We've been interviewing the sponsors of the upcoming AIIM Conference for their predictions for the future of the industry, a preview of the conference, and a look at some of the biggest challenges facing information professionals right now. Here, I sat down with Dave White, Chief Technology Officer at Quark, to chat about content processes.
JM: What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to "Embrace the Chaos?"
DW: Enterprises in industries such as financial services and manufacturing are evaluating their multi-channel customer communications requirements and their related internal publishing processes and technology. Companies know they must change, but truly struggle with:
- Prioritizing their business' urgent demand to deliver customer communications in the richest experiences across the broadest selection of devices and formats at the lowest cost with the more complex and initially costly need to re-engineer business processes to accomplish those communication goals efficiently now and for the future.
- Identifying the minimal number of vendors and solutions through all the marketing noise that can truly address their current needs as well as offer flexibility to address the very rapidly changing content technology landscape.
- Identifying internally or hiring the right personnel or consultants who can lead a team responsible for the customer communications department through a successful transformation because the new world requires much broader and deeper technology understanding than most publishing teams have traditionally been required to have.
JM: What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?
DW: Here are the issues we see impacting end-user organizations:
- Brand will become even more critical to organizations as they differentiate customer experience. Brand and content will be even more inseparable. One of Information Management's driving purposes today is to efficiently support digital content delivery where the dramatic fragmentation of consumption devices continues to increase. Businesses are often selecting the lowest cost but broadest reach systems, but this often equates to content delivery with the lowest functionality and business control as is seen with many responsive design implementations. We're currently in a cycle that is led by breadth at the cost of richness, but we are seeing signs that businesses are identifying that they need more control and flexibility related to brand in terms of styling, design, layout, and interactivity in order to deliver an optimized customer experience on every device and media type.
- Many companies are struggling with the need for content and document management that actually understands content not just files, file associated metadata, and file driven workflows. Content management needs to become more comprehensive and include deep connection and real-time integration to the authoring, re-use, design, and multi-channel publishing processes. Too many enterprise content management implementations have stopped at supporting centralized file stores with workflow or have just become systems of record.
- Capturing knowledge with semantic richness and granular metadata directly from subject matter experts such as financial analysts, product managers, and technical staff in a form that can be reused, repurposed, and automatically published is critical to remove the manual labor and time-intensive publishing processes of old. Supporting that authoring process across a breadth of devices and with content specific capabilities such as direct integration of data components including tables and charts versus the traditional copy/recreate/redesign steps will shorten time to market and deliver better content consumption experiences.
JM: What are the three most important things AIIM15 attendees should know about your company?
DW: We have a deep understanding and extensive global experience in helping large organizations change from traditional publishing processes to dynamic publishing solutions that reduce time and costs by up to 85%. Organizations such as Standard and Poor's, National Bank of Canada, HSBC, UNICEF, IBM, Louis Vuitton, and many more rely on our solutions daily to continue to transform their businesses.
Secondly, Quark is one of the only vendors in the market with an end-to-end solution from structured content authoring (using MS Word or any modern Web browser), review and approvals, and content management through to multi-channel output for print, PDF, Web, eBooks, and interactive mobile apps. Our technology is commonly deployed alongside leading enterprise content management platforms such as FileNet and Documentum.
Lastly, dynamic publishing covers a wide array of areas, so whether you are looking to automate multi-channel publishing, better manage compliance documents or standard operating procedures, deliver interactive sales materials securely to a distributed sales team, create compelling interactive apps, or take government regulatory processes online, dynamic publishing is widely applicable, and Quark has a range of solutions to meet your needs.