One of the main industries that Millennia Group supports is the commercial real estate industry. I am sure that this industry shares traits with many other industries in terms of technology solutions, things like single sign-on requirements, transitioning to cloud based email and new uses for CRM.
Another area that all industries have in common, and it is not a new problem, is called “silos of data.” This is a situation where different sets of data reside in different applications or locations. The problem is that sometimes you need data from several of these “silos” to solve a problem or answer a question and the silos don’t always talk. The answer to this problem has been the proliferation of data warehouses or business intelligence applications. These applications aggregate copies of data from many other applications into the warehouse and allow searching and slicing and dicing of data to get answers.
However, data can include more than just transaction data or customer data. Data can include documents, but documents are not always part of a business intelligence or data warehouse solution. Documents, and we are talking about digital documents that have been scanned or created electronically, also need a warehouse so that the information in or about those documents can be shared with other applications.
But rather than just copy documents from other repositories to allow searches, it makes sense to us to just have a single repository of the documents that other applications pull from. We have been calling this the “Hub” concept for years now. A Hub of digital documents that link to other systems because of a common bit of data. When you are working in a CRM and you pull up a customer record, it automatically would display a list of the contract documents associated with that client. The same list of documents for that client would be available from within the accounting system and of course the contract management system.
This “Hub” concept is really a data warehouse or as Glenn Murray of Hypercept called it several years ago, a “Document Warehouse.” This concept will require integration effort, but the trend is to make data accessible where it needs to be so that users can make the best decisions possible.
If you are interested in learning more about the Document Warehouse concept, please email me at mcipriano@mgdocs.com.