Introduction 

In the current economy, smart and savvy customers are demanding user-friendly and highly-satisfying personalized experiences every time they engage with their preferred business providers. As the velocity of digital touchpoints continues to multiply, it’s no longer sustainable to create separate and different experiences for each digital channel. Successful businesses are investing human and financial resources and precious production time to revisit legacy content and software within a digital transformation approach across all enterprise business units and systems, without regard to governance, roles, and organizational structures.

Most businesses have a strategic dictate for the incessant improvement of profitability, and productivity and risk reduction, within their core business and support activities.

A corporate Content Digital Transformation program typically involves strategy development, updating tools and technology, retraining and empowering employees, and redesigning business and support processes, all focused on generating increased content efficiencies and effectiveness.

Digital Transformation: The Starting & End Points 

The content digital transformation program starting-point is the identification and understanding of the current corporate business and associated content management strategies, content ownership and use, business processes and supporting work flows, and corporate level and content management software and networks. This information gathering and analyzing effort is followed with a strategic rethink and rebuild of business strategies, goals, and a vision of a highly-productive future ‘To-Be’ content management environment.

The successful end-point is realized when all corporate content can quickly and effortlessly learn patterns and make decisions around the right content and experiences within web, mobile, IoT devices, etc. interactions.

Digital Transformation: Benefits

Successful companies are taking organized steps to accelerate their digital transformation journey through a blend of digitization practices, improved and more effective information management and business process automation.

The dependence on paper and unstructured data in key business and support processes poses an array of challenges that impact profitability, productivity, and regulatory compliance risk and exposure

Key benefits realized from a successful digital transformation strategy and deployment are outlined below::

  • Eliminate organizational silos and multiple data bases.
  • Enable multi-channel communications with customers and partners.
  • Ensure availability of key business records/documents for official purposes.
  • Increase the efficiency and effectiveness of business and support processes.
  • Improve strategic and tactical decision-making.
  • Support improved personalized customer interactions.
  • Reduce operational costs and eliminate unnecessary expenditures.
  • Reduce regulatory compliance risk.
  • Streamline business processes and activities.
  • Support changing work place of millennial employees in the creation and use of content, documents, and knowledge.

Digital Transformation: Characteristics

Characteristics of a successful digital transformation include:

  • Quickly and easily move from ideation to publishing to meet personalized customer needs.
  • Create rich personalized customer experiences with optimization of context with customer profile and history.
  • Use artificial intelligence, bots, and machine learning technologies to enable continuous action and automate content discovery, management, creation, delivery, and performance.
  • Acceptance and support of employee population on changes to workplace and roles and responsibilities.

Summary 

Today, the intersect of content management and digital transformation is dramatically shifting strategic executive thinking from the ‘inside-out’ to the ‘outside-in’. Content digital transformation is essentially a business refocus, although technology is a key component that will enable exploiting the enabling software and platforms to realize the benefits projected from a successful change program.