How to Correct Your Organization’s Content Myopia
Organizations today must confront an expanding sea of information. Whether they drown, tread water or confidently ride the waves depends on 1. their enterprise content management strategy; and 2. the extent to which they use that solution to satisfy the company’s business requirements.
Just a few years ago, an organization could earn a competitive advantage simply by storing all its relevant content electronically and then making that content immediately available enterprisewide. Content was now secure, searchable and relatively consolidated—ready to be tapped as needed anywhere, any time, for any purpose.
However, the promise of enterprise content management should carry an organization well beyond mere storage and access. How? By ensuring organizational information is used to satisfy a full range of mission-critical business needs. When organizations use the information now at their disposal to meet specific business requirements, they create a content value chain that feeds, integrates and dramatically improves virtually every business and operational process enterprisewide.
In short, an enterprise content management system should deliver content-enabled solutions. These solutions may leverage business processes, pre-defined content lifecycles and policies, best practices, rapid developer tools, product integrations, standards and Web services, purpose-built user interfaces and more. They may include the ability to be improved through closed-loop businessactivity monitoring. They should be built on modular technologies, applications and services that get organizations up and running quickly. And they promise the possibility of transforming every business area that uses information.
Accounts payable: Content-enabled solutions for accounts payable streamline and automate related processes—everything from the receipt of invoices and supporting documents through approval and archiving—while ensuring compliance with government regulations and company policies. To build a content-enabled solution for AP, start by scanning, classifying and indexing paper documents as well as capturing electronic invoices. Save time and improve accuracy using tools such as queue-based workflows and automatic notification. Integrate accounts payable information with enterprise resource planning and other line-of-business systems to ensure it gains the widest possible currency.
Contract management: Content-enabled solutions for contract management control and accelerate the contract process from authoring and approvals to execution. To implement a solution, begin by leveraging collaborative workspaces to share documents, track deliverables and hold threaded discussions. Enable users to access associated content—office documents, scanned images, email and more—from a common content repository. Develop electronic forms to streamline contract requests and notify others about contract milestones and obligations.
Client engagement: Content-enabled solutions for client engagement provide secure, central, Web-based workspaces that enable collaboration across projects and around the globe. You’ll be able to track milestones and resolve issues, give clients visibility into processes from project launch to completion, and track key metrics across various projects. The benefit? You’ll increase delivery throughput, exceed client expectations and drive new engagement opportunities.
Compliance: Content-enabled solutions for compliance enforce government regulations and company policies enterprisewide so content remains complete, accurate and secure. Start by automating the entire content lifecycle to protect content from inappropriate use or disclosure while ensuring its accessibility. Mitigate risk of non-compliance by automatically auditing content during any stage and enforcing policies for retention and, as appropriate, disposal.
New product development: Content-enabled solutions for new product development support real-time decision making and reduce time-to-market by facilitating global collaboration. Imagine the ability to manage distributed teams via virtual project workspaces, a global content repository and business process support to capture and retain product data throughout the development lifecycle. Create flexible workspace templates to enforce best practices and track progress across multiple projects through enterprise database rollups, dashboards and reporting tools.
Enterprise marketing: Content-enabled solutions for enterprise marketing overcome the many challenges posed by today’s global marketplace. With the right approach, you can streamline the marketing process and provide seamless access to marketing content. Coordinate campaigns, product launches and ongoing branding and marketing communications. Keep projects on track, reduce overall costs and exert greater control over brand assets using media repositories, creative workflows and virtual workspaces.
Content-Enabled Solutions
Enterprise content management systems are invaluable—when used to their full potential. Organizations must realize that providing easy electronic access to content will take an enterprise only so far. Content-enabled solutions put information to work on key business requirements—where, when and, most important, how the information is needed to both mitigate risk and harness evolving opportunities.
The ROI in Deploying Content-Enabled Solutions
- A Fortune 100 aircraft equipment manufacturer reduced its proposal cycle time by 50%.
- A major German commercial bank eliminated paper and automated its entire corporate lending process.
- A US government agency streamlined access to land use records, providing access in minutes rather than days.
EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) is a leading developer and provider of information infrastructure technology and solutions that enable organizations of all sizes to transform the way they compete and create value from their information. Information about EMC’s products and services can be found at
www.emc.com.