Consider a Hybrid Team
ECM projects require a number of design and implementation disciplines: taxonomy, archive system(s), database, LOB integration and content ingestion. Your project team will require engineering/consulting experience covering each of these disciplines. Our consultants have extensive IBM Datacap experience, specifically within “content ingestion” project tasks.
We bring our expertise to any phase of your project, though it is advantageous we are involved as early as possible. Once the project is complete, internal resources will most likely be utilized for day-to-day administration and maintenance. Our team can take over some or all of subsequent enhancements to the Datacap processing configuration. Our consultants can educate and mentor your long-term support team in all things Datacap.
Phases of Your Datacap Project
- Initial project requirements and scope
- Select IBM ECM products including Datacap
- Thoroughly and realistically evaluate the documents to be processed; prototype the most challenging aspects of the document processing
- Reengage with project stakeholders to review evaluation results and confirm and/or reset expectations
- Create project design documents and set schedule
- Develop and implement the solution
Projects that bypass phases 3 & 4 are subject to expensive delays, rework and frustration. The most common reason these are bypassed is not knowing the realities of document capture system capabilities and therefore how to identify challenging requirements.
We are experts in all things Datacap. As your technology partner, we help you achieve optimal results by applying the technology to meet both your organization’s immediate and future needs. We help you discover why a process should be implemented in a specific way. Combining our discovery process and extensive experience of both the software and hardware components, enables us to recommend the right technological solution and implementation. Once deployed, the solution will evolve over time to further improve your business processes.
Typical Datacap Implementation Progression
- Requirements gathering
- Thorough requirements evaluation including prototype development of challenging project aspects
- Evaluation review with the project’s business stakeholders
- Design the solution
- Develop the Datacap application within initial environment
- Migration of the solution into test environment and conversion of databases to SQL Server, DB2 or Oracle
- Unit testing
- Stress testing in test environment
- Necessary fixes to application based on test results
- Migration of application from test to production environment
- Production support
- Training for users, supervisors and administration
- Necessary documentation specific to the implementation
Assumptions Are Expensive
IBM Datacap products are industry-recognized as best-of-breed, powerful, flexible and comprehensive. Not unlike a thoroughbred racehorse; bred and trained to provide the best possible results when set to task. However regardless of what you might have assumed, what you might have read somewhere, or what you might have been told, a thoroughbred racehorse can’t fly because that is not what it was created to do.
Document capture projects are often stymied by assumptions or incorrect information injected early in the design phase, only to be realized well into the project schedule. Redesign, expectation reset, and rework efforts are expensive. Our Datacap architects can play a critical role during the requirements gathering and design phases to protect your project’s budget and schedule.
Prototyping Saves Budget & Saves Projects
Not only can our Datacap architects provide pre-project education regarding all aspects of the document ingestion component of an ECM project, we can also participate in any phase of your project. Our preferred project approach involves identifying the most challenging aspects of the project design and developing/validating specific solutions to these challenges through prototype early on. The challenges may be in the form of complex enterprise infrastructure or security, document content specifics, or simply working at the far reaches of the technology envelope.
The prove-via-prototype approach provides either confirmation of the design or alternative solutions. In nearly every case, the effort invested in the prototype(s) can be directly applied to the final project. In our experience, addressing the project’s challenging aspects early-on is best way to control schedule creep and/or avoid costly rework.