Focus on ‘Change’ at the Dutch Aia Customer Day

“There are plenty of reasons not to want to change: everything is already so hectic” remarks CEO Paul Dirven at the beginning of the afternoon session. “But if you never change, nothing will ever happen.” The business sees changes, the business does something with the changes, and ICT makes its (own) changes possible: business-owned, business-managed & ICT-controlled. Or, as Forrester says on the topic of correspondence and communication processes: “Tame the untamed business process”

Change was precisely the view put forward in the presentation by Ronald Postema, Chief Business Support Engineer at energy company Essent. “At an earlier stage of development, we mainly used ‘in-house applications’, which did not interface with other applications. Text changes had to be made by IT, which meant it took a couple of days to get some text changed. In the business’s view, this was not flexible. This prompted employees to save their own sample texts locally, which in turn made it more difficult to maintain consistency in outgoing correspondence.”

Postema certainly agrees with the line of reasoning that an integrated customer communications management (CCM) solution quickly pays for itself. “But it’s also absolutely vital to involve business in the process of selecting and implementing any solution of this kind. As soon as the ICT department had drawn up a package of technical requirements and desires for us for the new CCM solution, we immediately sat down with our colleagues from the business. They were highly involved in the different product presentations and the selection procedure, and users from the business took part in the implementation as well. The result is that a new CCM solution supported by business and IT has been implemented, with content managed by people from the business. They are ‘leading’ when it comes to content.”

Paul Dirven: “This means that, in practice, ITP gives the business more power and control than ever before over content for our customers, and that can only be a good thing. After all, they’re the ones who have the knowledge of the market and the customers. You only need ICT for essential changes in the use of the supporting resources. They handle management of software versions, hardware (performance), corporate style templates, integration with back-end systems and other similar activities which are not directly related to the business.”

Logical & Consistent

“With customer communication management, the business user is key” highlights Ronald Postema. “What is crucial and distinguishing for a company is their approach to customers and the customer experience, not their ICT or mailroom. You do need to have those in order, but it’s certainly not a core business. As an organization, you always want to communicate with your customers in the same way, logically and consistently: always communicate with them through the same image. This image is precisely what you, as an organization, should be striving towards, in every channel of communication. The main benefit of this approach is that employees in business can perform their work far more easily and are less dependent on ICT. They become (more like) the owners of a process and the content that goes with it. The speed with which changes can be applied now is a world of difference from before, when ICT had to implement every change. However, there is one factor that you should be mindful of as an organization; that is that the simplicity of the change can even result in people ‘working around it’ because it ‘just doesn’t fit in’ with their work. But this can be overcome easily enough. You have to remain vigilant and remember that this problem is a mere trial compared to the old situation. However, even minor problems can get out of hand.”

Simplifying Complexities

“The complex commercial reality is often very difficult to capture in IT systems” notes Aia Software CTO Jeroen Huinink. “Our mission is to provide business users with tools to communicate effectively with customers, whether via an office network, a partner network or a website. Knowledge of this commercial reality is often lacking in the systems traditionally used in the mailroom. A service-oriented architecture does make it possible for all IT system’s to communicate with one another, but it does not add any information on the various ways in which an organization interacts with its customers. This information is in fact normally available in a CRM system. By incorporating this information from CRM and using it in a targeted manner, your customer management system can optimize outgoing message flows and harmonize them with the desires and requirements of all parties in the sales channel. Proper allocation of this responsibility and use of ITP/CCM puts everything in the right place and integrates it seamlessly, while also making it all a little bit simpler and more accessible.”

As a loyal user of Aia’s ITP, De Lage Landen International, a financial service provider, has undergone a transformation as well. Rens Voogt, Head of IT Enterprise Document Services: “We are an internationally operating service organization with numerous branches and a wide array of products and services, and thus also a wide variety of customers. However, you still always want to achieve a consistent and logical approach to your partners and customers in the different business units. This is an enormous challenge for the ICT department: it is complex, diverse, fraught with high volumes of output and templates, and is knowledge-intensive. In the business, there was a notion that ITP was difficult and time-consuming, and not as flexible as a user would like it to be. But correspondence, communication with your customers, is your calling card, in a manner of speaking. Your customers are constantly experiencing it, so it is the only tangible aspect of a financial service which absolutely must be good. Documents deserve just as much attention as the processes that they support. The focus of our new approach is business governance, which is implemented by a ‘Document Board’, comprised of representatives from the Legal, Marketing, Commerce, Operations and IT departments. All of our processes generate documents. These documents should be prepared in a manner that is correct and simple for the user. And They should also do justice to the various product labels, legal preconditions and consistency of the ‘look & feel’. What’s more, they have to fit into the IT reference architecture that we have in mind as an organization: ‘Document Generation as a service’ as it were, all in accordance with the rules of the company and the business units that use the documents. With Aia’s ITP solution, we have enjoyed a great deal of success here. The responsibilities are now where they belong, some with the various business units and some with ICT, each with its own approach, geared towards the quality and knowledge available there.”

Putting Responsibilities where They Belong

“The new version of ITP is ground breaking in regards to putting responsibilities where they belong. ‘Giving the business (even) more responsibility over content and only using ICT for typical ICT tasks, that’s what it’s about” explains CEO Leon Pillich. For the customer, the new version is easier to use, it is arranged more logically with the separation of content from software, and its structure is a far more uniform for the user.

The new version adds a considerable expansion to the basic functionality of the three ITP/CCM products: interactive, on-demand and enterprise. New features include an extensive web-based administration environment for letter books, a tracking & tracing database, publication of workflows and built-in support for automated regression tests on changes and – last but not least – management of templates and text blocks has also been further simplified. Another new bonus is that it now supports standard integration with Microsoft SharePoint. This makes it easy to integrate interactive documents with the SharePoint document management functionality. “An ideal solution for supporting knowledge workers in their processes, among other things” adds Pillich. “Think of preparing quotations or inspection reports so Forrester also sees our SharePoint integration as a major plus.”

A long road behind us, but a long road still ahead…

Aia software has come a long way to become what it is today: a supplier of all-in-one solutions for customer communication. “And there’s much more to come” says Mr Dirven. “The world is getting more and more mobile, and so shall we. There will be task-oriented apps for mobile phones, making it possible to create and send interactive documents from your mobile or, more likely, your tablet PC. HTML 5 will be the starting point here because it makes you platform-independent and device-independent, both now and into the future”

ITP version 4 with the new basic functionality as well as the iPhone task interfaces will be available soon. Integration with SharePoint as a DMS is in development and is projected for Q1 of next year.