The emergence of intelligent information management

• Uncover the 6 Vs of modern information management and learn why legacy systems can no longer keep up with today's data demands.

• Discover the four major advantages of a modern, intelligent content strategy, including how to achieve unfettered information access, leverage intelligent content capabilities and enhance business automation.

• Explore how to use AI and cloud-enabled platforms to transform unstructured content into a powerful strategic asset that drives efficiency and innovation.

Organizations have always needed to manage their information effectively. Today, however, the challenge is greater than ever. IT departments are under immense pressure to balance seamless usability with robust security, enable productive remote work and ensure strict compliance. This pressure has intensified with the recent rapid shift to hybrid work models, forcing businesses to adapt on multiple fronts.

In this climate of change, a defensive posture might seem logical. Yet forward-thinking organizations see an opportunity, with 71% of content managers proactively migrating users and content away from legacy solutions, according to Forrester. By making strategic investments during volatile times, they position themselves to lead in the future. At the core of this strategy is intelligent information management.

This guide examines why organizations are investing in modern information management strategies to navigate change, mitigate risk and create business value. It also shows how cloud-enabled content management platforms are providing the answers they need.

The need for better business solutions escalated during the pandemic, but the trend was already in motion. The world and its workers demanded — and continues to demand — new secure and efficient ways to compete in a fast-paced environment.

The six Vs of information management are distinct pressures that challenge organizations of every size:

1. Volume: The sheer amount of data and content generated by organizations is growing faster than organizations’ ability to process and store it. This exponential growth shows no signs of slowing down and demands scalable solutions.

2. Variety: Modern content is no longer just scanned documents. It includes a rich mix of videos, images, social media messages, unstructured data and more, all of which must be managed cohesively.

3. Velocity: Information is generated at an unprecedented speed, and the expectation is for it to inform or automate decision-making just as quickly. To meet these requirements, intelligent automation is becoming table stakes.

4. Variation: Organizations must manage information from a wide range of disparate sources, repositories and business systems. This necessitates seamless integration to access data and automate actions across different platforms.

5. Value: As much as 80% of data in enterprises is unstructured and housed in multiple repositories both on-premises and in multiple clouds, according to an Intelligent Business Solutions white paper. With content scattered throughout the enterprise, effectively identifying, extracting and routing this information is vital to unlocking its inherent value.

6. Visibility: As organizations expand, so do their information silos. Finding and managing information across a labyrinth of disconnected tools requires an elegant, unified solution to provide clear visibility.

These six factors render many traditional information management tools, like legacy enterprise content management (ECM) systems, obsolete. They simply can't keep up with the demands of the modern business world.

> Read more | Legacy system modernization for the digital era

ECM platforms have been a cornerstone of business operations since the early 2000s, providing governance and control over documents and data. However, today’s business landscape is fundamentally different, and the tools used to manage information are rapidly evolving.

Traditional ECM platforms face several critical limitations that hinder their effectiveness in today's environment.

Aging platforms

Many legacy ECM systems are built on dated, monolithic frameworks. This architecture leads to limited functionality, makes integration with modern applications challenging, and results in expensive development and maintenance cycles for any customizations or add-ons.

Cloud limitations

Initially, many ECM vendors and their customers were hesitant to adopt the cloud. But the undeniable need for anytime, anywhere access to content, coupled with growing confidence in cloud security, is driving more companies to make the switch, with 92% of respondents to a Forrester study reporting they’re investing in cloud/web-based applications that simplify working remotely and from a variety of devices to support content strategy. A core requirement for any modern content strategy is ensuring management tools are not just cloud-ready, but fully functional and optimized for the cloud.

> Read more | Modern cloud content management: The emergence of cloud-enabled ECM

Limited innovation

The intense focus required to rearchitect legacy systems for modern infrastructures often leads to a drop in innovation. Users of these older platforms miss out on transformative capabilities like artificial intelligence, content intelligence and intelligent automation. They also lack integration with modern collaboration tools and simplified user interfaces, putting them at a significant competitive disadvantage.

Continued high implementation costs

Deploying traditional ECM systems typically involves careful planning, long development cycles and extensive user training. This combination results in high implementation and maintenance costs, especially when compared to the flexible, consumption-based pricing models and extensive customization options available with modern platforms.

Information sprawl

For years, vendors promised a single system to store all an organization's content. This promise was never fulfilled. Instead, businesses ended up an average of 21 repositories, according to Forrester, and these disconnected information systems were never designed to work together. The result is a chaotic landscape of aging platforms, abandoned collaboration sites and isolated departmental solutions. This information sprawl makes it nearly impossible to leverage unstructured data to make swift, informed decisions and improve business efficiency.

These shortcomings highlight a clear need for a new approach — one that embraces the cloud, fosters innovation and provides the agility modern organizations require to get their intelligent information management strategies right.

— The Rise of Content Intelligence: A new era of innovation in ECM, Forrester, 2025

Here are four key areas where a modern ECM approach makes a significant impact.

1. Unfettered information access

The shift to hybrid work underscored the critical need for access to information from any device, at any time and from any location. This means seamless access to content from any business system, whether it's their email client, ERP system or the native ECM interface.

A modern, cloud-powered information architecture delivers several key advantages to enable this level of access:

• Limitless scalability: The cloud offers elastic scalability and allows organizations to scale resources up or down based on demand, such as a university increasing processing power during student application season.

• Controllable total cost of ownership: Cloud architectures reduce running costs, simplify resource management and provide greater control over the total cost of ownership.

• Microservices architecture: Cloud-enabled platforms use a modular architecture that allows for independent scaling of services and easy adoption of new cloud innovations.

• Instant access to innovation: The continuous innovation/continuous delivery (CI/CD) model means software updates can be rolled out instantly and without user intervention, ensuring access to the latest features.

• Multiple integration options: Leading solutions easily and securely unify content access within other business applications, so search results and accessibility isn’t limited to one repository.

2. Intelligent content management capabilities

According to Forrester, 74% of content management decision-makers expect AI to have a significant impact on their ability to meet key objectives. It's clear that the time to embrace intelligent content management is now.

By transforming unstructured content into AI-ready data, organizations can:

• Unlock contextual insights

• Drive AI-powered automation

• Establish a robust framework for data governance

• Streamline operations

• Accelerate decision-making

• Free employees to focus on higher-value work

Modern intelligent content solutions are distinguished by several capabilities:

• Data curation: Transform content from hundreds of diverse file formats into structured, AI-ready data.

• Context enrichment: Enhance unstructured data by linking it to relevant contextual information, improving searchability and understanding.

• AI-powered search: Unify information from multiple content repositories to provide a single, actionable view of all enterprise data.

• Verified AI output: Easily trace AI-generated responses back to the source documents to verify accuracy and gain deeper insights.

• Agentic AI: Build enterprise AI agents that can read vast amounts of content, decide on a course of action and execute tasks autonomously.

3. Enhanced business automation

Modern ECM platforms move beyond the rudimentary automation of early document management systems. They offer the advanced capabilities required to drive new levels of efficiency and innovation.

AI-powered automation features include:

• Intelligent document processing (IDP): Use AI to automatically capture, classify and extract relevant data from documents without human intervention.

• Process orchestration: Automatically route content to the right people, workflows or systems for review, approval and other business tasks.

• Systems integration: Connect disparate systems and applications to facilitate a smooth flow of data and processes across the entire organization.

• Case management: Manage all data, tasks, correspondence and events related to unstructured, knowledge-driven processes.

• Agentic process automation: Deploy AI agents to perform complex tasks or even entire business processes with minimal human supervision.

• Intuitive, low-code automation building: Empower users with generative AI-powered prompts and simple visual design tools to build automations without needing deep technical expertise.

By leveraging these capabilities, you can unburden your team from tedious, repetitive data tasks and reduce burnout while enabling them to focus on their most strategic work.

4. Innovative solution creation

Every organization has unique needs that off-the-shelf software rarely addresses perfectly. A modern ECM platform solves this by including powerful low-code development tools that enable rapid creation of purpose-built applications.

Low-code tools offer a wide range of benefits:

• Rapid prototyping: Quickly build and test new applications, fostering a culture of innovation and problem-solving.

• Business-centric development: Enable teams to develop solutions that solve genuine business pain points without lengthy development cycles.

• Increased agility: Rapidly configure and customize existing solutions to adapt to changing business needs.

• High collaboration: Engage both business analysts and IT developers in the creation process with an easy-to-learn visual design model.

These tools empower organizations to build tailored solutions faster and more affordably, providing the agility you need to thrive.

The rise of AI has created the perfect opportunity for organizations to innovate their information management practices and embrace a new era of technology-led intelligence. By giving structure to vast amounts of previously hidden unstructured content, modern ECM platforms can unlock a new era of efficiency and insight.

Hyland empowers organizations to unlock profound insights that fuel innovation and redefine how they operate. By leveraging AI and cloud technologies, you can transform your enterprise content into a powerful strategic asset.

Explore how Hyland Content Innovation Cloud™ can help you deliver on the value of intelligent information management, so you can build a smarter, more agile and successful future.