Feb 26, 2008
Justifying New Software? Use The Buddy System.
In the past, if you wanted to substantiate new software for document design or a related application, you headed straight for the document production and IT departments. The return on investment (ROI) for document-centric software was focused on hard dollar cost savings for things such as actual print production, mailing, and turnaround times for the document design process.
But the software and services once considered limited to documents are now gaining recognition across the enterprise as their value becomes more evident. What’s in it for you? More places to provide value means additional ROI opportunities. Here are two areas where the benefits of a new system can offer value outside the traditional production environment.
Access to Data
Certainly the HTVO group is not the one in the organization that could use better access to the company’s data. The challenges are similar for a variety of groups. There’s always been data that could be valuable if only it were in a format that could be utilized by the target application. Many vendors in the HTVO space have developed a wide range of transformation applications as well as services to reformat or normalize data and printstreams into format that other applications can use. The result? These days data can virtually begin in any format – including proprietary – and through conversion, be utilized in other applications.
Access to Document Creation
Document creation software exists on nearly every desktop in the company but in many cases, the applications used are different based on the specific needs of the user. HTVO professionals perhaps have some of the most sophisticated document applications. Software designed to support the unique requirements of production printers allows the creation and editing of resources for those printers, and provides IT-level control for conditional logic so that any aspect of the document can by dynamically generated (just to name a few). It takes a highly skilled developer to take full advantage of the power of these applications. Because of the built in conditional logic, these document designs provide a high level of control with regard to the content each document carries. Extending those designs as templates to business users (folks like me!) leverages the important work done by IT while making it easy to create documents on-the-fly. Word processing applications are more my speed and the good news is vendors are expanding the use of their document creation applications to offer editing features that are appropriate for each user type.
These are just a couple of areas that could provide value outside the scope of your initial goals for a new document system. Ask around and learn about the challenges that other departments are having related to documents and data.
The ROI that you may discover could help justify your project and just as importantly, address some challenges that others are having.