Jumping on the critical services bandwagon, Xerox Corp. last week launched a consulting division aimed at helping users with successful enterprise content, knowledge, and document management system deployments.
One of Xerox Global Services’ goals is to determine quantifiable metrics for demonstrating ROI for knowledge and content management projects, which traditionally have been difficult to measure in terms of cost savings and productivity gains, according to Jim Joyce, president of Xerox Connect in Stamford, Conn.
Xerox Global Services brings together multiple existing Xerox services and product-focused groups from around the world into a single structure. The organization will use existing and forthcoming Xerox products as well as third-party technologies and tools.
A key differentiation for Xerox Global Services is the coupling of services and products for content management, knowledge management, and document management, which is necessary for solid integration, according to Joyce.
“To think you buy knowledge management or content management in a box is crazy. Document management has been available for years, but managing a document is a difficult task for most organizations,” he said. “You can buy technology but unless you can integrate it effectively into a business process you won’t get the results.”
The Xerox Global Services organization consists of two branches: business innovation services and managed services. Business innovation services typically begin with a discovery process, which is designed to locate an organization’s need for knowledge management, where Global Services expertise can be used, and establish metrics for the deployment.
“It is important to define the discovery process of problems in the services to gain results because more problems are cultural than are technical,” he said.
The post-implementation managed services offering supports the initiative with services such as help desk, fix and repair, and hosted offerings.
Xerox Global Services will tap its Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, leveraging years of research and development aimed at understanding how people interact with technology, Joyce said. Xerox research has explored the social-technical components about how people and processes work together to leverage existing knowledge in an organization, he said.
“It is about understanding where knowledge is and how it is found,” he said. “By working with human elements of this, there are real things you can do to help people embrace the technology and incorporate it into the workflow.”