What exactly is the link between IIM and Digital Transformation?

Every organization is on – or should be on – a Digital Transformation journey.

At the heart of this Transformation journey is the drive toward 1) understanding, anticipating, and redefining internal and external customer experiences. This primary driver depends on other key transformative aspirations such as 2) business agility/innovation, 3) operational excellence, and 4) automated compliance/governance.

79% of organizations realize that they must transform into a truly digital business in order to survive. As the currency that fuels and funds the journey, information is an organization’s most valuable asset.

As organizations begin their Digital Transformation efforts, they are focusing on three key areas for improvement: 1) IT processes and their modernization (58%, to give them more business agility); 2) Information Governance (42%, to make their information assets more findable, accurate, and accessible to machines); and Customer Experiences (39%, to increase value to customers and head off potential digital disruptors).

A rising tide of information chaos and confusion imperils these desired Digital Transformation journeys. The volume, velocity, and variety of information that most organizations need to manage, store, and protect now exceeds their ability to even marginally keep pace with big content challenges.

This rising tide of information chaos and confusion is creating a demand for new information management practices that extend beyond traditional Enterprise Content Management. AIIM calls this Intelligent Information Management (IIM), a roadmap that provides the following key capabilities:

• CONTENT SERVICES – a flexible and modular approach that utilizes content and information wherever and whenever it is needed, independent of the legacy ECM preoccupation of where it is stored;
• PROCESS SERVICES – process tools that can be delivered with the simplicity of an app, but within a framework that allows the business to remain in control; and
• ANALYTICS SERVICES – automated tools to prepare ALL of its information – both structured and unstructured – for machine learning.

The term SERVICES is intentional in this definition because a modern enterprise must be able to link these capabilities together on the fly to respond to a continually changing business environment.

Each organization needs to assess its IIM starting point before setting its Transformation objectives, and our research suggests that organizations are at widely varying starting points when it comes to core IIM technologies.

In AIIM's latest eBook, we look specifically at the current state of content services technologies (records management & preservation, document management, multi-channel capture, content migration, integration & collaboration) and how user perceptions about them are changing. We surveyed over 300 decision-makers from around the world about content services with a focus on answering these three core questions:

1. What kinds of critical business problems are users trying to solve with Content Services?
2. How is content services automation revolutionizing records management and information governance?
3. How are the spending patterns for Content Services changing and evolving?