Feature

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 17 No 01 - January/February 2009

One of the longest established EDM vendors in the UK market has managed to remain a relatively small-scale success story. DM Editor Dave Tyler speaks to Dr. Vijay Magon, managing director at OIT UK

Dave Tyler: OIT UK has been around for longer than many other vendors in the EDM marketplace. What do you think has contributed to your longevity and continued success? Vijay Magon: What makes us different from many other suppliers in this space is that we are not just about selling our EDM technology: we really understand the problems faced by people dealing with information within their business. This means information in the widest possible context, we're not just talking about a piece of paper coming into a department. We have a real understanding of how to capture that information, how to store and manage that information, and crucially now, we are also able to be much cleverer about how make that information available to the right user at the right time. With us, the software does all the hard work of locating and presenting the relevant information to the user in as accurate and timely a manner as possible, rather than the user having to go in and press lots of buttons in order to get what they want. Something that has struck me over time is that most 'search engines' are actually very poor 'find engines': when you search for something, you still have

to spend time - and money - trawling through everything that's presented on the screen, hoping that you will see the content that is relevant to you. With our approach the system does the work in understanding exactly what it is you're looking for, and discerning the relevance of different content to what your requirements might be.

DT: You've a solid reputation as a specialist supplier to specific market sectors

-I'm thinking here of health, police forces and the like - but I know you are doing more and more business in the private sector these days. Does your product offering have a focus on particular markets or is it applicable to any business? VM: We've done a lot of work in hospitals, local government and the private sector, and these diverse markets all suffer from the exact same problems when you look closely: it doesn't matter who you are or what sector you operate in, you are dealing with information, managing and presenting that information. That said of course, there is a need to package solutions so as to suit, say, the NHS - they need to know that we genuinely understand their business, so selling a generic EDM solution is unlikely to appeal. But the differences often come down to an exercise in packaging. If you look at our software offering, probably around 85% of it is applicable across any market sector: the other 15% is where we make it 'talk to' a particular industry, in the language that a specific business understands and uses. So if I were to 'peel away' the NHS layer from our offering in that sector, what is left is exactly the same software as is being used in the police networks and government departments - albeit with their customised 'top layer'.

This means we don't have to re-invent the vast bulk of our product offering every time we make a new sale; it is a stable well-established product that has a track record going back 20 or 30 years. Instead we can focus on that other 15%, which is where we can best apply our technologies to your specific business in order to ease your actual day-to-day pain.

Our skills and experience in these diverse markets have evolved over quite along time to create a highly skilled workforce within OIT UK: we've spent over 15 years learning what the NHS wants from technologies like ours, and what local government wants. This is not generally something a supplier can buy in. We have consultants who can go in to, for instance, an NHS department, talk to the staff there, understand exactly what their issues are, and come back able to translate that information into a system spec that we can then develop.

DT: In the private sector much of the drive toward document automation has started from 'easy return' applications such as Accounts Payable: how does this vary in the public sector, where the emphasis is less on cost-cutting and more on efficient delivery? VM: Interestingly, most of the 'pain' that

our private sector clients have to deal with, like invoice processing for instance, tend to be non-core areas where those clients are looking to cut costs. If we can show a client how they can process invoices in say fifteen minutes instead of five hours, that appeals very much to businesses. We don't come across that approach so much in the public sector, because it is almost taken for granted that those overheads are there and will remain - they don't have the same impetus to re-deploy staff, for example to save money. Where the public sector looks for improvements is in process efficiency, especially in the delivery of timely information. This is particularly true within the NHS, we find. So from that point of view it influences how we might present our products in order to make them specific to those different kinds of business messages. DT: If the drivers towards EDM are not essentially financial - especially in the public sector, what is it that is helping you to make sales in these difficult times? VM: The entire EDM business is changing as users become aware of the enormous potential benefits. We have seen a huge shift away from document management purely for the sake of archiving, and toward the goal of getting documents into the business process as soon as possible. From that perspective much of the technology of even the relatively recent past is now effectively just a component of a far wider solution.

One other key driver in recent times

that we have seen having a major impact is compliance. Given some of the litigation episodes that have occurred, people are now taking this whole issue very seriously indeed. They are asking the right questions, whether it is "What do I have to do to be compliant?" or even "What is compliance anyway?"

We've spent a lot of time over the last two years working on these areas, at two levels. There is 'standards-based' compliance such as TNA and more recently MOREQ2, where we are fully compliant - we have products based on the TNA 2002 specification, for instance. But I'd have to say we have seen very little take-up.

I think this is because many products come in at a corporate level and attempt to enforce how people should deal with records and documents. On the other hand we've come from a background of many years of selling document management systems - many customers who've been using our systems have built up huge document repositories over 12 or 14 years, and they are now asking if they have to replace everything with a 'TNA 2002 compliant' product.

What the whole compliance argument boils down to is this: "All I really need to know is - What do I actually have in my organisation or department, and how long should I keep it?" And that's it! Armed with that approach, we've been able to develop software which allows our existing customers to achieve compliance almost overnight. More info: www.oituk.com

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