Why Content Services Will Dominate Digital Transformation in 2021

Dennis Chepurnov, product marketing principal at Hyland, talks about how re-examining your organization’s content ecosystem in 2021 is a smart way to guard against future disruption. By asking the right questions and focusing on legacy technology elements causing the most friction, you can leverage content services to create efficiencies and free team members from an administrative slog.

When I look back on the goals I set at the start of last year, I realize I have plenty of evolving and adjusting to do in the year ahead. For me, both personally and as a leader, it wasn’t that I didn’t achieve my goals in 2020 — it’s that the world changed so much. Achieving them meant something different in the end. The world doesn’t stand still, and no year proved that more than 2020. Now, the challenging and rewarding work of setting new goals for a new world begins. 

I suspect many organizations are going through a similar reflection and re-evaluation process at the beginning of this year — and that’s totally OK. What’s important is to avoid complacency because it doesn’t look like the pace of change is slowing down. 

I want to encourage leaders in any enterprise to make a reasonable faith effort to re-examine their content priorities and infrastructure this year. A re-evaluation of the content may be one of the best insurance policies against the kind of business disruption we saw in 2020, and you owe it to your customers to enter a new decade equipped to deliver the best experience possible. 

Content Management Has a New Name

If it has been a few years since you took a look at the technology that supports your content, you likely see new nomenclature. Enterprise content management (ECM) previously dominated as the namesake for the systems that manage content, cases, related data, and its processes. But after some evolution, a name change was in order — fundamental changes to the technology and market meant that the term ECM no longer captured the complete set of features the technology offered. 

Due to shifts in the way vendors deliver the technology — and the ways customers consume it — content services is a more apt term. Here’s a quick primer on some features that distinguish content services from ECM: 

• Cloud-based: Bringing data into the cloud is a table of stakes for digital transformation around content processes. On-prem options for content become riskier by the day, primarily as hackers have held shared drives ransom. 
• Low-code configurability: Content needs often differ significantly by department, but IT teams don’t have the time to code a unique solution for every use case. Low-code features, however, allow fewer technical employees to create new workflows and customizations. 
• Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML): These advanced features can help automate and streamline workflows so employees can focus on higher-level tasks. 

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

Evaluating Your Content Ecosystem in 2021 and Beyond

Everyone’s content ecosystem will have different needs in the year ahead. Leaders must carefully examine their processes and content structure to reduce friction at every step in mind. Identifying the legacy technology and processes slowing your organization down will help you achieve this. 

And it is not just about the friction of inefficient technologies and processes. It is also about meeting the new expectations of user experience – for your employees, customers, and partners, as they now must work and interact with information in new ways. And it is also filling the gaps in information security and compliance so that your organization does not expose your customers and itself to undue risk. 

When preparing to vet and evaluate content services solutions, you’ll need to start somewhere. Before you dive into a new vendor relationship or plan a full-scale content reorganization, ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your timing? You will need to know how quickly you can reasonably assemble a team for this project and how rapidly you or your leadership will expect results. This will help determine the budget and the priority for the project. 

• What is a realistic budget? Determine how much you can reasonably spend this year. While you can’t always control how much you have to spend, you can control who you choose as a partner. Many content service providers have more modular and customizable offerings, making it easier to do smaller deployments or proof-of-concept deployments. 

• What are your IT capabilities? A good rule of thumb for any organization is to keep initial projects small and scale them according to your IT team’s skill set. 

• Is there strategic alignment? Specific projects may be easier to pursue because they line up with a similar goal or technology upgrade occurring in another internal department. If another department is seeking a solution that may help you as well, can you help each other? 

• Priority: No project needs to be a “lift and shift.” Instead, you may have one or two critical needs that can be addressed with a proof of concept or smaller departmental experiment. These projects can help you make bigger impacts in shorter time spans — often with less disruption.

All of this is more important now than ever. And while these gaps and inefficiencies might be easy to identify, they aren’t always quick or simple fixes and may require outside assistance. 

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