Cleaning Out Your Closets with Enterprise Content Management

Medical records are transitioning to electronic versions. Many patients can now contact their doctors electronically, ask questions by email or in a secure forum-type environment, and view their digital records. Travelers routinely get their airline boarding passes delivered to their phones and choose their hotel room digitally before their arrival in the hotel lobby. Tickets for movie theaters and concerts have gone electronic. Restaurant reservations have also become a digital activity, although the food served, thankfully, is not digital.

It’s not just the consumer side of commerce that is experiencing digital transformation. Regulatory agencies of all stripes expect reports in digital form. Suppliers and manufacturers communicate digitally and complex supply chains are managed, controlled, and updated with digital tools. Sensors track delivery trucks so that the trucking company knows where they are and when shipments are expected to arrive at their destination. Retailers and wholesalers alike use digital data for product improvement; fast and tailored distribution to stores, warehouses, and manufacturing facilities; and trend tracking.

Digital transformation, in Ghai’s opinion, causes businesses to become more agile. He’s not specifically talking about agile development, in the IT sense of the phrase. It is through using digital content in an agile fashion that allows companies to respond quickly, identify new opportunities, discard what is not working, and find new avenues of profitability. Access to information with the immediacy of digital data gives those who understand it an enormous competitive advantage.

Non-Digital Content

What does this mean for content management? Surprisingly, even though the digital transformation is real, paper has not disappeared. Many organizations continue to maintain paper repositories. Knowledge management professionals would like to believe that the digital transformation is complete, that all communications are electronic, but it’s not the case.

Industries concentrate on automating and removing paper from core business functions and processes, according to Ghai. One example is clinical trials in the pharmaceutical industry. Clinical trials are essential to the new drug approval process and even 10 years ago were usually paper-based, with patients filling out diaries by hand. Today, those paper accounts have largely been replaced by electronic patient reporting to capture information, which leads to more timely and accurate responses by the patient and higher quality data for the pharmaceutical company to analyze.

Automating the core is important, no doubt about that. So what’s the problem? “We’ve ignored the edges,” says Ghai. “There are still lots of paper-based flows, particularly with external partners.” Paper is endemic to the content repositories of many industries.

In the pharmaceutical industry, clinical trials may be at the forefront of presenting a totality of digital data, but other parts of the industry haven’t seen the same amount of digital transformation. According to Ghai, only 12% of submissions to the FDA (the U.S. Food and Drug Administration) arrive in electronic form.

Or think of the banking industry with its paper-based checks and loan processing documents. Even as they are digitized somewhere during the workflow sequence, they begin as paper and are often stored as paper. If you’ve ever bought and/or sold a house (one of those houses that you will inevitably, eventually, have to rid of unwanted stuff via donation or yard sale), you know the mountains of different forms, disclosures, and documents awaiting your signature during the closing. I sometimes think the only reason fax machines survive is to transmit signatures on forms to lending institutions.

Work environments are moving from paper to digital, but the shift is not complete. Thus, a content management system must acknowledge the existence (or probable existence) of paper. Ghai’s take on this? “The strategy is better together.” The problem, of course, is that paper doesn’t scale. If paper records fall into the “vital” category, some accommodation must be made. Individual situations may vary, but paper abides.

Security Concerns

Security is foremost in many peoples’ minds. Part of content management is guaranteeing that sensitive data does not escape the enterprise. This means identifying content that should be released outside the enterprise and that which absolutely, positively, should not.

Safeguarding content is important on both the consumer and the enterprise level. This is not an either-or proposition notes Ghai. We need both. In fact, to some extent, finding that what works on the consumer side is driving the enterprise experience. Unlike previous generations, today’s content is more distributed. It’s not locked up, secured, and then made compliant. Instead, content exists—and sometimes is created—outside the enterprise. However, enterprises must secure content even if—especially if—it’s in the wild.

Security is also a function of compliance. Ghai believes compliance must be in place for all systems. Keeping up with what constitutes compliance and with updates in regulatory requirements should not be an add-on. It’s mandatory, or “table stakes,” as Ghai says.

What about business rules? Every business has some, and enterprise content systems must conform. However, even though rules sometimes seem hardwired, they can change and systems need to change when rules change.

Impact on Enterprise Content Management

Digital transformation—or digital disruption, as some would have it—profoundly affects enterprise content management. In its 25 years of existence, EMC has seen the shift from paper-based, physical content to electronic records. Cleaning out the information closets, attics, and garages starts with identifying what the enterprise needs today and what no longer runs but might be needed in the future.

Ghai thinks a digital maturity curve should be determined. Following that, execute on a set of strategies developed to ensure the clutter is under control. “Things need to be different,” he says. “We need to break some of the traditional models, be provocative.” By this, he emphasizes that enterprise content management is not simply a technical issue; it’s rooted in the human element.

Becoming a digital enterprise and building a digital platform comes with the territory of digital transformation. Still, essential elements of content management must be addressed. Determining value of stored content is not the easiest job in the world. Frankly, no one is completely happy about cleaning out the garage and holding a yard sale. Yet, as stuff piles up, it becomes a necessity. What’s in your enterprise content closet?