Dipak Sahoo, Vice President-IT/Head-IT, Bharti AXA Life, in conversation with Biztech2.0, iterates the challenges posed by enterprise content management and discusses the transformation of a CMS from a form of 'paper stimulation' to a sophisticated technology platform, which resembles business process management.

Can you explain the challenges posed by enterprise content management at Bharti AXA Life and also outline some of the solutions you have deployed to overcome these challenges?

Insurance companies generate physical documentation in various formats and in enormous quantities. Managing such a large volume of documents and ensuring easy and efficient access to the content, at a later date, becomes a challenge.

Cumbersome paper handling and error-prone manual processes, in addition to space constraints for storage of physical documents is a problem when processing large volumes of paper-based information. Accessing these physical documents during claims and customer service requests poses certain logistics problems in addition to security issues raised during document access and modification. Modifications to existing documents lead to versioning issues, along with problems surrounding document ownership. Another problem associated with paper-based systems is the inability of access to physical documents by multiple people, at the same time.

Another significant challenge, especially for life insurance companies, is data collation for risk management. This data can be mined to develop products and services that meet customer expectations.

We have used the Filenet suite of products from IBM in conjunction with Sharepoint services from Microsoft, in order to deal with the Enterprise Content Management issues at Bharti AXA Life. These solutions enable us to effectively manage the entire policy life cycle of our customers.
We also plan to invest in technologies like Workflow Management and subsequently Straight Through Processing Technology in the coming year. These investments would help manage digitised content across all our processes and thereby help us cater to customer requests quicker and better.

What were some of the issues that you had to deal with during the content management solution implementation?

The creation of efficient information architecture is generally the first problem faced, when you want to implement a content management solution. The information architecture for our enterprise content management system was designed keeping in mind the flow of information across the organisation, control requirements for information security and our plan of moving to a business process management and straight through processing platform.

Data migration is another issue raised when moving data from old formats to more useable formats and includes concerns such as creation of a master data store. As we implemented our enterprise content management solution within four months of launching our business operations, we did not face any data migration issues as we could define the format at the outset. The people factor and reluctance to change was also taken care of, by implementing this solution soon after the launch. As a young organisation, our employees clearly saw the benefits of this initiative and adapted to the early change immediately.

Getting the top management to support an information management initiative is another problem that many organisations come across. Bharti AXA Life has a vision of being a top-class, customer-centric organisation. This initiative reiterates the commitment of our management towards realising this vision through better and more efficient customer service.

Another area of concern is when multiple users are modifying one document, which raises issues of document ownership. This has been managed at the process definition level. Hence, at any given stage, the ownership of the document is clearly defined to avoid any ambiguity.

High amounts of customisation are generally required to make packaged software fit an organisation’s workflows. We took a calculated approach towards customisation, where what was required was more in terms of defining the flow of content, which could be configured inherently in the IBM software.

How far along do you think are Indian enterprises in looking at CMS as a more powerful database model/stage?

Indian enterprises are increasingly acknowledging the benefits of content management. From a mere digitisation exercise, Content management has metamorphosed to resemble far more sophisticated technology platforms like business process management, straight through processing and enterprise analytics.

Once content is available in a managed environment, organisations are equipped for data mining to design sophisticated and customised service offerings.