When I was in high school we not only had to read the poem Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. But, we were required to memorize portions of this huge poem. As a high school teen, poetry was not my favorite thing in fact, I hated it. Why would anyone need to know about this poem?
So many years later, I was sitting in a conference and the key note speaker, a CIO of a fortune 500 company said “you cannot get more efficient as a company until you rid yourself of the Albatross that is around you neck…”
Then the words came back to me ….
“The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,
The furrow followed free;
We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea.”
What was this Albatross that this CIO was talking about? He said “you need to get rid of the paper in your office that it the Albatross around your neck preventing your staff from becoming more efficient. We noticed that when we became paperless it opened the gates to a new and more efficient mode of operating.”
They had just completed a year implementing a Laserfiche Electronic Content Management (ECM) and creating workflows that automated their business process. This story he related is by no means a ROI case study that you can convince the management of your organization that they should invest in Electronic Content Management system. But, as the Ancient Mariner you can see a small glimpse into the picture of what it would be like to “be the first to break into the silent sea”.