The secret to effective enterprise content management: Building from a sound base

A number of obstacles stand in the way of IT leaders looking to address their enterprise content management objectives, but two stand out: a proliferation of tools and an inability to effectively integrate them. Coupled with the rapid rate of content growth, it’s little wonder that a Forrester survey shows 42% of enterprises report having large amounts of critical content effectively hidden in information silos across the organization.

The solution involves choosing a content management platform upon which you can add the specific tools you need with the assurance they are well-integrated with one another.

How we got here

The proliferation of tools is the result of years of individual departments acquiring products with limited scope to address specific problems. The popularity of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions compounded the problem, enabling various departments to buy and deploy solutions without the blessing of IT.

The result: numerous content silos and point products that don’t talk to one another.

“In many organizations, the problem of siloed content developed over many years, and sometimes even decades,” says Dennis Chepurnov, Product Marketing Manager with content management solution vendor Hyland. “It’s not uncommon for us to talk to organizations who have dozens of legacy repositories still in use.”

That’s a problem for any organization trying to make the best use of all the content it owns. Silos prevent decision-makers from easily gaining the best data from all relevant stakeholders – whether marketing, research and development, sales, or finance. Perhaps worse, using whatever tool they have at their disposal, decision-makers may think they’re gathering all possible data on a topic when, in fact, much of it remains out of reach. They don’t know what they don’t know.

Benefits of a platform approach to ECM

Modern ECM solutions have a number of features that help IT address the problem, but it starts with the ability to build on top of a common platform. The idea is you add modules to address specific needs, such as for different departments. So, each department gets a view that helps their own workflows, but all content is available to anyone who needs it and is authorized to access it.

A modern platform should offer a number of features and functions, Chepurnov says, including:

• Federated access and management of legacy content repositories – so you don’t lose all your investments in those legacy ECM tools
• Modern security and compliance controls
• Flexible deployment options, including cloud-based
• Scalability to meet ever-burgeoning volumes of content
• Low-code/no-code application development to make it easy for business departments to customize the solution, “So they don’t go shopping for more disparate apps,” he says.

Another key to look for is support for native advanced automation capabilities, including robotic process automation, and artificial intelligence-driven capabilities, such as intelligent document processing. That’s especially important given the AI landscape is rapidly evolving and changing

“We found that a modern approach powered by a content services platform is essential to successfully navigating the disruption and opportunity automation and AI present,” Forrester notes in the 2024 edition of its Annual Content Services Pulse Study, based on a survey of 405 global content management decision-makers.

That’s sound advice for anyone looking to break down their content silos and prepare for all the benefits AI has to bring.

Learn more about Hyland’s intelligent, cloud-native ECM platforms. Visit: Why Choose Hyland?