The crucial role of ECM in digital transformation

While ten years ago digital transformation may have seemed like a mere consideration for many businesses, today it’s becoming more of a necessity.

Digital technology is a huge driver of some of the biggest changes we’ve seen over the past twenty years. Technology has evolved way beyond tools to plant itself into every aspect of our personal and professional lives. We’re in the midst of the Internet of Things and we’re using internet-enabled devices for almost everything.

Digital transformation is moving fast, and much faster than many of us expected. In order to stay relevant and keep up, organisations developed before the digital age simply have no choice but to transform.

So how can ECM support digital transformation now and into the future?

It’s no secret - companies that are able to quickly create, capture and harness information and data to support business decisions are the most successful.

Whether on-premise or in the cloud, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is already playing a huge role in helping businesses deal with the complexity of data and assets that need to be managed.

While ECM-driven digital transformation has revolutionised and continues to revolutionise the way businesses manage their information, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems.

With the expanding volume of data being said to increase tenfold by 2020, the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in ECM is likely to become a necessity.

If you think about it, each file has data attributes associated with it. Things like:

• created dates
• user ids
• licensing information
• expiration dates
• authors
• keywords
• user actions, and more

This is the kind of content that is truly rich and most valuable to an organisation. So, employees should be able to access and share it at the point of need with relative ease.

The key to facilitating this is technology like AI, machine learning and natural language comprehension. By cutting out manual and labor intensive tasks, all available information can be categorised, accessed and shared through Intelligent Automation (IA).

IA is not only capable of handling data faster and more accurately than humans, but it’s also capable of learning from that data to provide better results over time.

What are some ways that AI will make ECM even better?

Automatic classification and processing

While optical character recognition technology enables text recognition, AI can ramp this up a notch by having the ability to read information in a document, categorise it and automate a workflow based on that classification faster than a human ever could.

The even better news is that the process will only get faster with repeated action, exposure to more documents, and machine learning.

Text clustering

AI is able to perform text clustering, which is grouping documents by topic without prior classification.

This can help businesses to understand how one group of documents might be similar to others and help them make conclusions that prior to this, wouldn’t have been possible.

A good example of a company that already does this is Google; Google News uses text clustering to group related articles into separate categories.

Advanced searching potential

AI can also impact how information is extracted, for example, through voice search queries, visual searches and more.

These AI-powered capabilities are expected to be staple features of ECMs in the not too distant future, allowing users to easily and efficiently find the content they need.

Increased personalisation

Not only will future ECMs have the ability to make intuitive data suggestions, but the interface of an ECMs could also potentially morph to suit the user’s actions, patterns and habits.

Not only through showing frequently visited categories or topics, but also through customising an interface based on the way a user works.

Could your business benefit from an ECM system?

Delivering a seamless and optimised experience is important to not only customers but also employees.

Is the content available when they need it? Can they find it on a mobile device and in any timezone?

Strong ECM digital transformation allows for engagement and collaboration across a business. A new ECM will change how people work and affect the way documents are managed right across your organisation. It's not an easy or quick decision to make, but our Enterprise Content Management Checklist will help you consider your options and identify the right ECM to meet your business needs.