Content forms the core of every organization. From customers interacting with banks and insurance companies for services, vendors sending invoices for processing payments, HRs managing employee records, governments managing public records to hospitals handling patient details, each transaction generates content in various sizes and formats.
Simply put, modern content has become more pervasive and diverse than traditional document formats, such as PDFs, word documents, and forms. It’s ever-expanding in formats & scale and includes media, such as images, audio, video, emails, and social media posts. However, the expansion of content forms and types has also brought forth its own set of challenges for enterprises in managing their content.
In this article, let’s take a look at some of the common challenges that business leaders face when managing enterprise-wide content. And, how an ideal enterprise content management (ECM) system enables users to manage content, from origination to disposition in a seamless manner.
Key Challenges Faced by Enterprises While Managing Content
- Content Silos: Organizations frequently rely on different enterprise applications to fulfill their business needs. These applications vary from CRMs, ERPs, vertical-specific applications—core banking and insurance systems, productivity tools, or different storage locations, and HRM systems. As a result, employees have to navigate through scattered applications and systems to execute their day-to-day tasks
- Context Gaps and Distorted Experiences: Knowledge workers struggle to search, access, and retrieve content at the right time due to content silos. They are constantly switching between different applications, resulting in a disjointed user experience and loss of context
- Content Accessibility: As remote work becomes a new norm, there’s a growing need to access content from anywhere, anytime. Organizations that do not optimize for content accessibility risk losing out on significant benefits
- Security and Compliance Adherence: Improper content management, spread across multiple systems and locations leads to security and compliance issues. As privacy concerns continue to grow, governments across the globe are imposing stringent regulations on organizations. Ensuring compliance adherence with these evolving regulations and laws pose difficulties for business leaders
To address these challenges and beyond, organizations require a comprehensive solution—one that serves as the foundational pillar, the quintessential “backbone” of an
enterprise—streamlining content-centric processes.
From Information Chaos to Clarity: The Answer is Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Solution
Known by different names–Enterprise Content Management, Document Management System, or Content Service Platforms—ECM is an all-encompassing term that defines a set of processes and strategies used to capture, manage, and deliver content.
With capabilities ranging from capturing content from multiple sources, managing it in a secure, centralized repository, and making information and file-sharing accessible across content-centric processes, an ECM solution makes it easier build a boundaryless workplace with anytime-anywhere accessibility to content.
An Ideal ECM – How it Can Do Wonders For an Organization?
- Streamline processes with automated workflows: An ECM solution enables business leaders to build digitally-connected content-centric processes. This encompasses creating workflows for document routing, incorporating complex business logic and rules, and intelligently processing content, thereby empowering users to make informed decisions
- Boost productivity with an integrated application ecosystem: By implementing an ECM solution, organizations can optimize investments in enterprise applications by connecting all organizational content, thereby ensuring compliance, improving efficiency, and enhancing productivity. This means that your employees can access content regardless of which application they are working on or where the content is stored, making it easier for employees to access content from different applications without having to switch back and forth
- Make smarter decisions with intelligent content capabilities: Leveraging AI/ML-powered content capabilities, organizations can eliminate redundant tasks and improve process efficiency and turnaround time. This includes the ability to intelligently classify documents without manual intervention, extract information from documents automatically for use in processes across applications, identify sentiments in customer interactions, and more
- Boost collaboration with a digital workplace: Regardless of place and time, multiple users can leverage a robust ECM to collaborate to work on same documents/projects and achieve their desired goals. The solution fosters smooth collaboration between employees, clients, and other stakeholders, meanwhile simplifying the decision making process
- Ensure compliance and mitigate risk: Using cloud-based ECM solutions, organizations can securely store/manage documents and records over longer periods while adhering with regulatory compliances, such as GDPR, DoD 5015.2, and more
- Increase agility with cloud migration: Modern ECM solution can help organizations systematically migrate content and processes to the cloud, improving agility and minimizing infrastructure costs. This includes identifying different types of content and processes in an organization, determining their importance, and accordingly migrating them to the cloud.
In Conclusion:
With the rise of diverse content forms and types, increasingly stringent privacy laws, and the need for contextually accurate content, organizations face complexities in managing their enterprise-wide content. In view of these challenges, organizations can turn to a modern ECM solution. An optimal ECM solution leverages cutting-edge technologies, including low code, process automation, AI/ML, robotics, and cloud, to streamline the delivery of content.
(This article is written by Utsav V. Turray, Head of Product Marketing, Newgen Software, and the views expressed in this article are his own)
