Information At Your Fingertips

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Next week I will be attending and speaking at the OpenText Enterprise World event in Orlando. The theme is the Power of Information which is about how to discover, control, secure, and unleash it so that you can be remarkable – in your role, in your organization, and in your industry. As I started preparing for the event my mind flashed back to Comdex 1995 and Bill Gates' "Information At Your Fingertips" keynote speech. Yes, I am really dating myself now! clip_image002

There’s a lot in common between Bill’s speech and what OpenText will be showing and discussing next week. A good example is the work at Anglian Water who supplies water and wastewater services to more than six million domestic and business customers in the east of England. Anglian had some significant information management problems with a document storage system with 40% duplication, 10 million documents and no search capability. Their Intranet had over 39,000 pages, no common look and feel, much duplication and old content with employees spending approximately one hour per week searching to locate necessary information.

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How did Anglian Water solve this information management problem? They used the OpenText xECM Suite with SharePoint as the glue for connecting Anglian’s SAP processes with its Microsoft SharePoint intranet to create an “Information At Your Fingertips” environment. Take a look at this video where Anglian describes how they optimized their information management for improved access, removed information silos and aligned information management with business programs and processes.

It’s a great story and a modern day example of “Information At Your Fingertips”. I hope to see many of you in Orlando next week! – Jon C. Arnold