9 Indicators of the Shift from ECM to Modern Content Services
The world of content management has undergone a disruptive shift due to increasing customer expectations and evolving business needs. From the way your customers engage with you, to the way your workforce functions and your entire organization operates, everything has witnessed a sea change. With this, businesses are increasingly realising the need for modernizing their enterprise content management (ECM).
According to Gartner, the purpose of ECM was to provide a centralized enterprise-wide platform that could meet one or all of the following primary goals associated with the utilization of content:
- Regulatory compliance and risk management
- Retention and dissemination of business knowledge
- Cost and process efficiencies
- Innovation and new ways of working
However, the rapid adoption of digital has changed everything about content management.
The Paradigm Shift from ECM to Modern Content Services: Key Indicators
A combination of consumer trends, technological advancements, and business models has led to the paradigm shift from ECM to content services. Let’s look at the ten indicators of this shift:
- Content for transactional support to content for contextual engagement
The focus of content management has shifted from managing the end-to-end content lifecycle to embedding content for utilization across mission-critical business applications
- Paper-based documents to multi-format variants of content
ECM streamlined paper-driven processes but today your organization deals with multiple formats of content, including paper documents, digital documents, e-mails, images, audio and video files, social content, and more. Content services enables intelligent processing of information, furnished with all the relevant metadata, regardless of the content format
- Scanning, e-mail, and front-office to omnichannel input and output
The way organizations ingest content has multiplied, thanks to the plethora of devices and channels that customers and partners use to engage. You must ensure that content is securely available in real time, across channels, any time, and from anywhere
- Internal-facing ECM to a connected and extended enterprise
ECM was restricted to managing content internally, isolated from the external world. In addition to being omnichannel, your organization needs to operate in your environment as a connected entity, extending beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. It’s crucial to maintain a consistent version of the content, available to everyone, regardless of their location
- Simple, linear workflows to collaboration and content-centric processes
Traditional ECM supported business processes through simple, linear workflows that were strictly meant for internal consumption. Most processes today are driven by context, which is expected to be extracted from content in real time. Extensive real-time collaboration and content-centric processes mandate a different, modular, and service-based approach that can be achieved by content services
- Human intervention to AI- and ML-based intelligent cognitive services
The availability of cutting-edge technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), has led to real-time processing capabilities that were deemed improbable in the traditional ECM paradigm
- Single, bulky repository to a large-scale federated repository
Content services platforms provide the ability to store and search through large-scale deployments using a federated model. Multiple content repositories can be used by various teams across different departments and geographies in your organization
- On-premises deployment to cloud and hybrid deployments
Organizations need the flexibility to consider all the deployment options, ranging from private cloud and hybrid, virtualized environments to public cloud hosting, SaaS models on public cloud, and even traditional, on-premises deployment
- Heavy coding to low code/no code
Content services platforms thrive on rapid application development, powered by low code capabilities, where professional developers can build complex, content-driven, and customer-engaging business applications without heavy coding
Modernization of ECM Platforms is the Way Forward
An aging ECM cannot meet the dynamic business needs and you must quickly transition to a modern content services platform—the one that enables you to create an extended and agile organization, by empowering you to rapidly develop and deploy end-to-end content-centric processes in a secure remote environment. To stay competitive and future-proof, the time is now to move to a more modern way of managing content!
Authored by:- Mr. Arvind Jha, Sr. Vice President, Software Development in Newgen Software ltd
(The views expressed in this article are by – Mr. Arvind Jha, Sr. Vice President, Software Development in Newgen Software ltd. Technuter.com doesn’t own any responsibility for it.)
