Gartner: “ECM is now dead (kaput, finite, an ex-market name), at least in how Gartner defines the market. It’s been replaced by the term Content Services.”
The past 12 months have certainly been filled with enough change to last a lifetime. The past 12 months have also been pivotal for content management. In December, Gartner put a capstone on the year by announcing it was “retiring” the term “ECM” and replacing it with something called “Content Services.”
Forrester also chimed in on “Content Services,” splitting the market into two parts, 1) Transactional Content Services and 2) Business Content Services, with the former most closely aligning to “traditional” ECM.
At its core, what suppliers in this space provide are solutions and strategies that help end user organizations manage the complex interaction between PEOPLE, PROCESSES, and TECHNOLOGY. How this interaction is managed evolves as technologies evolve.
This is described in the table below:
| DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT & WORKFLOW CIRCA 1995 | ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT CIRCA 2005 | MOBILE & CLOUD CONTENT MANAGEMENT CIRCA 2015 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| PEOPLE | Solutions are difficult to use and require lots of training - users are specialists | Focus shifts from ECM "specialists" to knowledge workers, but usability still not a top priority | Usability becomes everything. Lines blur between home and the office |
| PROCESSES | Focus = automating content intensive, complicated, mission- critical processes - departments at large organizations | ECM believes it's an enterprise layer, but is often still driven by individual departments - silos explode | "Appification" of processes and "Good enough" solutions merge for the mid-sized market |
| TECHNOLOGY | Complex, custom and expensive implementations purchased by business buyers | Rise - and then decline - of the "suites" - SharePoint disrupts the traditional ECM market | Configuration, connection and mobile skills become key - File sync & share and cloud disrupt the market |
Times have changed for the better. Power now lies in the hands of your customers and employees, who define the success or failure of your business on the basis of your competency to best serve them.
Your business success depends on your agility in responding to customers, catering to their needs, and hence exceeding their expectations. Content Strategy of your organization can only be successful if it intersects with the evolving needs and demands of your customers and employees that are increasingly driven by digital.
What is Intelligent Information Management?
Intelligent Information Management means that new world is all about Data AND Content, not Data OR Content. We have operated in the past with a convenient dichotomy between data management and content management. If this dichotomy ever made sense, it makes less and less as time goes on. The kinds of customer-centric problems that must be solved require competencies and technologies from BOTH the data management and content management worlds.
Intelligent Information Management is a set of processes that enables organizations to organize, manage and understand all types of data. IIM deals with data such as computer files, spreadsheets, databases and emails
What does this mean as you build your Information Management strategy?
There are Many “Flavors” of Solutions
Intelligent Information Management means that there are many levels of complexity in thinking about the content management challenges facing organizations, and as a result, many flavors of information management solutions.
Organizations need to identify: 1) exactly what they are trying to accomplish, in business terms; 2) map those goals against the required capabilities in the Intelligent Information Management roadmap; and 3) understand how solution providers map against their required capabilities.
Digital Transformation Requires Both a Top-down and a Down-up Strategy
Every organization is on a quest to transform and digitize their business. C-level executives go to conferences and come back proclaiming a need for a bold “Digital Transformation” initiative, not always realizing that the raw material — and skills — necessary for transformation likely lie in some of their past experiences with ECM and Information Governance.
Content and records practitioners do not understand their potential value to Digital Transformation initiatives and fail to update their skills and mindsets to connect to the bigger world of data AND content. Both parties are critical to a Digital Transformation initiative, and organizations need to consciously work to connect these perspectives.
Digital Transformation is not likely to Occur via a Big Bang
Not every business process is a gigantic, millions of documents, straight-through process (in other words, a “traditional” ECM process). But all of these much more modest day-to-day processes are still information intensive, and automating these day-to-day processes is a critical precondition to digitally transforming the business.
Understand the purpose of each major content system, how current it is, its cost, whether there are opportunities to consolidate suppliers, and whether there are more modern and flexible solutions available.
Make a Commitment to Metadata
Metadata is the key to moving from a storage mindset to an applications mindset. It is also key to building some element of sanity around both the ability of your knowledge workers to find information across multiple repositories and your ability as an organization to put some framework around the management of your information assets. The days of imagining that everything would wind up in a single repository are over.
In the world that is coming, not everyone will need to be a data scientist, but a lot of employees will need to be information entrepreneurs. In addition, the worlds of data and content are combining/colliding, so invest in building competencies that understand the intersection.
Stop thinking about all Process Issues through an ECM “prism”
There is a tendency for those in the “ECM Community” — both users and suppliers to think of all issues through an ECM prism. There are still many, many organizations who have yet to automate these core back-end ECM processes.
But it is only part of the story. The focus is shifting to applications that leverage content capabilities for specific business purposes. The focus is shifting to the integration of content capabilities into our existing applications — including SaaS applications — finally providing the long-promised benefits of ECM without the adoption issues we have struggled with for so long.
What organizations are doing with content has outgrown the traditional definitions. We need a new “technology roadmap” for the information management capabilities that are critical to Digital Transformation and to meeting the challenge of radically redefining experiences with customers, employees, and partners.
Key Drivers for a Digital Content Management Strategy
ECM technology is undergoing an evolution triggered by market, customer and business dynamics. Let’s examine some of these factors below.
Digital Customers Demand Everything, Anytime, Anywhere
Digital Customers demand Instant results out of any engagement, initiated anywhere, across any device, at any given time. Customers now look for unified cross-channel experiences, where businesses offer them the flexibility to engage with them, with any content in any preferred format (message, video, image, document, form, picture, tweet, post, comment) across any mix of channels (Social Media, Phone, Chat, Email, Fax, Postal, Face-to-face) over any device.
Enterprises need to delight their digital customers regardless of device, channel, time or place.
Boundaryless Workplace and Collaboration are Key to Business Value Creation
Employees today expect “Boundaryless Access” to content to be able to serve customers efficiently. This approach differs drastically from the traditional organizational view of “Controlled Access” to content. Today’s digital workforce (includes employees, vendors, partners, etc.) look for mobility across multiple devices, networks & platforms, and collaboration over a secured work environment.
Digital Content is core to employee activities across, and beyond, the physical boundaries of workplace, for continued business performance.
The challenge is to implement an organizational content strategy around the digital work style of employees while ensuring security.
Organizations Need Elasticity and Flexibility
Today, businesses are more exposed to business/ market risks and opportunities than ever before. Organizations should be able to adapt to changes in real time across the growth and declining business phases.
This requires enterprises to build and procure technologies that provide them elasticity to upscale or downscale, extend applications, and tap innovative strategies or technologies as and when they want. Organizations need to have fluid applications that can help them adjust to their changing business demands quickly.
Enterprises need to focus on fundamental solution building blocks that allow them to orchestrate their resources while maintaining loose-coupling.
Business Operations Don’t Measure Up in Silos Any More
Organizations must involve workers across different functions and processes to leverage content for planned outcomes. Various systems that are used by various teams and departments should be able to collaborate so that there is a seamless information flow, maintaining concurrency of data updates, and triggering respective actions across various team members.
Employees need to be able to collaborate with their team members freely so that work gets done instantly. Business applications – across different functions – need to be interconnected and expanded (beyond their original scope) with content services to implement a holistic content strategy.
Compliance and Governance Are Fundamental Needs
With information access and control in the hands of users, it becomes more challenging for organizations to maintain control and information security without limiting the user experience. Governance and Regulatory Compliance need to be taken care of by content management technology to mitigate any business risks posed by the users.
With emerging technological and market risks, business and regulatory authorities continuously tighten existing compliance and governance requirements and lay out new ones. Content services need to include a variety of existing and emerging complex Compliance and Governance use cases.
A Holistic ECM Platform powered by Content Services
An ECM Platform powered by content services enables you to build customer-centric business applications, where you can tie in the content to build context throughout a customer transaction or customer lifecycle.
In order to accomplish that, your underlying ECM platform needs to have all the necessary functionality – Content Capture, Content Processing & Storage, Management of Content-centric processes, Delivery of Information, Archival of documents and records – and all this functionality needs to be available through loosely-coupled content services that can be consumed from anywhere atomically without losing the necessary context.
One of the biggest impacts of microservices architecture in ECM is the shift from the monolithic application approach to applications built with loosely-coupled content services. As you build such applications, you need specific content services in various functional areas –
Steps to your ECM Strategy
Once you have identified your business challenges and formulated the Digital Content Management Strategy to address them, you can undertake the following steps for your ECM Technology Strategy –
- Identify and prioritize the business processes you need to digitize as per your digital content strategy
- Understand how other line-of-business systems need to work with ECM applications for given business processes
- Figure out which Content Services Clusters and specified Content Services are required to enable the business systems and tools
- Evaluate if your existing ECM platform provides the required content services or if you would need additional content services from new ECM platform and/or Content Services
- Deploy new ECM platform/ Content Services on the top of existing ECM and other business systems
- Execute user onboarding, training and change management programs for effective implementation and execution of business processes
- Track the established ROI, Process & Activity Metrics time to time to evaluate and improve the business performance
Are Your Documents Slowing You Down?
Information is the most valuable commodity of the digital economy. It helps customers improve efficiencies, redefine business models and transform industries. Organizations must use new technologies to unlock the power of information, become more Intelligent and Connected through automation and artificial intelligence, APIs and data automation and drive engagement with customers, partners and employees.
An ECM/Intelligent Information Management solution helps manage the creation, capture, use and eventual lifecycle of structured and unstructured information.
Contact us to explore more on how an ECM/Intelligent Information Management Solution can add value for your Enterprise to drive Digital Transformation.
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