, but they want to use our new iPad, Android based solution that we’ve been collaborating with Samsung on.  And if they want to use that Samsung tablet, they simply have to put one extra server that is providing internet access to that Samsung tablet, and seamlessly they can take advantage of today’s technology and the latest technology and go mobile, and yet still be on a version of the software before mobile was popular, or before the Samsung tablet had really gotten off the ground. 
So that ability to apply technology immediately is a huge differentiator between us and other products. We can do that because we keep the database and the architecture of our software both upwardly and backwardly compatible, which costs more in R&D, an extra couple of million a year.”

IDM: There’s a lot of discussion now of making that as seamless as possible by putting that in the background.  Is that the approach that you’re taking to enabling users to interact with ECM in an easier fashion?
MZ: Hyland Software in 2000 invented a product that we called the Application Enabler.  We’ve sold about 3,500 copies since.  It’s a product that goes through the Microsoft Windows messaging system, and is aware of all the messages that are being generated between all of the applications and the operating system.  By linking into that level of the architecture, what we’ve done is we’ve created an ability to contextually be aware of what’s going on in other applications at the same time.

So one of the things that we provide this for is if you’re in an application, and maybe I’m looking at issuing a credit memo.  Maybe I want to see the purchase order that corresponds to that credit memo.  Should the user have to go to another application, type in the purchase order number and type in the vendor number and do a search and find this document, or should the system be able to realise which customer he’s looking at in that other application, what vendor and what purchase number’s on the screen and automatically bring up the document that corresponds? It delivers a measurable increase of efficiency for any workers to not have to interrupt their train of thought to go into another system to do something. The Application Enabler can take the context from that accounting system and apply all the metadata seamlessly and in the background to the image on the screen.  Ehen a clerk receives it via email and ticks it’s arrived, that invoice is now fully coded, it might even have the GL codes applied from the accounting system, and can be routed to the right person for approval by the workflow engine without having to do a single keystroke of data entry.

IDM: Hyland offers OnBase in an on-premise, cloud or hybrid solution, how important is the cloud offering in this region?
MZ: We have a long history of cloud here in Australia where we have been deploying ever since 2005.  Actually Australia was really a pioneer in some ways, because when they first started going cloud, there were many geographies where there wasn’t that.  But there were some pioneers here in the IT space that realised the value of a cloud solution early on.

The reason why we’re totally under the radar is because our cloud offering here in Australia has mostly been sold by our partner Recall which sells OnBase as their product Review. Organisations such as ANZ Bank, Recall’s former parent Brambles and QBE Insurance are some of the 29 cloud customers right now in the Australian data centre.  We are actually considering opening up a second data centre.  We’re still negotiating terms, but it will be in Melbourne, so we’ll have one in Sydney and one in Melbourne, and we’ll be replicating the data from data centre to data centre for business continuity purposes for our customers, without having to take it offshore, outside of Australia. 

IDM: In the US Hyland’s strengths are in the healthcare and financial services markets. Where do you see the major opportunities in Australia?
MZ: We see healthcare as a huge opportunity. Even for those organisations that have not decided to go with an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) yet, and where they still have paper folders, those paper folders still could benefit if they were electronic.   When a patient is discharged from a facility, that folder needs to be coded so that the different activities that were performed on the patient become can then put it into a billing system.
But the reality of it is that maybe of 20% of people discharged from the hospital return within the first two weeks because of an infection, a complication, etcetera.  When they return, that folder needs to be readily available for clinical use.  If you were to scan on discharge, you would immediately have digital copies of that record so you could choose a lesser expensive geography in which to do the coding. 

Maybe a hospital in Sydney decides I want to send these charts to Adelaide electronically and have someone code it at a lower cost.  Or maybe I’m going to take it offshore and send it to Thailand, where they’ve got a great medical environment that speaks English, and code it at a lesser cost.  But in the emergency room when the patient comes back in, you could find in subseconds.  In the 21st century, it seems almost unconscionable that a complete digital record is not available.

We have a dedicated healthcare effort here in Australia with dedicated employees on the ground who are helping the industry here pioneer how to take this to a new place. We also think there’s a huge opportunity in insurance and we’re very focused on industries like manufacturing, mining and transportation, imported and export. The 2015 Digital Transition Policy presents opportunities in the federal government marketplace. We’re currently implementing push capabilities so that if an agency declares something as a record that needs to be automatically archived to the National Archives, the system will be able to seamlessly do that through web services and won’t negatively impact the efficiency of the organisation.

There are some entrenched players but a lot of those systems are really first or maybe second generation document management systems that might now be calling themselves ECM.  But in terms of enterprise class solutions that are metadata driven and can be tailored from department to department, and can work across an entire enterprise, I think that our architecture is so strong that we will be replacing systems in every industry

IDM: Many organisations struggle with dealing with masses of content in shared drives that is not able to be managed. What do you say to them?
MZ: “We’ve got some percentage of our customers who are storing 100% of the data tied to all of their transactions, but when somebody writes a position paper or a PowerPoint presentation that they’re going to present to a potential business partner, what do you tie that to? Where is the right place to store that, what is the right retention plan for that document that was written.  It’s a potential business partner, and maybe someday they’ll become a business partner, maybe they won’t, there’s no contract or not a business entity in any of your systems yet. 

It’s a very difficult problem to try to solve, and quite frankly one that Hyland Software that has not got into.  We’re more focused on hard return on investment, opportunities for organisations to drive their processes and manage their data and become more effective and more profitable.