Monday, May 3rd, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
Elizabeth Lucas
Like anyone else, Team VeBridge gets really excited when our family is promoted and grows.
We are excited to make two announcements. First, Director of Litigation Support Services Elizabeth Lucas is now Vice President of Strategic Markets. Congratulations, to Beth!
Our family has grown by one. We have added a new position to help serve our clients better. Bill McGrath will focus on service delivery as our Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Implementation Consultant. Welcome, Bill!
Here’s a little from the press release:
Lucas, formerly VeBridge Account Manager and a General Manager of Consulting and Education for Fortune 500 company ACS, brings more than 20 years of court-related consulting, business workflow, education and training experience to the position. She will manage marketing/sales initiatives and personnel. Lucas received her bachelor’s in History from Transylvania University (Lexington) and earned a master’s in Communications from the University of Kentucky.
McGrath brings more than 12 years of project management, implementation delivery, contract administration and consulting services to VeBridge. He is formerly a project manager responsible for implementations for Fortune 500 company ACS. McGrath will spearhead technical services in the ECM space. He received his bachelor’s from Transylvania University. In 2007, he earned his Project Management Professional (PMP) certification from the Project Management Institute.
Friday, March 19th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
I was catching up on my reading this weekend when I happened across the February issue of Business Focus from Commerce Lexington . The cover boasted: “How do cities & businesses thrive in dire economic times? They get creative.”
If you haven’t read it yet, it’s announcing that Lexington will host the Creative Cities Summit from April 7-9 this year. Previously held in Detroit and St. Petersburg, Fla., it’s an international conference drawing speakers to discuss “savvy economic development.” Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear was quoted as saying: “The summit will provide an opportunity for collaborative brainstorming that will strengthen both cultural dynamics and offer economic solutions.”
That phrase “economic solutions” resonated with me, especially as Team VeBridge has been planning for the upcoming year in the face of some trying economic times here in the Bluegrass State. While some areas around the country are showing signs of rebounding from the latest economic crisis, our state government and our companies continue to broadcast woeful economic news.
In the face of businesses cutting back and losing revenue, friends and peers have asked me, “So, how’s business?” And interestingly enough, it’s in the tough times that demand for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions rise exponentially here at VeBridge. When companies are cutting, the paper shuffle they have to do doesn’t go away. Those companies have just as much paperwork with fewer resources to get it done.
That’s where ECM comes to the rescue. For those employees who are left with not enough resources to do the accounts payable paper shuffle or the human resources documents management, or the Manufacturing Safety Data Sheets compliance paperwork dance, an ECM system can streamline a company’s processes and its workflow. Shuffling paper is no longer necessary. An employees’ time is now driven by the workflow lever in the ECM system. There is no longer any worry about an employee’s silo. Anyone granted access can now review the documents associated with a company’s key knowledge.
And the best part? It doesn’t require capital expenditures. Organizations that opt for a hosted solution don’t have to shell out precious cash for new hardware, software and implementation services. They can simply pay as they go. And, at the same time, they are satisfying their disaster recovery and business continuity requirements. Talk about a strong ROI!
Along with all the creative thinking that will be arriving in our fair city in April, we’re also a creative solution. Consider it.
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
As disaster aid workers try to land on Haitian airstrips covered in rubble, and as international aid tries to figure out the best approach to getting aid to the disaster-stricken country, the world is mired in disaster and catastrophe. As we have watched, we also wonder. An article about Tulane University and the effects it felt from Hurricane Katrina, which was the sixth strongest hurricane on record, popped up in a Google search in one of our wondering moments.
The article was written on Aug. 5, 2009, significantly after the initial August 2005 hurricane. Tulane University, located in New Orleans, had closed only once before in its 170-year history, and that was during the Civil War. Before Katrina, the university was imaging all its files for “tactical business use,” as the article will state, but each department or college was left to decide its own fate for its own internal and student documents.
No longer. After Katrina, the thought of digitizing documents drastically changed. The university put an Enterprise Content Management System into place across the entire university. The barriers to digitizing records broke in the face of the disaster that faced the entire city and this University.
The article demonstrates how disaster can affect institutional thinking.
Here is an excerpt of the article. The link is below.
Enterprise content management a player in disaster recovery program
By Linda Tucci, Senior News Writer
05 Aug 2009 | SearchCIO-Midmarket.com
“For all the talk about living in a digital age, paper content, from account invoices and HR records to intellectual property, still fuels the business processes of many organizations, even those with sophisticated IT systems. But quick recovery of paper content — a fragile medium in fire and flood — is often an afterthought in disaster recovery and business continuity planning. An enterprise content management system, the modern-day descendant of tactical document imaging tools, can act as a safety net in a disaster and even play a strategic role in a disaster recovery program…”
Click here to go to the article.
Friday, January 15th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
The photo above shows the devastation Haiti is left with after an earthquake reaching 7.0 on the Richter scale ripped through the country on January 12.
After a 7.0 on the Richter scale, Haiti now has the entire world’s focus. We all watch, mourn and grieve for a country’s loss of 50,000 people with the death toll rising. We wonder how an entire country can rebuild after such disaster. That is human nature after all. For those who are left behind, life continues. Eventually, we pick ourselves up after our mourning, and we slowly begin the rebuilding process.
Did you know western Kentucky sits along a fault line? Did you know that the series of four earthquakes felt in 1811 and 1812, called the New Madrid Earthquakes, were felt over almost 50,000 square miles strongly, and across nearly 1 million square miles moderately? Experts believe that at least one of the earthquakes was around an 8.0 on the Richter scale, more than the Haiti earthquake. These earthquakes were so powerful that the Mississippi appeared to flow backward and new lakes were formed.
Disaster of this magnitude can strike here in the Bluegrass State and can affect those states contiguous to Kentucky.
As team VeBridge sits and watches the news coming out of Haiti and feels similar emotions that the entire world is feeling, we can’t help but wonder if the country had a disaster recovery plan. What about all the local businesses? Can the country’s banking industry rebuild and get moving after having all its disaster recovery plans in place? What about its hospitals? Are patient records recoverable?
Mother Nature.Acts of God. Acts of Man. This generation has seen them: this latest earthquake, Hurricane Katrina, 09/11, and the 2004 tsunami with a death toll of 227,898. That tsunami sparked from an underwater earthquake that registered 9.1 and 9.3 on the Richter scale and was the single largest tsunami on record.
We never really expect the disaster. When we work with organizations on their disaster recovery plans, it’s usually viewed as an exercise that must be completed to check off a task. Fortunately, we never have to internalize the human costs of the disasters. If we did, our absolute helplessness to preserve life as easily as we preserve data would be overwhelming.
Our hearts go out to the people of Haiti. We will feel their pain, but not as profoundly as they do.
Friday, January 8th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
You know those moments. You’re at a party, you’ve just met someone, and they’re trying to explain what they do in their 30-second elevator speech. Somewhere in their explanation, they get lost in their own jargon, their own language, their own alphabet soup – acronyms for their programs. Then you start looking around the room trying to figure out who else you want to speak to or meet.
When team VeBridge talks to people with a problem we are trying to solve, we make sure we don’t get lost in the language of document management, enterprise content management systems, imaging services, litigation support and electronic document discovery. When you’ve been doing this as long as we have, your everyday language changes as your brain starts to adopt the words you use as the norm. Finally, you are talking a lingo that only you understand. The listener is not nodding their head because they agree, they just don’t want to hurt your feelings. To successfully communicate, we know that we have to painting a picture in terms that lay people can understand. It’s not always as easy as it looks.
So, when we find others within our industry that find a good way to communicate our passion and deliver that “aha” moment, we feel obliged to pass it along.
Hyland Software, one of our partners, has a great video that helps explain that dragon-of-a-phrase – Enterprise Content Management. It gave us a good chuckle. Enjoy!
Thursday, January 7th, 2010 by Paul Engel, VeBridge President and CEO
VeBridge? What does it mean and what does it stand for? We get those questions often enough that I think it bears a little explaining. It’s not like your typical intuitive business name…like Bob’s Transmission.
Once upon a time, we were known by another name. We started as a simple imaging service bureau, outsourcing document imaging for our clients. As our clients’ needs grew and our market matured, we grew along with it. In time, we became nationally recognized experts in document/content management and were being sought out as a trusted advisor. It was time for a name change. And the rebranding began.
In January 2006, we began the process of coming up with a new name to reflect all that we did. By this time, we provided not only internal document imaging, but software and hardware for companies to do the same internally. We added litigation support services – managing paper evidence electronically rather than on paper. We also added electronic document discovery – managing emails, pdf files, forms, etc. along with paper evidence for civil or criminal proceedings.
With the help of both a website and marketing firm, we began the exercise of renaming our organization. We went through lots of cool brainstorming exercises. After those exercises, my staff and I honed in on one word – bridge. We wanted to be a bridge for people and their documents, all kinds of documents, so we wouldn’t be tied down to any one particular field, like healthcare or banking. We did it all, so our name needed to reflect that.Then came the “V” – our bridge was in a virtual or electronic environment.
We began researching business names and internet domains that weren’t already in use. After doing that, we realized that we needed to add just a bit more. Then came our “e” – we weren’t a physical bridge, we were an e-bridge.
Thus, VeBridge was born. We bought up the internet domains, trademarked the name, added some purple and green because we liked the colors, and in four months, we had our rebranding campaign. On April 1, 2006, VeBridge entered the world. I didn’t pass out cigars or send out balloons, but it has certainly been an exciting ride ever since.
