Introduction
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions unlock and leverage corporate information and knowledge embedded in its content. ECM captures, stores, activates, analyzes, and automates content, providing new value from data that was unstructured. When effectively managed within the organization, content can be used to engage customers, automate business processes, and enhance collaboration.
Public and private sector organizations face increasing customer, marketplace, and compliance challenges to improve efficiencies, optimize and leverage business processes, monetize services, and comply with the growing complexity of governmental regulations.
As a result, creating and implementing an effective content management strategy should be a priority undertaking within an organization’s strategic framework. The approach entails conducting a comprehensive assessment of the current business and technology to create the baseline for a successful design of a modern enterprise content management strategy based within a digital transformation approach.
“In God we trust. All others must bring data.”
W. Edwards Deming
Content Management Definitions
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consists of processes, tools, and technologies to support the effective and efficient organization and management of content throughout the content life cycle, from creation to archive.
Key ECM solution components include:
Content Management Platforms (CSP)
A Content Services Platform (CSP) is a set of services and microservices, embodied either as an integrated product suite or as separate applications that share standard APIs and repositories, to exploit diverse content types and to serve multiple constituencies and numerous use cases across an organization. A CSP has the flexibility to support existing and emerging content use cases. It has its repository and integrates external repositories through connectors, APIs, or packaged integrations.
Content services platform capabilities include:
- A platform orientation, including service-oriented architecture, integrated content repository, and content-related services and user interfaces, instead of prebuilt, content-oriented process applications.
- Content architecture is supporting critical business processes delivered in on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments.
- Agile and flexible services and interfaces that can be customized, extended, and integrated through publicly available APIs, connectors to commonly used productivity, EPR, and line-of-business applications.
- Innovation in content-related processes, new analytical and intelligent functionality, and new approaches to services delivery models. These, in turn, enable more-seamless management of enterprise content in use cases including user productivity, records management, business processing, content ecosystems, and digital transformation.
“Identify your problems but give your power and energy to solutions.”
Tony Robbins
2018 ECM Trends & Directions
The topical and high-impact ECM trends and directions encompass:
- Demand for mobility catalyzing investments and the Internet of Things (IoT) and conversational interfaces are looming as the next opportunity.
- Digital experience platform (DXP) encompassing portal and a wide range of other capabilities as the foundation for building and managing digital experiences.
- Records and life-cycle management recognized as transparent services.
- Embed security policies into the collaboration or file-sharing process.
- Support mobile content use with administrative controls.
- Intelligent web search.
- Machine learning applications.
- Cross-repository content application delivery.
- Content categorization and classification.
Content Productivity Statistics
Outlined below are workplace content-productivity statistics, derived from an array of market research and intelligence, that will likely make you rethink the handling of content with a productivity lens.
- Knowledge workers and professionals expend 50% of their time searching for information and take about 18 minutes to locate each document.
- Knowledge workers waste a significant amount of time working with documents. This time is estimated to cost about $19,800 per worker annually and amounts to a loss of 21.8% in an organization’s total productivity.
AIIM – Capitalizing on Content
- Access to up-to-date customer data and correspondence can produce improvements to customer service levels from the customer-facing staff of 33%, with over half (57%) estimating a 25% improvement or more.
- Managers’ report that they miss important information daily because it exists within the company, but they cannot locate.
(Source: Accenture)
- For lost documents, companies pay a cost of searching 6X the value of the original material.
- 28% of respondents had their records management and security practices or exposed by an auditor in the last three years.
- 27% of businesses have suffered a loss of business or loss of reputation in the past because of inadequate record-keeping practices.
“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people, that they’re basically good and smart, and if you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things with them.”
Steve Jobs
