Why you need to modernize your ECM now?

Digital is pervasive today.

However, digital outcomes remain elusive for enterprises, despite investing in technologies, such as mobility, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), and more. This is because of prevalent information silos, owing to outdated content management technologies and preventing organizations, like yours, from reaping the full benefits of other automation investments.

Multiple systems – from multiple vendors – have been the norm. Point solutions lead to fragmentation of content, and organizations still struggle with the sprawl of network and personal drives

This is why “digitization of business processes” is the top driver for most organizations considering ECM investments. Considering the criticality of digital content today, the negative impact of an outdated ECM system is highly underestimated.

As per Forrester’s research, “Business stakeholders are demanding that their peers provide fresh approaches to content management. The emergence of modern, often cloud-based, content platforms has eroded the dominance of the monolithic, 1990s-architected ECM suites. Platforms allow architects, developers, and designers to compose and deliver content-rich applications to business stakeholders”

Enterprise content management, as a practice, was established with the intention of connecting people, processes, and technology together meaningfully.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. It’s the architecture that glues your documents and business content together — making them searchable, explorable, organized, and ultimately meaningful.

In the past, we have always referred to enterprise content management’s ability to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver. But, for the purposes of clarity let’s settle on a different acronym.

A dynamic enterprise management system should be able to do CAMPS, or –

Capture

A smart enterprise content management solution should be capable of entering content into the system intelligently. This means digitizing paper documents, cataloging video and audio, and managing documents across value segments (i.e., contracts, invoices, marketing materials, etc.)

Analyze

With all of these documents and contact types now entered into the system, you need to be able to explore these documents in a sophisticated manner. ECM should be able to extract and infer metadata and create bridges between unstructured content and search capabilities.

Map

Creating a pathway between business needs and document storage requires mapping. Content needs to be stored optimally, retrieved intelligently, and extracted uniquely. By mapping content out, ECM not only organizes — but optimizes — your content library.

Preserve

Content archiving is mission-critical for compliance and regulatory reasons. Typically, content is saved when changes are made, so content that requires few human touch points risks being removed for space in the cloud. Enterprise content management involves improving archive content across channels to keep crucial content protected — as well as all subsequently connected data sources.

Store

Finding content a home within your IT architecture is essential for visibility, preservation, and security. Enterprise content management involves gluing content to specific systems (both SaaS and on-site.) This makes content retrieval natural — since each component is nailed to its parent system and roles are spread amongst multiple systems.

It’s best to think of enterprise content management as a sequence of data collection and distribution that overlays your existing systems. This means that business process management, archiving, imaging, document management, collaboration, web content management, records management, and digital asset management all act as streams that can supply data to the enterprise content management warehouse, which then organizes, analyzes, and distributes this content amongst cloud resources, on-site storage systems, and information systems.

An outdated ECM system hurts your organization in multiple ways. Ingestion of new content types becomes a challenge. Linkage of various content items to their transactional contexts and corresponding security involves considerable effort.

You may face many such obvious challenges, but if you assess your operations holistically, an aging ECM system has an overall negative impact on your digital efforts.

Here are few compelling reasons to consider modernizing your ECM, urgently –

• Your Customers Expect Contextual Engagement

One of the key reasons for a disjointed customer experience is when context is lost at touchpoints along the way. You must map the customer journey from initiation to outcome, including the ingestion of the complete context in the form of supporting documents and the effective lifecycle management.

Also, as your employees interact with customers, they require the context from all of the customer’s past interactions in order to respond quickly and appropriately. Unfortunately, most of this content is either spread across point solutions and disparate repositories, or stowed away in a monolithic legacy content management system, requiring difficult maneuvers for integration. While these types of systems may have worked in one-off, high-priority scenarios, it is nearly impossible to ensure consistent contextual engagement with such aged infrastructure.

• Your Interactions must be Omnichannel

Your customers and employees must be able to transact anytime, anywhere, through their preferred channel. Moreover, they should be able to switch to the channel of their convenience on the fly, without losing context.

For this, your content management system must meet a variety of requirements–from access to revisions, storage, delivery mechanisms, and archival. An ECM system, still based on monolithic architecture with traditional integration mechanisms, will always lead to subpar customer experience.

• Content is Pervasive Today, and it’s ever-expanding in Formats and Scale

Organizations are flooded with a deluge of data and documents. We are dealing with an explosion of content spread across various formats. Increasing scale makes the traditional repository approach untenable, calling for a federated mechanism coupled with cloud and hybrid delivery models.

Moreover, traditional ECM systems cannot do justice to the rich functionality available with content-rich formats–especially considering the prevalence of audio, video, and unstructured information in business processes today.

• Your Operations need Intelligent Automation

The definition of “fast” is rapidly shifting to mean “real-time”. You are expected to onboard customers, close retail loan applications, and process orders almost immediately. These are the times when processes, such as digital KYC or automated insurance claim processing, based on pictures and geo-tagging, are rapidly becoming the norm.

You must go beyond traditional image processing and content ingestion mechanisms to intelligently process and mine data from all kinds of incoming content formats, rich with metadata that can help make intelligent decisions through the usage of technologies, such as RPA, AI, and machine learning (ML).

• Your Workforce must be Customer-centric, Productive, and able to work Remotely

Your employees must be able to focus on customer-oriented tasks, whether co-located or working remotely. Enabling contextual engagement, omnichannel interactions, and intelligent automation go a long way in achieving your employee productivity goals.

Additionally, you must ensure 360-degree visibility of all relevant content for your employees, with authorization-based control over the entire document lifecycle. Additionally, a well-devised cloud architecture (including hybrid) helps address several traditional challenges associated with secure, authenticated access to data and content from anywhere. This is difficult to achieve with an outdated ECM technology.

• Your Enterprise Must be Collaboration-driven

Typically, traditional content workflows have been simple and linear. It was broadly acceptable for processes to have a “backend or off-line processing” where your employees deal with mini workflows that involve content management in the background.

But that’s no longer sustainable. All your processes need to be collaborative, with content embedded across your end-to-end business processes across all levels of complexities. Achieving this requires a divergent, modern approach, which traditional ECM systems cannot offer.

• Your Enterprise must be Elastic and Agile, Operationally as well as Strategically

Organizations confront the challenge of agility at many different levels of business today. Operationally, you need the flexibility to adapt to variations in customer context, quickly and intelligently. At a strategic level, you face the challenge of rapidly delivering business applications.

Modern technologies allow you to deal with content integration in a modular manner, through plug-and-play, automated metadata processing, and intelligent/cognitive capabilities, among others. Moreover, RPA, AI, and ML, in conjunction with intelligent process automation (BPM) technologies, can enable low code and no code automation where you can rapidly deliver smarter applications. A traditional ECM system can be a big hurdle in this endeavor.

• Security, Risk, and Compliance Requirements become more Stringent every Day

Digital has brought about a major change in the way authorities, consumers, and organizations deal with regulatory compliance, data privacy, financial risk, and information security. Proliferation of imaging technologies and the widespread availability of tech-enabled tools has led to increased levels, and a higher awareness, of risk.

In such a rapidly shifting environment, the traditional ways of managing physical and digital content are grossly inadequate. In the absence of more granular content taxonomy control, traditional ECM systems are a compliance burden and, often, a security nightmare.

• Digital Business Models Demand an Extended Enterprise

Successful digitally-native enterprises are platform-driven in terms of technology and business models. For your enterprise to compete in and lead the digital economy, you must develop business models that extend your enterprise beyond physical and organizational boundaries. You must also treat customers, partners, and employees as part of an extended ecosystem, where everyone can engage, collaborate, and self-service digitally.

This necessitates multiple capabilities, including federated storage architecture, cloud/hybrid delivery models, fully-functional API sets, multi-factor authentication mechanisms, and more. These capabilities are beyond the scope of traditional ECM architecture.

• Your Existing ECM Infrastructure can be Cumbersome to Maintain and Support

As with any legacy infrastructure that is deeply rooted in architecture predating a decade or earlier, the maintenance and support of aging ECM systems can be very challenging. This challenge multiplies if you consider that many of these systems are based on products and applications that have changed multiple hands due to mergers and acquisitions over the last 10-15 years.

Not only are these systems difficult to maintain, they are very costly and effort-heavy to replace at once. The ongoing costs of staying with such systems, however, far outweigh the cost of transitioning.

Whether or not to modernize is no longer the question. You must decide which path to take on the way to a modern content management platform, based on what is known as a “content services architecture.”

More often than not, your path to modernization will involve transitioning to a more modern content services-based platform, such as Newgen’s Contextual Content Services, part of Newgen’s digital automation platform.

Newgen’s digital automation platform enables digital transformation by integrating critical capabilities through flagship products in intelligent process automation (BPM), contextual content services (ECM), and omnichannel customer engagement (CCM). On one hand, Newgen’s platform helps you transform experiences by bridging (process, content, and communication) silos across your organization. On the other hand, it offers you the agility for sustainable and continuous improvement, thereby future-proofing your enterprise.

What’s more, Newgen’s architectural support for integration and innovation enables you to leverage cutting-edge capabilities to stay ahead of the curve. These capabilities include mobility, social, analytics, cloud, machine learning, robotic process automation, blockchain, and artificial intelligence.

If you are planning to establish a digital workplace within your organization, please feel free to get in touch with our domain experts for a deep dive into the new capabilities that the modern ECM has to offer.

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