Three of our departments on campus had different situations and for various reasons decided to outsource all or part of their Content Management. This article outlines the advantages and the disadvantages that they encountered along the way.
In two of the departments they had already invested in a Outsource Content management system (Ivise and Papervision)
Advantages that the department wished to acquire with this outsource:
° Reduce Business Cost
° Time Savings from filing
° Expand other Services to be performed by present employees
° Enable employees to have more time for customer service
° Limited personal and space
Disadvantages that the departments encountered after the outsourcing relationship was implemented:
° Renewal of Licenses cost every year
° Charged extra for additional items scanned and indexed or any changes made to the application.
° Lack of Support (Paying for a service they expected special treatment and better customer service).
° Individuals performing the duties were not experienced with the documents resulting in misplaced items.
° The quality of the outsourced process was dramatically less professional then the way the Departments ran. The Department suffered loss in productivity and efficiency, and did not gain any reduction in cost that was promised.
° Valuable staffing that they thought would be utilized differently in the office had to refocus on technological and financial resources which the department didn’t have in the first place.
° The initial thought that the departments would be much more agile using the outsourcing found they lacked control and ownership of the documents. The outsourced process hampered the departments response time for unexpected changes with internal and external conditions.
° Outsource vendor’s team lacked required skills, didn’t have the knowledge of the department environment. This facuilitated an increase in staff turnover causing the department to review procedures/process and retrain new staff.
° Maintenance cost increased yearly
Frustrated, the departments searched for a solution and learned about UAMS campus having a Content Management system already in place, by utilizing the UAMS Content Management system, departments were able to achieve cost, capability and capacity goals by eliminated the outsourcing. Once all data was converted from the old systems to ApplicationXtender, the departments were able to make changes and maintain their own data. In both cases the departments are more efficient and have more access. They have even been able to created additional projects to eliminate more paper in office and filing.
The third department chose to outsource their initial scanning portion of implementation to achieve faster results. However, wehn the outsource vendor completed the initial implmentation, the department decovered most of the work preformed though outsourcing was done incorrectly. The department had to make corrections and/or changes to most of the documents. In the end, the department found they could have performed this service and saved alot of time and money.
In our experience here at UAMS outsourcing of Content Management didn't seem to be the way to move forward.
What were your experiences with outsourcing? Please share your feedback, it may benefit and help others with similar issues/concerns.
Bonnie Hipp
Senior Systems Analyst for Documentum ApplicationXtender
University of Arkansas for Medical Science
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