Content has come to be widely acknowledged as the lifeblood that propels modern day businesses and gives it a competitive edge. Any type of information or data – as trivial as employee reports to something as substantial as financial projections and organizational roadmaps, all come under the purview of content.
The way this information is stored, accessed, disseminated, shared, and saved, together constitute Enterprise Content Management (ECM). A key advantage offered by a good ECM solution is that information is available to the right person at the right time, which ultimately benefits the business.
Why is a new world order needed for ECM?
Legacy ECM systems have been found to be tremendously short of providing value when it comes to current business demands and scale of data exploding in the corporate universe presently. The need for a future ready ECM system was never as critical as it is today because of these challenges.
Alfresco, the world’s favorite in ECM, examines the 4 crucial trends that dominate the need for a new approach to ECM, in its forward looking e-book. Let’s look at these 4 trends that possess the potential to forever change the face of ECM systems as we know them today.
1. Trend#1 – Any Time, Any Where Approach to Work
Smartphones and social media have completely redefined how and where we work. For such tech savvy users, IT systems must upgrade themselves to continue offering ease of access and boost in productivity. If 37% of workforce is going mobile, ECM systems have to deliver solutions that make this transition easier, rather than a pain.
2. Trend#2 – The Growth of the Connected Enterprise
Instead of standalone models, today’s businesses are much more actively connected with outside world. ECMs need to drive the ability to share content across various stakeholders inside and outside the company (vendors, resellers, employees, shareholders, customers). This can be done by expanding the horizon of IT setup, and bring in remote access, VPN etc. for ease of use and productivity.
3. Trend#3 – Deluge of Digital Content
In just ten years (2010 to 2020), digital data is expected to grow by a staggering 50x in volume. Imagine gaining insights from such a mind boggling array of structured and unstructured data? These challenges can be met satisfactorily only with scalable, new age ECM systems. These systems need to bring out the underlying context behind the mass of content, to the right people at the right time and thus provide a competitive edge.
4. Trend#4 – Sync with New Age IT Infrastructure
Today’s IT landscape is determined by cloud technologies and growing mobile audience. The trend is increasingly transitioning to cloud based hybrid ECM systems in various forms – virtualized, on-premise, private cloud, or SaaS solutions. This new approach can help you be in total control of your ECM ecosystem at amazing cost-effectiveness.
Still relying on legacy ECMs? Risk losing valuable business unnecessarily
- Nothing puts business driven content at more risk than outdated systems that neither have the scalability nor the capability to manage new age information explosion. Also, there is no guarantee of security, ease of access, and timely value to other users.
- Legacy ECMs severely restrict newer business opportunities that can be explored by ways of mergers, acquisitions, or bursts of innovation.
- Valuable business content cannot be stored on consumer-grade web services, due to obvious reasons of lack of security, privacy, or the hassles of timely access.
- Users spend way too much time searching and accessing content. This brings down their productivity, which in turn, undermines the value provided by these old systems.
How the new approach to ECM provides value?
1. Hybrid approach provides multi-channel support (on cloud, virtualized or on-premises)
2. App ecosystems like Google Docs provide all-round content management ability
3. Rise of mobile users has opened innovation avenues on mobile platforms like iOS and Android
4. Content intensive workflows can now be easily and seamlessly managed irrespective of the size or scale of information to be processed
5. Unmatched value provided by Open Source integration, in terms of cost effectiveness and elimination of vendor dependencies
Value proposition of CIGNEX
As an Alfresco Gold Partner, CIGNEX has tremendous exposure in setting up and synchronizing customized ECM solutions in line with your business need and existing operational systems. Our expertise is endorsed by the 115+ ECM implementations and 1000+ community contributions. This helps us to let you easily manage structured and unstructured content across your organization with industry endorsed OS products such as
a. Alfresco (for document management)
b. Drupal (for web content management)
c. Moodle (for knowledge assets management)
d. Apache SOLR (for enterprise search)
e. Activiti (for Business Process Management)
Get more info on our experience at Enterprise Content Management solutions. You can also download the e-book from Alfresco here.
