Reinvigorate ECM to Better Serve the Knowledge Worker
A third way to present information is to put it into present physical context. More and more this means social and mobile. To react at the pace of digital business, knowledge workers require access to the information at the time and place that business is occurring. Either alone, or in combination, each of the above elements improves the capabilities of our team members to harness information, to accelerate processes, and to drive outcomes.
The Avoidance of Heavy Tools for Content Orchestration
Digital business moves quickly. Priorities change, new opportunities emerge and new competitors pose threats. To be responsive to this fluid environment, IT must be able to rapidly prototype, develop and deploy tools for the business side of the house. At this point it is worth acknowledging that those heavier legacy ECM tools, while great for organization and storage, may not be the best choice for rapidly changing content orchestration needs.
In a December 2013 study conducted by Forrester Consulting, it was reported that “two-thirds of organizations’ current system development approaches do not support unstructured process needs.” (See Figure 1 on page 7 or download PDF.).
The system development approaches we employ are constrained by the tools we have at hand. The Forrester study recommends that to overcome the process-change challenges presented by traditional enterprise solutions that organizations seek out new technologies that make it possible to:
Make adaptive solutions center stage. Solutions such as dynamic case management allow a business analyst to combine prebuilt process models with other prebuilt process models and process fragments to quickly create new processes.
Look to a data-first approach. Put the task-mapping tool away and start with how users manipulate and consume information at various stages in a process.
Focus on goals and outcomes in system design. Avoid the disconnect and lack of collaboration between departments for end-to-end processes.
Empower all levels of the hierarchy to create and improve the high-value, semi-structured knowledge work of business professionals.
This then brings us to the last point—interoperability and integration.
Choose Technologies that Extend Interoperability and Integration
If we are going to reinvigorate ECM and drive better outcomes, it is important that we stay focused on harnessing the data to the benefit of the knowledge worker—our goal is to add functionality.
If we have an ECM system of record that serves most of the business well, but we need to add some case-based capabilities and analytics, then integrating a new system with the existing one may be the preferred approach. If, however, we want to bring that ongoing and dynamic process change ability to the entire business, then a wholesale ECM migration to a more modern system may make sense.
In either situation, we are going to want to seek out applications that can be ported across disparate platforms, integrated with legacy or other third-party applications and extended continuously to build new features without affecting the core building blocks and existing functionality. To effectively manage these long-term challenges, we strongly recommend that the selected technology support the following three fundamental principles:
1. Open standards that facilitate a high-level of extensibility. Systems with open standards at their core have built-in mechanisms to engineer and integrate new features with little or no impact on the existing system’s functions.
2. Open architecture that allows for interoperability with similar systems or third-party systems, which may have unrelated architecture and technologies. In a complex IT infrastructure environment, it is common for applications to communicate with each other and share business data. An open architecture-based design can use publicly available APIs, Web services or other communication protocols to make diverse systems work together.
3. Platform independence that allows for application portability across different operating systems, Web servers, application servers and database servers without getting an organization locked into a vendor-specific platform.
By choosing platforms such as these that offer a superior level of extensibility, interoperability, and portability through open standards, open architecture and platform independence, organizations are able to keep their systems open to evolving and emerging technologies.
Serve the Knowledge Worker
As they say, information is king. To be viable and deliver true business value, today’s ECM solutions need to go well past archiving and present information to the right individuals, at the right time, in the right context, so that they can make informed decisions and drive optimal outcomes.
Functionality such as document management, natural language analytics and mobile, coupled with open architecture, open standards and platform independence, are the types of forward-looking capabilities that will keep ECM relevant and grant knowledge workers the power to drive better outcomes for the people and organizations they serve.