Everything is Information, and Information is Everything

We live in the information age. The age where physical things are increasingly being connected to the online world to deliver a more integrated and intelligent environment (i.e., the Internet of Things). You have to look no further than the list of most valuable companies in the world to back this up. Google, Apple, Amazon, AT&T—all of these organizations either deal purely as information brokers or they’re bringing physical products “online” to enable better information exchange and creation.

This ability to drive value and profit from information is an objective for every single organization on the planet. Even pure manufacturing businesses still create, receive and process information—but the difference is that the best in the world truly understand how to get the best out of that information, and to make it work for them.

Managing information within an organization has typically fallen into a variety of different technology domains. Enterprise content management (ECM), records management, and knowledge management provide tools intended to improve the manner in which companies manage content and data. However, the problem has been that each of these systems only manage information within a certain part of the business, and very rarely do they talk to each other. So, when an average employee wants to get value from the information within the business, their perspective is limited to the information available to them from the system for their own department or functional group. In order to gain a wider view of all available information, employees typically must manually pull data from multiple systems and join them together by hand, a process that is both time-consuming and ripe for errors.

The Future of Information Management is Here

But recently a modern and more intelligent approach has come into prominence within the information management sector—the concept of content services. A content services platform differs from the tools of the past in that it doesn’t try to manage all of the information related to the business within one place, system or repository—but instead manages information “in-place.” The platform acts as a connected information hub, working on the simple premise that information can live wherever it likes, essentially “in-place,” but can still be connected to, and leveraged from, that central hub.

This content services platform approach has been around for awhile but gained significant traction when Gartner announced that ECM was dead and replaced by the “content services” moniker. This announcement sparked significant debate, but most of the discussion was about the language or name of the technology and associated industry. But something much more fundamental happens when a content services platform approach is embraced. An organization can experience true information consolidation liberation—from one single, harmonized perspective.

The ability to integrate previously disconnected information systems and isolated stores in order to deliver a unified experience for managing content residing in any system or repository completely changes the outdated and unrealistic notion that “all information must reside within one monolithic solution.” These capabilities are numerous but at their core include:

♦ Connecting and enriching information from numerous internal and external sources in order to deliver greater intelligence and provide “content in context.”

♦ Natively managing any type of information—from structured information typically stored in databases, to unstructured information such as documents, videos and images.

♦ Providing a flexible technical architecture to enable organizations to build on their existing investments. This includes the ability to be deployed on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid environments, but also with existing SQL/NoSQL databases, local or cloud-based file storage, and a variety of interfaces, including mobile and web.

♦ Delivering value to all of the business—not simply focusing on automation of back-office processes or the removal of paper, but actually driving critical decision-making and other revenue-generating activities.

Information Untethered and Unconstrained

This approach liberates information from within the organization and turns it into actionable data. For the first time ever, information-related capabilities can be used by the majority of the business, as opposed to a small minority. No longer is information management limited to the automation of a limited number of back-office processes such as accounts payable or claims processing.

We are now looking at providing solutions for task- and business-oriented activities: customer support, workforce and resource scheduling, marketing and brand asset management, and much more. These activities touch a much greater proportion of the workforce, empowering an organization to get much more value from the vast amount of information that resides within its walls, systems and repositories.

With the emergence of artificial intelligence, the scope for information value creation is growing exponentially. Simple automation in areas such as document and information classification will provide significant baseline improvements, but more advanced applications such as fraud detection, resource management and inventory management will showcase how best to drive value from information in a more automated and intelligent manner.

Don’t Throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater

All of this is well and good, but all organizations have existing investments in their information infrastructure and applications. Surely, replacing these would be both costly and result in the loss of lasting value from the previous installations? Not so. Contrary to previous technologies such as ECM, a content services platform is designed to work with existing systems, infrastructure and investments—connecting them together to extract value from what already exists and building future enhancements on top of this platform.

A content services platform brings a lot of pieces of the information management puzzle together. It combines the power of multiple systems and unites previously disconnected information silos together in a centrally managed hub environment. It does this in conjunction with modern cloud-based technologies that provide both massive scalability as well as access to AI-driven capabilities for further information value extraction.

But most importantly, it puts these tools in the hands of the majority of the business, not just a select few. Employees of many organizations have enjoyed more advanced technology capabilities via their personal devices than those provided by the enterprise recently, but that is about to change. The content services platform revolution is about to begin and will finally set free the information within your business.