The Next Generation ECM Platform

Authored By Virender Jeet, Senior Vice President, (Technology), Newgen Software Technologies Limited

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems have successfully transformed businesses across industries with the management of the enterprise content lifecycle. However, with the changing times, would these systems suffice?

Today, digital customers expect real-time responses and contextual engagements across various channels. And, the millennial workforce in organizations demands flexibility to access the enterprise content beyond the boundaries of the workplace. All of this requires organizations to go beyond the centralized, monolithic approach to content management and rethink their digital content strategy.

5 Key Change Drivers of Content Management Strategy

In order to meet the increasing customer expectations and demands of the workforce, it's important to acknowledge the five key drivers that are challenging businesses to redefine their content management strategy:

1. Digital customers demand anytime-anywhere services. The tech-savvy customers demand instant results out of any engagement, which could be initiated anywhere, across any channel(social media, phone, chat, email, fax, postal, face-to-face) and at any time.
2. Employees expect “Boundaryless Access” to content. To efficiently service customers, the digi­tal workforce requires flexibility to access content beyond the boundaries of the workplace. This requires organizations to move away from the traditional organizational view of “Controlled Access” to content and enable secure access to content both within and outside the organization ecosystem.
3. Organizations need flexibility. With changing market dynamics, businesses are more exposed to business/ market risks and opportunities, than ever before. So, an organization should be flexible enough to respond and adapt to changes in real-time, which requires them to have scalable applica­tions that can help to quickly embracechang­ing business requirements.
4. Business operations are not in silos anymore. In an organization, multiple teams and departments use different business systems. And, it's important that there should be a seamless flow of information across these systems to maintain concurrency of data updates and trigger respective actions.
5. Compliance and Governance are fundamental needs. With information access and control in the hands of users, it's important to control and secure information without limiting the user experience. Therefore, ensuring compliance with regulations and policies and monitoring across processes/ information is critical in overcoming such business risks, posed by the users.

Enterprise Content Management Platform powered by Content Services

The above key drivers are forcing organizations to rethink their enterprise content strategy. A truly digital content strategy should not only address the existing challenges but also meet the future business needs. Also, it should allow for the seamless and secure flow of information across the digital business model, which includes employees, customers and other external stakeholders.

In order to meet the changing business requirements, ECM systems need to evolve. And, Content Services would play a key role to facilitate this transition. Content Services are the fundamental building blocks of the next generation ECM platform.

ECM platform powered by content services utilizes a micro-services architecture to create rich consumerized ECM applications. This allows businesses to move away from the monolithic, centralized approach and leverage flexibility and extensive integration capabilities, enabling seamless integration with third-party applications and tools.

A Holistic ECM Platform

Leveraging content services, businesses can build custom­er-centric business applications and drive contextual customer interactions across multiple channels. In order to do that well, an ECM platform needs to have all the necessary functions such as content capture, content processing & storage, management of content-centric processes, delivery of information to archival of documents and records. And, all these functionalities should be available through loosely-coupled content services that can be consumed from anywhere, without losing the necessary context.

To get started, an organization needs to identify the specific business use cases, considering operational and functional aspects of the business, and then leverage the right set of services from the content services platform.