are you ready for the ‘big data’ explosion? · information, posts to social media sites,...

Are you ready for the ‘Big Data’ explosion?

Achieve More. Beyond Technology.

Canon is the world’s leading imaging brand that actively inspires with imaginative ideas that enable people to connect, communicate and achieve more than they thought possible through imaging solutions for business and consumers. Canon’s Australian R&D company, CiSRA, develops and exports digital imaging technologies for use in Canon products worldwide. Canon has ranked among the top four US patent recipients for the past 20 years, and had global revenues of around $US46 billion in 2011. Canon Australia also operates Canon Finance Australia, which offers one-stop shopping for customers wanting leasing or finance services. For more information, visit www.canon.com.au, www.facebook.com/canonaustralia, www.twitter.com/canonaustralia, www.youtube.com/canonaustralia.

Are you ready for the ‘Big Data’ explosion? 2

What is ‘Big Data’? 4

Three key business considerations 5

Predictive workflows 8

Storage and compression 10

Integration 12

Building with you as you grow 14

Preparing for the ‘Big Data’ explosion 16

Contents

Con

tent

s

Are you ready for the ‘Big Data’ explosion?

Are

you

rea

dy fo

r th

e ‘B

ig D

ata’

exp

losi

on?

2

Today’s business environment is more competitive than ever. With businesses still feeling the long term pinch of the global financial crisis, there’s a need for them to look for ways in which they can drive innovation and identify new ways of being more competitive in business.

We’re also living in an age where we’re experiencing exponential data growth and proliferation of new communication channels, including social media and the ever-increasing use of collaboration tools within and between organisations. Enterprises are facing an avalanche of data, documents and images that they need to manage to enable them to spend more time on innovation and helping grow the business.

Are

you

rea

dy fo

r th

e ‘B

ig D

ata’

exp

losi

on?

3

So, what are the challenges and considerationsbusinesses need to think about in regard tomanaging this era of ‘Big Data’?

Although businesses invest heavily in IT infrastructure, too often they fail to account for the various document and business processes that contain the vital information and data to feed the back end systems. As a result, many organisations may be relying heavily on inefficient processes to send, share, store, and retrieve information. The costs associated with these inefficiencies that are not readily seen yet can be staggering as they spend more on automating bad processes.

Businesses that don’t manage their information and data effectively in this era of ‘Big Data,’ are not only impacting their productivity but are also at risk of making poor decisions that will impact their bottom line. This does not just relate to large corporates - businesses of all sizes are being impacted. In this ever competitive environment, it’s about looking at how to get control of your data, how to use this information effectively and how to make this valuable to your business.

Documents

Images

Data

What is ‘Big Data’?

Wha

t is

‘Big

Dat

a’?

4

This has become more commonly known as ‘Big Data’. But as Gartner identifies, the term is sometimes misleading because the challenge businesses have is the many dimensions of this data in addition to the volume of data under management.1

‘Big Data’ consists of both ‘structured’ and ‘unstructured’ data that is derived from multiple sources and, due to its volume and real time nature, it exceeds “the analytical or processing capacity of today’s conventional systems and databases.” IDC simply notes it is big, fast and varied, lacking inherent structure or predictable size, rate of arrival and transformation or analysis when processed.

With IDC predicting the global market for ‘Big Data’ exploding to US$16.9bn in 2015 from just $3.2bn in 2010 across software and services, storage, Cloud, and infrastructure deployments, ‘the Big Data’ market is rapidly expanding. The benefits of harnessing ‘Big Data’ are clearly being recognised by businesses who are looking to use this information in a variety of ways, such as to gain meaningful customer insights, analysis, prediction of trends and more targeted marketing to name just a few.

Businesses are beginning to investigate how they can more effectively harness this information from across their organisation to ensure their people are truly productive in their role. Too often employees are siloed in their organisation, based on their role or the IT systems used in a particular department and are unable to quickly access information from across the organisation. With the rise of ‘Big Data,’ it becomes even more necessary to ensure that information is accessible quickly across a variety of formats and across every department of an organisation.

According to IBM, every day, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created. So much data is now produced that 90 per cent of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, student records, medical records, invoices, digital pictures and videos posted online and transaction records to name just a few.

Wha

t is

‘Big

Dat

a’?

5

1Gartner, ‘Big Data’ Is Only the Beginning of Extreme Information Management, 7 April 2011

Sensors

Medical Records

Invoices

Transaction Records

Social Media

Student Records

Video Posts

Digital Pictures

But what does the impact of ‘Big Data’ mean for businesses’ existing information management practices and their technology infrastructure and how can they manage this revolution as painlessly as possible?

‘Big Data’

What are the three key business considerations around ‘Big Data’?

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

6

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

7

According to Gartner, concern over ‘Big Data’ represents the first manifestation of the extreme challenges that will overwhelm existing information management practices and technologies.2

Gartner notes that ‘the ability to manage extreme data will be a core competency of enterprises that are increasingly using new forms of information (text, social, context) to look for patterns that support business decisions.’ However, enterprises are beginning to focus on high volumes of information to the exclusion of the many other dimensions of information management —leaving massive challenges to be addressed later.

As Gartner identifies, IT leaders must be aware of ‘all the dimensions that are moving toward extremes in their environment and then learn how these dimensions interact with each other.’ They must recognise their challenges, plan how to address them and acquire new technologies and practices to manage them.

Managing ‘Big Data’

There are three core areas for consideration when managing ‘Big Data’:

Predictive workflows

Storage and compression

Integration

2Gartner, ‘Big Data’ Is Only the Beginning of Extreme Information Management, 7 April 2011


Predictive workflowsMany businesses operate their processes in a manual way, relying on inefficient processes to send, share, store and retrieve information. With the growth of ‘Big Data’ and information available in a variety of formats, organisations will increasingly need to look at technologies that can not only automate workflows to create streamlined business processes across various sources and formats of information, but also uses information values to predict next steps for processing documents.

Send Share Store Retrieve

For example, the amount extracted from an invoice would trigger an approval workflow. The invoice is then immediately pushed to the relevant Manager based on the value amount. This ability to predict rather than depend upon manual intervention brings significant productivity gains to an organisation’s workflow.

“ With the volume of data readily increasing, it is imperative that businesses look holistically at their organisation now in terms of business information workflow and information management as well as looking at their needs for the future in order to set themselves up for success. Implementing technologies that can help automate workflows and predictive workflows not only save time but also ensure they operate as efficiently as they can.” - Craig Manson, Director, Canon Business Imaging

Implementing cutting edge technology infrastructure and business workflow solutions

not only impacting their bottom line but also improving the productivity of their employees, freeing them up to do the work that matters to them and the business.

enables businesses to operate efficiently,

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

8

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

9

Marist College, Ashgrove also implemented a range of Canon solutions to reduce costs and improve its workflow. During the implementation, the College was provided with a single point database to scan in and store files with Canon’s Therefore solution. Prior to implementation, it could take up to three days to find a piece of data. Once all the College’s data has been input into Therefore, Marist College will be able to search and locate a file instantly, moving away from a reliance on paper files and significantly reducing the time taken to search through them for data.

In order to move to a predictive workflow environment and ensure that employees are as productive as possible, a thorough analysis and investigation of a business’s existing processes and assessment of its infrastructure is required to create a robust overview. Once the analysis has been completed, the needs and pain points of its information management workflow now and in the future are identified, enabling a business to make the right, informed decisions for their needs.

“ It is a significant upgrade to our previous document management system and we look forward to being able to improve our search capabilities. The Canon implementation was at first just a print solution but it quickly became an implementation of a complete solution.” - Stephen Porter, Business Manager, Marist College Ashgrove

One of Canon’s customers in industrial and mining services is an example of one such organisation that once operated a completely manual accounts process to manage its invoices before implementing a capture and store solution to automate its workflow processes. Its accounts department filed its invoices in lever arch folders across multiple office locations, with the supporting material often stored in different locations again. With the storage process completely manual, the time taken to retrieve documents and critical business information was significant and information was often misfiled. This meant customer queries couldn’t be answered in a timely fashion.

Canon implemented a solution that enabled this customer to automatically extract information from its documents and used this data to index them directly into Canon’s document management solution.

By installing Canon solutions, the customer was able to revolutionise its workflow processes, enabling it to easily capture, organise and access information across multiple locations quickly and this workflow has been extended across multiple departments in the organisation.

“ With our business continually growing, storage space was becoming an issue and the time taken to file documents was also significant. We knew we needed to streamline retrieval of our invoices to reduce the time spent filing and retrieving information, as well as freeing up office space.” - Canon Customer, Industrial and mining services

“ Switching to an automated workflow not only improved accuracy but also increased productivity, allowing us to concentrate on our core roles, rather than laborious tasks such as filing, retrieving invoices and co-ordinating with other locations to access supporting documents,” - Canon Customer, Industrial and mining services


Storage & compression

As the volume and complexity of information and data grows, storage becomes a key consideration for businesses, not only in terms of physical space but also cost.

In a paper-based system, paper, filing cabinets, admin staff and other requirements cost money. In a digital-based system, you need the electronic storage space and system administration staff. Good information management systems can reduce these costs by meeting all information-related requirements in a well-planned manner.

By ensuring that organisations are only storing the information that they need, this reduces the amount of physical and digital storage space required by the business. And by making information easily searchable, it reduces the amount of time wasted by staff looking for the information they need.

Managing the growing volume of information generated and received in the course of a business is expensive and that is only set to increase.

“ By digitising paper documents and using a secure central repository for storage and retrieval, the amount of printing and copying undertaken by staff has reduced and our information management dramatically improved,” - David Leong, Director of Information Technology, Arnold Bloch Leibler, an Australian commercial law firm.

Paper-based system Digital-based system Good information management system

Printing and copying

reduced

Information management

improved

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

10

Over time, people will search information based on context not specifics and it is important to have the systems in place to facilitate this. With businesses increasingly looking to move to ‘paperless’ offices, it’s not about removing the paper per se, it’s about removing the duplication of paper in storage and in the retrieval and search processes, saving businesses time and money.

As the need for storage increases, compression becomes an increasingly critical component in managing ‘Big Data.’ Implementing technology solutions that can compress information can not only save your business significant time and money in terms of storage, but also the ability to quickly share, collaborate, and manage bandwidth.

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

11

Implementing an efficient storage and information management solution enables businesses to easily search, manage, and control multiple types of information efficiently across a variety of different formats – effectively creating an electronic filing cabinet of all business information.

An efficient storage and information management solution

“ Canon’s solution allowed us to create a workflow that supported our email management/electronic filing project by allowing employees to scan paper documents into their email or matter files directly. Storing these in a central repository allowed us to effectively make an electronic backup and it also made them accessible to other staff working on the same matter.” - David Leong, Director of Information Technology, Arnold Bloch Leibler

“ One aspect of information management that is critical for businesses to investigate is compression. When deploying information management tools and software, it is prudent to investigate whether they come with compression technology built in. For instance, our suite of capture tools features patented iHQC technology which compresses documents up to 50 times their original size without compromising on image quality or content.” - Craig Manson, Director, Canon Business Imaging

Having the back end infrastructure and software implemented that can compress and extract data quickly and efficiently not only helps businesses manage their information on a day to day basis but also ensures they are well prepared for disaster recovery – being set up to recover as quickly as possible, reducing downtime and minimising loss.

Search

Manage

Control

Create


IntegrationMost businesses have an IT environment that is made up of multiple systems across different aspects of the business, which have been designed around specific functions. Often there is a risk that data does not effectively cross between these systems and workflows across an organisation and that consequently, decisions are made without a complete picture. The onset and growth of ‘Big Data’ magnifies the issue.

which means higher costs for an organisation. For instance, HR will process a new employee contract for its internal records. Payroll will then process the very same contract for payment purposes. The same data had to be manually entered twice.

A lack of visibilityacross the different systems can lead to duplication in data entry and processing

12

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

When looking at implementing systems to manage ‘Big Data’, it is critically important to consider integration and implement a comprehensive, planned and multi-faceted approach that takes into consideration not only the future in terms of technology needs, such as mobility, but also the technology investments already made that are critical to a business’s existing processes.

QLeave worked closely with Canon’s professional service team to integrate TeleForm into its new business system and its TRIM document management system. From there, QLeave was able to transfer the paper based documents directly into TRIM, as well as capturing the information on the forms and automatically moving the document to the process holding data store.

13

Wha

t ar

e th

e th

ree

key

busi

ness

con

side

rati

ons

arou

nd ‘B

ig D

ata’

?

Integration is the ability to take captured data and parallel push this into multiple third party systems. Pushing data at this level not only enables optimised workflows across the business but also ensures that data is entered just once, giving a business more efficiency, flexibility and value for money than creating customised integrations.

“ By engaging with Canon’s professional service team we were able to capitalise on our investment in TeleForm and achieve massive improvements in staff productivity as well as improve the efficiency and accuracy of the form processing system.” - Hafiz Dean, Manager Information Services, QLeave, the Building and Construction Industry Portable Long Service Leave Authority

“ Canon worked with us to optimise our use of TeleForm. Despite having already invested in TeleForm a few years earlier, staff were basically just scanning forms and using this as their in tray. Now only one person is required to scan in forms and staff only need to key a minimal amount of information into the system.” - Hafiz Dean, Manager Information Services, QLeave, the Building and Construction Industry Portable Long Service Leave Authority

Furthermore, should systems change or evolve over time, it is important to ensure that the API framework implemented will enable a quick change over, giving businesses peace of mind that a large customisation piece of work will not need to be undertaken as part of the new system.

Data

Bui

ldin

g w

ith

you

as y

ou g

row

14

Building with you as you grow

Bui

ldin

g w

ith

you

as y

ou g

row

15

Dealing with this data avalanche and its resulting complexity of processes and workflow can be a daunting situation that businesses expect will require huge change. Identifying the immediate needs of a business, its unique workflow demands as well as its long term goals and growth strategy is critical in determining the right technologies and processes are implemented to set up the business for success. The complexity of a business’s environment, ensuring full understanding of the technology that is available to ease its pain points, as well as ensuring all compliance needs are met is a complicated and time consuming process. But each business is different – with different needs, pressure points and different amounts they have to invest in technology. So is there a ‘one size fits all’ approach to manage the complexities of ‘Big Data’?

“ Our approach here at Canon is to investigate carefully the particular needs, pressure points and information requirements of each customer and then build the correct solution with theirs,” says Craig Manson. “It’s not about implementing technology for technology’s sake. It’s important to look at the technology investments that have already been made, understand the environment that business operates in and its own unique needs and information requirements and make considered recommendations and technology recommendations that are built with the customer as each step progresses.” Dealing with small changes in a staggered approach ensures that the pain points of dealing with ‘Big Data’ are carefully managed. As David Leong, Arnold Bloch Leibler, said, “One of our main objectives was implementing a solution that would have little to no impact on the day-to-day work practices of the firm. As a result we were very prescriptive with our plans to introduce the new technology and very mindful of the change management aspects of the roll out.”

“ Throughout the process, Canon’s representatives were excellent. We really felt that we’d be undertaking this as a journey together and we were very comfortable with the broad product. Canon delivered a complete solution for us and the support team were excellent, we still keep in contact with them.” - Stephen Porter, Business Manager, Marist College Ashgrove

Pre

pari

ng fo

r th

e ‘B

ig D

ata’

exp

losi

on

16

Preparing for the ‘Big Data’ explosion

Pre

pari

ng fo

r th

e ‘B

ig D

ata’

exp

losi

on

17

There are five key steps to take in order to create the most effective environment for your business and ensure you are managing and well prepared for the ‘Big Data’ explosion:

“ The opportunity around ‘Big Data’ is huge but managing ‘Big Data’ doesn’t have to require huge change and a big headache. With a trusted partner that builds your information management system with you as you go, you can make small but important changes to ensure you are getting the most valuable information you can out of the data you have, setting you up for success and putting you in a highly competitive position in the market.” - Craig Manson, Director, Canon Business Imaging

Discover A thorough analysis and investigation of your existing processes and assessment of your infrastructure to create a robust overview of the business processes, costs and output management technologies.

Design Once the analysis has been completed, the needs and pain points of your information management workflow now and in the future are identified.

Transition Once identified, the right solutions can be implemented that include everything from automating manual processes to increasing the effectiveness of communication and ensuring the right compression and storage solutions are implemented. It is at the implementation and transition stage where businesses build an effective foundation for growth and scalability.

Manage Closely managing the change ensures that all employees are brought into the new processes and any problems that arise are carefully monitored and swiftly managed.

Review A thorough review of the implementation is critical in ensuring that all needs have been addressed, that the workflow is operating as efficiently as possible and that the business is set up for success for future growth.

For more information contact:Shane McClellandCanon [email protected](02) 9805 2619

For information on Canon’s solutions call 1800 263 655 or visit canon.com.au

1774-1112