Transactional Content Management Blog

Why we developed document management software in context - TCM

 Email Article  

Tweet  

  

 delicious  

When it comes to information systems, we have lived in a siloed world ever since we moved past the first company mainframe.  As the network revolution gathered steam over the last 20 years, the information we need to do our jobs continued to splinter.  Customer information was in one place, product information in another and pricing information in yet another.  The growth of ERP systems over the past decade was an effort to pull together business information into a single set of applications. (Note – prior to “ERP”, companies used one vendors accounting system, another’s HR system, yet another warehousing application etc.).

But that useful aggregation of information was soon trumped by the explosion of electronic communications.  Today, a tremendous amount of business information is buried in email.  Increasing amounts of information live in your new company instant messaging or team networking sites. And as always, paper is everywhere – except where you need it.

The story of the last decade in IT is the more we try to pull silos together, the more silos come online.  Most of the new information is what is referred to as “unstructured” – emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, web pages.  So we still live in a world where we have to go to multiple applications (or places) to do our jobs.

Starting in 2005, we at ImageTag decided to attack that problem head on – we decided that what business users needed was the ability to marry the world of ERP information with the world of “unstructured” information.  In late 2009, this concept became a new category designated by the industry analysts as Transactional Content Management (TCM) – being able to aggregate and view unstructured information in the context of a ERP record or transaction. 

We are fortunate to have a head start in this very productive category of software.  We have been shipping our 2^nd generation of TCM for almost two years (and we just released a material update), and are on the verge of shipping our 3^rd generation later this year.  They say you can always tell the pioneers – they are the ones with the arrows in their backs.  We have survived the homesteading and learned a great deal about how customers want to use our KwikTag.  We have over 300 TCM customers and 15,000 users. That experience has allowed us to continue innovating and to advance the basic premise of TCM – making it easy for ERP users to get their job done.  An application that is easy to learn, fast to use, which provides all the information you need to get your job done in one consolidated window that is “embedded” in your ERP screens.

We just shipped an upgrade release of our 2^nd generation TCM version of KwikTag.  We will be shipping our 3^rd generation KwikTag TCM system by the end of the year – while our competitors are still getting generation 1 arrows in the back.  Stay tuned!