As we start to think about #AIIM15, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions in order to get an understanding of how they see the future of our industry -- and let those of you attending start to think about your own questions to ask them in San Diego. Here are the three questions I'll ask:
David Caldeira, Senior Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing at Kofax, says we're living in the Customer-Driven Era. Customers expect your organization to be available to them day or night, forcing companies to be more agile and responsive than ever.
What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?
The biggest challenge that we at Kofax see our customers struggling with is the crucial need to increase their business agility to better serve rapidly changing customer demands. This has always been a problem for businesses, but with the advent of mobile-first customers, the pace of change has accelerated the need for businesses to keep pace.
Closely related to the challenges to meet the demands of mobile-first customers are the challenges that our customers face to extend their back-end business processes beyond their front offices and corporate firewalls to directly engage their customers at the point at which information originates. The gaps between back office, front office, and customer self-service processes must be closed to provide the services their clients demand.
Finally, we see our clients struggling to process the deluge of information that is flooding them. Clients are swamped with information, some of which is meaningful and some of which is noise. Keeping up with this fire hose of data is a challenge in itself that's compounded by the challenge to act on the information while it is still relevant.
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?
Trend 1: Customer-Driven Engagement
Customers today want to interact with businesses on their terms, any way and anytime they want… and expect immediate, high-quality service.
In order to survive, let alone succeed, in the customer-driven era, every company must become more nimble and responsive. With their always-on, persistently connected smart devices, customers expect your organization to be there for them whenever they want, regardless of time, channel, or geography. This is driving a digital business imperative, compelling organizations across all industries to digitize both their business and the manner in which they engage with customers.
Trend 2: Process Intelligence
Each end customer expects to be treated individually and no longer tolerates a standard, fixed process for doing business—and if confronted with that, they can very easily (usually at the swipe of a finger on their mobile device) switch to a competitor.
Given this dynamic environment, it’s becoming increasingly important to have the tools to monitor and mine the information created, and provide the business with real-time dashboards that deliver the ability to react to changing conditions. The real-time nature of this requirement is essential as it provides the context for quality decision making. A critical need here is for business users to design and implement this analysis capability, and not be burdened by the time and cost that comes with traditional business intelligence infrastructures.
Trend 3: Smart Process Applications
Traditional packaged applications simply don't meet the expectations of today's customers and of your own employees.
The goal of smart process applications (SPAs) is to deliver much more intelligence, dynamically and in real-time, into the system to allow users to adapt to the unique information and events that are happening on every transaction. Multiple approaches to analyzing information (structured, unstructured, historical, and predictive as examples) and providing input and guidance to decisions are critical.
Knowledge workers are essential to delivering business outcomes that will delight the end customer. SPAs must empower those knowledge workers with the right information, presented in the context of the unique customer situation, so they can perform the right work necessary to get the job done. This means very flexible work management concepts, with a high degree of collaboration and dynamic processing, versus traditional, predictable workflows.
SPAs easily fill gaps between the systems of engagement and the systems of record. They support all of the organization’s channels of interaction and allow their customers to traverse these channels, including a mobile-first approach, while leveraging the information and transaction capabilities of the monolithic back-office systems that are difficult to change.
What will be different in two years?
Our crystal ball is seeing pretty much the same view as yours. Disruptive changes to the nature of people's work and to the channels through which they perform that work.
Two Gartner predictions support this view:
Work isn't going away, but with the automation of the mundane, it's nature will qualitatively change. Most workers will directly engage their clients - through the client's preferred channels - and our systems must change to support those engagements.
What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?
Kofax is much more than a capture company.