It’s Time to Rethink Enterprise Content Management to Meet the Needs of the ‘New Normal’

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is transforming to meet the changing needs of businesses.  Here, Fred Sass, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Content Services at OpenText explains how a new generation of content services technology is helping organizations enhance productivity, access, governance, and control.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The world has changed…there is a “new normal.” Yes, it’s a prognostication we’ve read and heard repeatedly over the past year — one directed at almost every facet of our lives. 

However, this new normal shouldn’t come as a complete shock when it comes to our work habits and operational models. On many levels, it’s really just the accelerated progression of several trends that have been emerging for a decade now:

• Employees have been transitioning to remote-based anywhere/anytime work for years
• Organizations have long realized that seamlessly accessing and distributing siloed information is key to process efficiency and task productivity
• Governance and control of all this information has continually struggled in the face of growing volumes and new use cases

As IT professionals, you’ve seen these patterns evolving through the inquiries and requests you regularly receive. Taken together, they’re confirmation that information has already become an organization’s most valuable asset—and enterprises are undertaking digital transformation efforts to extract its value and minimize its risk. Access to information, along with the ability to efficiently analyze, govern, distribute and use it, have risen to become perennial imperatives. The events of 2020 have only intensified these priorities. 

So how is the concept of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) evolving to meet these needs? Let’s explore.

First off, it’s important to understand the traditional model of ECM—a standalone repository primarily serving as a digital filing cabinet for Records Managers and Legal departments—is dead. Consider it swamped by an ever-increasing deluge of new sources and forms of digital information. All this content and data has far-reaching uses and risks. Yes, it still needs to have its lifecycle managed, but digital businesses also need it to be analyzed, contextualized, and easily available to drive productivity and service. That’s beyond the scope of traditional ECM.

Learn More: What Is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)? Definition, Key Advantages, and Best Practices

Content Services in the Cloud 

Enter content services technology. For those not familiar, content services is not a singular “thing.” It’s a series of platforms, applications, and components designed to layer over an existing ECM infrastructure to extend and expand content management capabilities. Each content services element is purpose-built to accomplish a specific function. Some integrate with the applications at the heart of business processes to extend lifecycle management to isolated information pools. Some facilitate the distribution of that information to workflows and value chains. Some generate custom workspaces for aggregating and sharing information. Others focus on specific functions such as capture, archiving, or external collaboration.

The future of information management is content services in the cloud. The leading content services platforms and applications are cloud-based, ensuring remote workers can access information and functionality while simplifying deployment and upgrades. Containerized architecture provides the agility and deployment options needed to integrate with highly varied cloud and on-prem environments. They’re easily customizable, as well: Connectors and open APIs enable tailoring to meet any organization’s unique needs. 

The development of content services technology is driven by three interwoven business needs that became even more pronounced with the sudden upending of norms and practices in the first half of 2020.

Learn More: Software Asset Management: Optimizing Software Will Be a Top Focus in 2021

Information Access

Knowledge workers have left the building. And many will never return. They’re now dispersed across highly varied working environments, toiling away in innumerable unique circumstances to complete their assigned tasks. The onus is on the enterprise to ensure they have access to the content and data they need to innovate, make decisions, and optimize the customer experience.

Enabling easier access to information is one of the core tenets of content services technology. By integrating a central content management platform with the applications (think ERP, SCM, CRM, CEM, HRM, and others) that produce information, lifecycle management protocols can be applied to previously siloed content and data. Information can now be automatically identified, analyzed, and classified as it’s created or ingested using centrally defined lifecycle rules.

The information remains housed in the system where it originated. It doesn’t have to flow to a “single source of truth” repository. It can now be located and retrieved through centralized search functionality that incorporates all these connected systems. 

The benefits and efficiencies are instantly evident. With cloud-based content services applications, users can access the information they need wherever they are, whenever they want. Gatekeepers and application specialists are no longer bottlenecks; IT no longer has to manage remote access to every system; screen flips, phone calls, and emailed reports are eliminated. 

Information Use

Business processes cover a broad spectrum—from capturing incoming forms to managing a customer service ticket to unstructured collaboration in the Microsoft Office suite. Information is used to fuel the sequential actions that drive each process. And every step in a process creates data that can be used in related processes.

It should come as no surprise that many enterprises found process continuity teetering on the brink in the first half of 2020. Decades-old, highly structured information flows broke down as “battle stations” were suddenly unmanned, communication faltered, and information wasn’t being created, distributed or consumed. 

Going forward, highly dispersed teams and operational processes need a stable, automated, real-time stream of relevant content and data to keep the wheels turning. Again, it’s the integration and automation strengths of content services technology that provides the solution. With lifecycle management rules and metatags consistently applied across disparate systems, actions and events in one system can automatically trigger the surfacing of related information from another system.

For example, relevant, real-time SAP data can be automatically surfaced in Salesforce when a customer file is opened. No screen flips, no additional logins. The same automation can be applied to any number of processes, from capturing incoming documents triggering a case management workflow to AI-driven analysis of mechanical operations initiating a service call.

It also applies to the process of collaboration. The ad-hoc creation, sharing, and modification of unstructured content—primarily in the Microsoft Office suite—drives planning, innovation, and service. But ideation and subsequent decision making are only as good as the information they’re based on. Conversely, the information generated by these actions has value beyond its immediate audience.

Using content services to underpin the collaborative capabilities of Microsoft Teams gives dispersed workgroups access to relevant content and data drawn from systems across the enterprise. Meanwhile, the information produced through that collaboration is instantly classified, governed, and introduced into the organization’s central content management program, making it retrievable to others who may need it.

Information Governance

IT departments and compliance stakeholders have a critical need to maintain control of rapidly growing types and volumes of information. In many cases, most information is created, shared, and used beyond the organizational “moat.” It may seem insurmountable, but let’s not forget that ECM platforms’ original goal was to provide legally defensible governance to enterprise information. The industry leaders have decades of experience adapting to the evolving security, privacy, and compliance landscape and applying those measures to the most highly regulated industries.

Content services technology builds on that by extending those strengths much, much deeper into the information ecosystem. Integration with systems and processes means that governance policies defined at the central content management hub can be applied to previously isolated content and data, where it’s created and stored.

As information is distributed and used across various connected platforms, control attributes such as permissions, legal holds, and privacy protections travel with it and are modified to meet the current state of the information. For example, SAP data may have a specific legal hold applied at source, but that criteria may change once the data has been surfaced and used within a Team workgroup.

Summing Up  

Granted, for many of us, arriving at our new normal has been a quantum step forward at warp speed—more of a big bang than creeping evolution—but the solutions to every organization’s most pressing needs are already time-tested, proven, and getting better every day.

Content services technology will be at the heart of information management in our new world—enabling cloud-based access, use, and governance of every organization’s most valuable asset.

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