Reinvigorate ECM to Better Serve the Knowledge Worker

The fast-paced, social-mobile digital workplace of today has outstripped the capabilities of what enterprise content management (ECM) was originally intended to do—to store and organize content.

Today’s organizational challenge, however, is not simply about archiving and delivering data. Digital business strategies now dictate, and rightly so, that we harness the data that we capture and put it in the hands of the right individuals—at the right time and in the right context—so that they can make informed decisions and drive optimal outcomes. Driving outcomes is the domain of case management.

Is Modern ECM Really Case Management?

When the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) International, first defined the term ECM in 2000, the basic goal of digitally storing and organizing content on an enterprise scale was a major technological challenge. ECM systems of the day were expansive, monolithic implementations. They were able to contend with massive amounts of data but generally weren’t designed to orchestrate business processes or to be adapted to serve rapidly changing business needs.

According to AIIM today, ECM is “neither a single technology nor a methodology nor a process, it is a dynamic combination of strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver information supporting key organizational processes through its entire lifecycle.”

In the present context of ECM we are no longer looking at a single monolithic technology. And if you add the words, “…so that knowledge workers can drive optimal outcomes,” to the end of the above ECM definition, ECM becomes case management—dynamic technology capable of supporting knowledge workers as they seek to drive optimal outcomes for the organizations and constituencies they serve.

Serving the Knowledge Worker

For a moment I would like to set aside the semantics of the differences between ECM and case management and focus on the fact that the systems we build should seek to serve their users. Since we are discussing this topic in the context of knowledge management, the users we are talking about are knowledge workers. And since ECM has been around for more than a decade, we are generally dealing with large technology implementations that are already in place.

So the question becomes, how do we best optimize our existing systems for the organization and its workers? We focus on three areas:

• Harnessing information to drive outcomes;
• The avoidance of heavy tools for content orchestration; and
• Technologies that extend interoperability and integration.

Harnessing Information to Drive Outcomes

Static information is of no use. It’s great to know that the data is there, archived where it can be accessed, but to actually be useful we have to do something with it. It must be presented to knowledge workers in the right context at the right time in order to drive outcomes. Presenting information to drive outcomes is where the cross-pollination of systems begins.

One way to present information is in the form of a case—a binder of information relevant to a single case instance. Forrester notes that a case “follows an unknown path through different states where rules, tasks and calendars change based on system events, system controls and the need to meet specific goals.” That’s pretty much most of what we do as knowledge workers—manage information in an effort to meet specific goals. This is also where case management platforms look an awful lot like ECM solutions because they have the same document capture, management, collaboration and archiving capabilities, but also have extended functionality such as natural language self-service business intelligence (BI) and analytics—that that go beyond traditional ECM functionality.

Self-service BI and analytics is also a second way to present information. To do it effectively we need to remove the distinction between structured and unstructured content and provide a holistic information-centric view—which is possible with today’s tools. And optimally, we should be able to ask a business question using natural language search, get a visualized answer, then follow an intuitive path as we drill down in real-time to the answer that we are searching for.