How mobility, cloud computing, analytics and outsourcing are rocking ECM as we know it
Successful
management of content throughout its life cycle has never been more
challenging. Customers and employees, operating in a social, mobile world,
expect easy mechanisms to create and consume content and automated approaches
to the duty of protecting it. In the future, some things will remain the same,
such as the fundamental drive to reliably manage and find content, but growth
in content types, like activity streams from enterprise social platforms and
the need to access content "in the moment" from the mobile world, will
fundamentally alter the enterprise content management (ECM) landscape.
Empowered Mobile Users Carry a
Mandate for Usability That Traditional ECM Can't Meet
Empowered
mobile users have shaken the foundation of the traditional ECM ecosystem. The
highly collaborative and mobile workforce has taken to cloud-based document
solutions, such as Dropbox, like ducks to water. Why wouldn't they? Such tools
are intuitive, available anywhere and inexpensive. However, these solutions
lack metadata management, records management and process integration, which are
critical to protect and secure content. Forrester predicts that the market will
handle this disruption and reach a compromise of the productivity gains from
"lighter" document solutions and control from the "private" network approach in
three steps.
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Startup mobile and cloud-based file management solutions will provide
immediate value. Emerging solutions like Egnyte, Dropbox and
SugarSync work between multiple computers, mobile devices and cloud
applications, both on and offline. The key to their success is that they oversee
documents without having to put them under specific control, i.e., in a managed
repository, and users don't have to think about anything in advance.
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Traditional ECM vendors acquire smart startups. In 2012,
seasoned acquisition spotters EMC and OpenText pounced on startups Syncplicity
and Tempo, providers of software to syncs files between computers and mobile
devices and promote team-based collaboration. The real driver for acquisition,
and the one that will help reshape the industry, is the viral adoption of
lighter content solutions. Traditional ECM vendors will add a layer of control,
security and compliance to these solutions.
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Future approaches will concentrate on integration and orchestration. Today, we
describe ECM as an "either/or dichotomy" between a popular cloud-based file
sharing system and unwieldy on-premise traditional ECM. The future will be a
"both/and" scenario, with easy end user access points supported by built-in
compliance and enforcement of enterprise-wide policies.
The 3 E's of Analytics Will
Drive the Next Generation of ECM
Semantic search, metadata extraction from capture, auto classification,
dynamic learning from forms processing and analytics are examples of
intelligent technologies that will continue to reshape the industry. Major ECM
players must acquire and absorb these technologies in order to add value to
their solutions, as they hold promise to solve historic adoption problems and
to steer the way to transparent management of content. Once content is better
structured, it is easier to report and visualize trends.
Semantic
software will release three sticky points of ECM: one, how to add context and
intelligence to assets throughout their life cycle (enrichment), two, how to
carry out retention and governance (enforcement) and three, how to optimize
information intensive processes (efficiency).
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Enrichment:
Analytics allows content to be annotated transparently.
ECM
will evolve to take pressure off administrators and users to add attributes and
policy to content. Text mining will be used to identify and extract entities
inherent in the content and then transparently add it to the metadata for that
asset. More sophisticated applications of this capacity involve natural
language processing to identify topics and not just attributes that follow a
pattern, like a Social Security Number.
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Efficiency:
Analytics supports straight-through processing of
high-volume information. Leading capture providers incorporate analytics in their
solution. For highly structured and predictable documents, like a survey, zonal
OCR and mark sense will usually work to get accurate extraction results. For
semi-structured documents, like a purchase order, clever analytics will help to
create a library of templates that have various rules and techniques to improve
extraction accuracy. The upside? Tighter integration with BPM solutions and
less manual, repetitive and costly work.
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Enforcement:
Analytics help retain each type of business record. One of the
historical challenges of legacy records management applications has been the
interface. Analytics can comb through a content collection to identify
different record types and define classification rules for each type. It can
then support automated or approval-based disposition of the content.
"
Providers will need to
embrace lighter cloud solutions but also devise a way to add a layer of
security"
The Perennial ECM Requirement:
Manage Risk and Ensure Compliance
As content grows and spreads across locations, it's imperative to
protect critical intellectual property. An efficient, effective content
management initiative doesn't just focus on the utility or business purpose of
the information; it also focuses on the duty, or legal obligation, around
specific information. Enterprises must protect valuable assets, meet a complex
mix of regulations and be prepared to respond cost-effectively to litigation
and investigations. However, enterprises won't realize the goal of efficient
content management via a big monolithic technology investment. Enterprise architects
should no longer assume that it's possible to run content management with a
unified content repository. Instead, success requires a strong focus on
developing solid policies, cross-functional alignment and pragmatic governance.
Some key foundational capabilities to a transparent future and achieving true
"corporate solutions" include:
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Intelligent
migration to rationalize ECM systems.
Top of mind
for Forrester clients is how to develop an approach to reduce the number of
content systems to apply governance and appropriate controls. The activity of
migrating content will evolve from a "dumb forklift" to a constant opportunity
for intelligent content processing — a chance to de-duplicate, annotate,
cleanse and delete content.
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Records
management to enable compliance and offer defensible disposition.
The need for
effective records management and defensible disposition practices will only
increase with more information under consideration and accelerating e-discovery
demands. Supporting strict guidelines and providing a consistent approach for
retention, disposition and other policy controls will become increasingly
important for enterprise architecture leaders.
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Rights
management to protect key business documents.
Enterprise
rights management (ERM) applications enable organizations to provide persistent
protection for valuable business documents. While the ability of ERM
applications to control the usage, circulation and compartmentalization of
content is compelling, these tools haven't had a lot of traction due to high
cost, application rigidity and integration shortcomings. Over the next three
years, tighter ties with content management will ease frustrations in applying
protection polices with a mix of cloud-based and on-premise applications.
What Does it Mean? Prepare For
a Redefined Content Management Universe
Enterprise content
management has been alive and kicking as a technology market for
several decades. Today's document management assumes a private corporate
network with a controlled repository. Tomorrow's document management, however,
will rely on the worldwide Internet with access to documents stored in various
cloud locations. Providers will need to embrace lighter cloud solutions and
drive them toward industry solutions but also devise a way to add a layer of
security that makes enterprise customers comfortable. At the same time,
enterprises will need to push previously trapped corporate content securely
outside the firewall to customers and partners. Looking ahead, organizations
must set the groundwork for innovative content management strategies based on a
redefined content management universe.
CRAIG LE CLAIR is a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester
Research, serving enterprise architecture professionals. For more,
visit www.forrester.com/Craig-Le-Clair.
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