Top considerations for ECM and content services
Cloud services
The capacity to seamlessly shift workflows, processes, and resources between varying content services is directly related to the cloud, which provisions “cross-platform mobility and accessibility,” Reynolds said.
In today’s multi-cloud reality, on-premise hybrid scenarios deliver optimal value for ECM, especially when fortified by what Rapelje termed “a hybrid remote agent.” Data can be accessed from other applications through SQL queries or script but also through robotic process automation. These interactions can happen on-premise through the remote agent even though the process is governed and being run through the cloud, Rapelje explained.
Business application connectors
Cloud-based connectors are ideal for providing the range of services required to inform modern ECM needs. According to Robertson, this architecture enables users to simply point at sources to utilize a “cloud service which allows them to stream content in an encrypted way to that service.” The service then profiles the data to provide those machine learning-driven suggestions in their own service to find content such as personally identifiable information.
The most effective types of connectors are embedded content services tools within popular platforms such as SAP and Salesforce, so that instead of people needing to go from one system to another, it is already where they work, Sass said. There are also traditional cloud connectors “built to be easily integrated with CRM and ERP applications,” Reynolds noted. “In healthcare, there’s EMR [electronic medical record] and EHR [electronic health record] systems, and really any other operational system a client has.”
Open APIs and graph APIs
According to Rapelje, while it’s simple for users to position connectors to their application of choice, behind the scenes “these prebuilt connectors are making API calls to the other system.” Open APIs and graph APIs are highly useful for content services. Open APIs conform to an API standard “enabling a tool to be built that uniformly understands any API written to that standard,” Rapelje explained. Open APIs also standardize how their functionalities are exposed or described for ease of access.
Graph APIs improve content services by “lightening the load on the systems by only returning the data that’s required for the application that’s consuming the API,” Rapelje explained. Thus, if a user only needs the creator and date of a document containing copious data, a graph API conserves bandwidth and cost by only returning those fields.
Information governance
ECM is also tightly connected to information governance and regulatory compliance. Here are three ways an organization can bolster its security and data privacy fortifications:
♦ Obfuscation: “Machine learning helps RPA recognize where sensitive data may be so bots can prescriptively go blank it out,” Kohli said. Data is obfuscated with masking or tokenization.
♦ Metadata: Metadata can supply “security and clearance levels on a document and what people are able to view and not view,” Sass added.
♦ Auditing: RPA also lends itself to easy audits since, for each process, “there’s an assistant running with you, and it can auto-track and auto-report,” Kohli pointed out.
Tomorrow’s ECM
The cloud, AI, and automation have shaped today’s ECM. Tomorrow’s ECM is inexorably veering toward mobile, voice, predictive analytics, and what Reynolds described as “packaged applications.” Packaged applications can deliver immediate value, for instance, in healthcare with a patient referral management system or an insurance payer portal.
The analytics potential is immense. “In human resources, for example, we can track 30 different employee variables like education, experience, income, and a lot of other things and predict attrition levels over a year or any other time frame,” Reynolds said.