Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Technical complexity, and in some cases vendor lock-in, make it very difficult to connect all of the various content systems that typically exist in every organization and access the right content. And that has a negative impact on the productivity of your knowledge workers and on your organization's ability to respond in a timely manner to changing market conditions.
A new generation of cloud based content solutions plus a simple desire to rationalize the number of content systems is driving organizations to look seriously how to update their content infrastructure. 83% say they are “working to migrate from legacy content management platforms to more modern platforms.”
Organizations face conflicting goals as they think about rationalizing and modernizing their content infrastructure.
On the one hand, as organizations make their plans for the next 18-24 months, they can clearly see the attractiveness of cloud content management solutions and the imperative of making these solutions a more important part of their infrastructure. A new generation of content management solutions is hitting the marketplace. This has created pressure in many organizations to take advantage of these solutions.
On the other hand, they likely have older legacy ECM systems – likely multiple systems – performing critical functions that can’t just be turned off without suffering lots of business disruption. Forrester notes, “Most organizations struggle with migrating legacy content from old ECM systems.”
The conflicting goals are leading them organizations to consider content integration options. In a new AIIM survey, 75% of organizations indicate that they are planning a content integration initiative in the next 3 years – and 34% are planning one this year.
So what do organizations hope to accomplish through a content integration initiative? Our research suggests that three key objectives are at the heart of a content integration initiative:
- Improving organizational flexibility and agility.
- Improving knowledge worker productivity.
- Reducing business risk.
1. Improve Organizational Flexibility and Agility
79% of organizations believe that process automation is critical to their success, yet 27% of organizations have no integration between their ECM system and other systems (AIIM).
In a modern digital organization, “logistics” doesn’t just refer to the movement of people or physical objects. Organizations face complex information logistics challenges in coordinating all of the various unconnected content silos that have arisen over the past 15 years – and continue to multiply as more and more SaaS and consumer technologies are adopted by newly empowered line of business executives.
The SaaS revolution started by Salesforce – making enterprise grade process automation available to companies of all sizes – is still in its early stages. SaaS solutions raise long-term questions about the availability of content assets for processes outside of the target SaaS application. Most processes connect with other processes, and most content assets are needed in more than one process.
A content integration platform reduces technical barriers to accessing content resources. It makes content in legacy systems to easier to reuse and access, and creates the possibility of gradually – rather than abruptly – phasing out legacy systems.
A standardized data model allows you to build modular applications with prebuilt building blocks.
2. Improve Knowledge Worker Productivity
Some of the original ECM suites grew from imaging and workflow products, others started with basic electronic document management, adding capture and records management along the way.
SharePoint grew from project collaboration and content-sharing intranets to encompass a wide range of active-content management capabilities.
Inherent in this was the vision of a much wider set of knowledge workers working within a common content management environment. The reality, though, turned out to be somewhat different.
User experience is the Achilles’ Heel for many ECM systems. Consider a few data points from AIIM surveys of ECM adopters:
- 22% consider their ECM project to be somewhat stalled, and 21% have user adoption issues (AIIM).
- 52% admit that they are still dependent on their network file-shares (AIIM).
- Poor content management practices result in taking too long to find content (62%), duplicated efforts (52%) and insufficient re-use (46%) (AIIM).
The problem gets worse as the number of systems increase that a knowledge worker must tap into to get their work done. Content integration extends end-user productivity across the organization as redundant content is reduced and content is easy to find and reuse. In addition, it reduces the amount of resources that manage content.
3. Reduce Business Risk
A growing proportion of process content is stored in third party SaaS repositories outside the control of the corporate IT and/or security departments. 87% of organizations are concerned about cloud chaos (AIIM). This means that this content is often not archived consistent with organizational standards and falls through the cracks when it comes to eDiscovery, litigation holds, and regulatory compliance.
Organizations face rising business risk due to content that is locked up in single purpose repositories and largely invisible beyond the specific application tied to that repository. This risk is often assumed to be legal and compliance risk, and those risks are certainly real and rising. For example, consider the complexities of GDPR compliance.
But the business “risk” goes beyond compliance and legal concerns. There is real business risk in sub-optimal processes and in business value that is never realized – and ultimately claimed by a competitor – due to inaccessible information and content.
