Advancing in modern information management

Modernization trends for aging ECMs

ECMs first found a footing decades ago, and while they proved proficient in content management at the time, things have changed. Legacy ECMs weren’t built for today’s diverse content or distributed workforces.

There are several factors to consider when considering replacing your ECM with a modern content and information management.

Adopting next-generation information management solutions

Many traditional ECM platforms still have the same dated, monolithic framework they were launched with. This leads to limited functionality, challenges integrating with more modern solutions, and expensive development and maintenance cycles for add-ons.

Cloud-enabled solutions

Ensuring the content management strategy and tools within an organization are cloud-ready and fully functional in the cloud is a core requirement for today’s pace of business.

Solution agility for better innovation

The focus on re-architecting for modern infrastructures can lead to a drop in innovation and new features for certain legacy vendors. Users of these older platforms miss out on new core capabilities such as artificial intelligence, process automation, integration with collaboration and business applications, and modern, simplified management and user interfaces.

Modern pricing models

The deployment of most ECM systems requires careful planning, a lot of configuration and significant user training. Combined, this results in high implementation costs — especially when compared with the flexible, monthly pricing models and extensive customization options available in modern platforms. Look for information management solutions that drive down operational costs, not add to them.

Unified content universe

Despite years of claims that one system would store all the content within an organization, vendors failed to deliver on this promise, resulting in the deployment of multiple, disconnected information systems — none of which were ever designed to work together. The result is a collection of aging platforms, abandoned collaboration sites and isolated departmental solutions. Modern solutions to this conundrum bring enterprise content together though intelligent technology like federated search and seamless integrations with core applications.

4 must-haves for a next-gen information management platform

According to Gartner, the term “enterprise content management” no longer fits the dynamics of the market and should be replaced by “content services” driven by a “content services platform.” Content services platforms are the next evolution of ECM — and an opportunity to address the challenges faced by aging, outdated ECM platforms. Content services takes a wider view of the business.

Let’s focus on four business areas that can be reimagined using a strategic content services approach:

• Increased access to information from any device, any location, at any time
• Faster and cheaper creation of business-focused solutions — that are subsequently easier to maintain
• Increased automation, efficiency and visibility of multiple business processes
• Intelligent management of rich media formats such as video and images

As we have seen, the need for information management is greater now than ever before. With a CSP, organizations can go beyond simple information management to achieve true digital transformation — with flexible pricing via consumption, subscription and perpetual licensing models.

Are you ready for the journey?

1: Increased access to information

Organizations need to have access to information from any device, at any time, from any location. For information managers, this means having remote and mobile tools to access content, as well as interact with several content-driven areas of the business, including:

• Execution of business workflows
• Integration to cloud-native services for optical character recognition (OCR), translation, transcription, sentiment analysis and more
• Creation of fresh, custom/business-specific solutions using low-code development tools
• Use of analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to drive value from their corporate information assets

The concept of gaining access to content in context is increasingly important.

For knowledge workers, this can take the form of seamless access to all content from any business system, whether that is their email tool, content creation tools, ERP or CRM business systems or the native content services interface. Customers are increasingly investing in self-service portals, allowing users to add documents and data to corporate systems and to drive their own workflows for activities such as product selection, loan applications and account management.

An empowered customer is a happy one. From a content services perspective, this means providing a cascading series of cloud-powered options — from simple mobile apps to the ultimate content services platform offerings built entirely on cloud-native architectures.

Key solution: Information architecture
To deliver the content services vision defined by Gartner, a cloud-powered information architecture is a massive help. A content services platform that can take advantage of public cloud infrastructures — such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and others — offers many business benefits:

• Limitless scalability: The cloud offers unparalleled elastic scalability. One example is the ability for a university to scale up processing during student application season and to scale down resources during holiday periods.
• Controllable total cost of ownership: Cloud architectures reduce running costs, simplify resource management and offer greater control over long-term platform ownership costs.
• Microservices architecture: A cloud-powered platform takes advantage of modular scaling and is perfectly positioned to take advantage of new cloud-native services.
• Instant access to innovation: The constant innovation, constant delivery (CI/CD) model of software management utilized by many cloud-powered platforms means that updates can be rolled out instantly and without user intervention.
• Multiple integration options: Cloud-powered solutions offer the ability to easily integrate content access within other business applications. Whether serving related content to a customer record in the cloud-based Salesforce CRM or providing historical document access in an on-premises HR solution, flexible and fast integration can drive significant business benefits.

2: Faster and cheaper creation of business-focused solutions

The purchase of any corporate IT solution is inevitably followed by business-specific customization. However, many legacy ECM systems lack the quality of the tools required to develop meaningful solutions on top of the platform.

Key solution: Low-code capabilities
Low-code development tools are not new — they have been used in areas such as software development for many years. Those of us who grew up building apps using Visual Basic are familiar with GUI-based development tools. Similarly, within information management, workflow design tools offer a visual way to create and manage business processes. But in a modern content services platform, low-code tools are much more capable and offer the business a wide range of benefits. Some of their key characteristics:

• Easy to learn due to their visual and declarative design model
• Highly collaborative, which enables them to engage business analysts and IT developers alike
• Rapid prototyping, encouraging a focus on rapid innovation
• Iterative development, allowing any developer to refine and maintain apps
• Business-centric, letting teams rapidly develop purpose-built content and case management applications that solve genuine business pain points

A word of caution: While low-code development tools allow rapid prototyping by a wider, less developer-focused team, there are situations in which organizations need to create low-level code. Having a low-code environment does not replace the need for a custom-coding environment, open standards or an open and accessible application programming interface. Modern content services platforms need to provide capabilities and tools from low code to full code and everything in between.

3: Increased automation

Ever since the first document management system, businesses have been sold on the potential of business process automation. Automation promises to replace manual tasks, remove human errors and increase the ability of staff to focus on less mundane, higher-value tasks.

While ECM addressed simple automation for paper-based, document-centric processes, modern organizations are looking for much more. Business content is no longer just documents and scanned images. Knowledge workers are being asked to work with more diverse and ad-hoc processes — and with incoming information in a wide variety of formats, such as images, audio and video. In an ideal world, automation would enable businesses to:

• Automate document ingestion, both in bulk (batches) and as part of individual transactions
• Automatically identify distinct types of content
• Extract rich and meaningful data from content to make it easier to find later
• Create multiple renditions of the original content
• Intelligently route documents and data — based on location, related documents and metadata — to relevant processes and users

For many reasons, automation has struggled to deliver these requests, not moving from promise to reality. But modern content services platforms don’t just have automation — they have automation powered by robotic process automation (RPA) and AI.

Key solution: Intelligent automation
Automation in a modern content services platform makes use of multiple technologies to achieve its goals — from traditional OCR to more modern tech such as RPA and AI. Intelligent automation focuses on using computing power to deliver human-like understanding, judgment and decision-making, with the added benefits of reduced error rates and blinding speeds. Rather than discuss how each technology works, let’s focus on the benefits modern automation adds to the business:

• Use a combination of OCR, RPA and AI to intelligently identify and classify content
• Intelligently extract and assign metadata from incoming content
• Identify relationships and group related information using automatically generated folder structures and metadata
• Improve search by enabling faceted search, deep relationships and comprehensive metadata tagging
• Index content from across multiple federated repositories to facilitate stronger enterprise-wide search capabilities
• Automate processes — trigger processes or automate decision- making directly from extracted data, enabling more predictable and accurate outcomes
• Automate compliance — assign retention and records policies, assign access controls and determine storage and archival requirements to strengthen compliance and eliminate manual errors

The potential provided by modern, intelligent automation is limitless.

Content services platforms allow organizations to make the most of automation in areas such as data capture, process optimization and more — using system-specific tools and those available as cloud-based microservices from other vendors.

4: Intelligent management of rich media formats

As we become more digitally enabled as a society and as a business community, the types of content we use are changing — and expanding. As individuals, we create images, audio and video content using our mobile phones to share on social media. Rich media usage has lagged slightly in the business world, but it’s catching up rapidly.

Most ECM tools can store various photo, video, audio and graphic design formats (such as TIFF, JPG, PNG, AI, EPS, etc.), but they are not specifically designed to do so. Equally, while traditional data extraction tools and OCR engines were more than capable of extracting text from a document, it’s a lot more complicated and nuanced process to interpret and understand what an image or video is showing. Put simply, legacy ECM tools lack the functionality needed to effectively manage rich media content in a modern enterprise.

Modern business requires a content solution that:

• Integrates rich media creation tools, such as the Adobe suite
• Improves collaboration across content formats and media types
• Extracts insights or business data from rich media to drive business value
• Provides native viewers for rich media content
• Annotates and edits rich media formats
• Offers rendition management to create alternative resolution and formats of the original content
• Ensures fast access to content, which is especially important for high-resolution and large content such as video and computer-aided design files

In addition to enabling businesses to take advantage of rich media to support traditional business workflows, digital asset management (DAM) tools are available to creative firms, marketing departments and product design teams within organizations who wish to work with rich media tools. For many, this adds another information silo into the mix, making it even more difficult to work efficiently.

Key solution: Digital asset management (DAM)
A DAM capability within your content services platform properly services the growing need for rich media management. Look for a DAM solution like Hyland’s Nuxeo Platform for DAM, that includes:

• Flexible viewing options, with the ability to deliver reduced resolution renditions to support remote or mobile requirements, as well as to apply watermarks to protect confidential information and indicate the validity of a legal document
• Intelligent and automated metadata tagging and extraction
• Integrated search to quickly find and leverage media for other purposes
• Intelligent categorization and organization of rich media content (for example, by media type, subject matter, business unit, product, etc.)
• Integrated workflows and business processes to use extracted data to drive new insights and process automation
• Deep integration to rich media editing and creation tools, such as Adobe Creative Suite
• Seamless integration into digital and web publishing tools

All areas of the business are increasingly encountering rich media. From dashcam footage usage in insurance claims to video transcripts for compliance purposes, rich media is here to stay. Modern content services tools offer significant benefits to organizations that need to work with rich media as part of their wider information management activities.

The future of enterprise information management

Content services platforms offer distinct new opportunities for enterprise information managers. Cloud-powered solutions provide employees, partners and customers instant and ubiquitous access to their key information anytime, anywhere and on any device.

4-step roadmap for getting the most out of your content

1: Think big. The technology is ready for you.
For too long, organizations have been forced to constrain their expectations of business software. Modern content services platforms remove those constraints and allow enterprise information management leaders to think in terms of how they can help the business as they fuel their digital transformation journey.

Build a wish list of solutions, projects and features that help your staff, your partners and your customers. Dare to dream big, and the results could be spectacular.

2: Make sure your vendor meets modern requirements.
Once an organization has identified its business requirements, identifying the core content services functionality that is needed to address those requirements should be straightforward. Refer to the four main areas addressed above:

• Increased access to information
• Faster and cheaper creation of business-focused solutions
• Increased automation
• Intelligent management of rich media formats