ECM management for today’s landscape of disparate records and sources
As modernizing systems becomes the latest and greatest trend in every industry, the methods and modes to achieve that transformation are critical toward its success. In regard to ECM management and legacy records, these variables can be extreme roadblocks in the way of accomplishing digital transformation.
To explore these varying ECM challenges, KMWorld hosted a webinar, “Conquering ECM Challenges in the Modern Enterprise,” sponsored by Access and Hyland, diving into the multitude of ways digitization can be optimized to best support ECM and its modern needs.
Matt Hillery, chief technology officer at Access, targeted legacy paper records as the ongoing hurdle preventing digital transformation. Ranging from medical records to claims records, HR files, and matter files, organizations are still burdened with an ample amount of paper records.
According to a survey done by McKinsey and AIIM-Alaris, 72% of organizations say scanning paper is still the most important part of their information capture strategy. Further, 79% of organizations say they are still in the early stages of their digital and technological transformation.
To overcome these challenges, many organizations look to scanning; a process that is both cost and time prohibitive. According to a study done by ABA, because of disparate locations and a remote workforce, the average time to fulfill a paper record request is 30 days. This is due to issues with records availability, incomplete or inaccurate indexing, and validation of collection to support destruction, which is further compounded with variable pricing and high cost of transportation and labor.
As if legacy paper records weren’t enough to manage, legacy digital content poses another issue; digital records are created and reside in numerous applications, while the average software application lifetime is 7 years. This conflicts with organizations’ retention requirements, which vary greatly from industry to industry.
Ultimately, Access discovered that organizations struggle with identifying what a record is, managing costly and obsolete systems and hardware, meeting compliance requirements, meeting demands for high performing systems, applying appropriate retention and governance rules, and correct disposition of records.
Access focused on what they already do best to combat paper records, Hillery explained: security protocols and certifications, wide transportation networks, geographically dispersed record centers, and expertise in digitization and cloud application development.
Access is equipped to tackle both IT and records and compliance objectives, which inherently improve last-mile digitization when faced with legacy content. In respect to IT, Access is able to eliminate ongoing management of technical debt, reduce security concerns of applications running on obsolete systems, databases, and infrastructures, as well as optimize database and application performance, maintenance, and infrastructure costs. To improve records and compliance for last-mile digitization, Access facilitates stricter requirements for managing data and improves management of retention schedules of several applications’ records.
Sean Baird, director of product marketing at Hyland, emphasized modernizing content strategy to drive business innovation through Content Services Platforms. Baird cited that the average organization has 9 content repositories, which results in increasing complexity for those who manage and access it. It’s clear that today’s industry calls for a solution that can continue to adapt and manage the always-rising quantity of content; but how?
Baird explained that the plethora of content types and information silos present a significant challenge towards modernization. He further highlighted three key reasons to modernize: intelligent content, custom ML models, and the promise of AI.
Intelligent content, which is a combination of both content and data, results in real-time accessibility, contextual, governed, and secure content that is available anywhere.
Custom ML models generate business-specific data, producing more relevant data values, workflow automation, and business value through specified data.
With AI, organizations can understand content and data as well as a knowledgeable human can, but with the promise of scalability. Content is therefore strengthened by predictive information delivery, usage and importance analytics, pattern and connection recognition, as well as outlying data point identification.
Baird then presented Hyland’s platform as the solution for disparate ECM management; Hyland leverages individual scalable services, elastic search, multi-tier archiving, serverless scalability, edge cashing, and open architecture to meet customers where they are to aid in modernizing their ECM. Hyland’s platforms also allow you to self-manage if you so choose, on top of providing platform-as-a-service to minimize resource requirements and simplify future upgrades.
To learn more about modernizing your ECM management, you can view an archived version of this webinar here.