Understanding the business problem

Most organizations of all types deal with standardized review and approval workflows for collaboration, oversight, and approval of documents that range from general contracts to media.

As common as review and approval patterns are, though, they are often under-served by conventional enterprise systems. Usually people have an awareness of the content and people to include in a review, but do not know the details of running a compliant review. Compliant reviews often have review auditing requirements, specific schedule guidelines, and required participants.

Often, IT departments deploy solutions that include business process automation and enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Conventional ECM-based review and approval implementations are often system-centric, inflexible, and limited. For example, changes to the review process often required direct IT involvement and inclusion of review participants external to the organization was not possible.

As a result, most reviews are left to ad-hoc email steps and manual processes that lead to inefficient, high cost, and non-collaborative environments. In addition, these reviews cannot be easily audited for compliancy, which is a requirement in regulated industries.