The Content, the Mobility and the Security
A paradigm shift is taking place in computing and the workplace. This paradigm shift is the new "wild west" of bring your own device (BYOD) to work. At times it is reminiscent of classic scenes from a western movie showdown, like those from "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" featuring content, mobility and security. The pace of business mandates that users have the ability to work wherever and whenever the assignment necessitates. Your users and customers want to engage as desired; they do not want to wait for access to information. They want access from outside the corporate infrastructure on their own device at the time and place of their choosing. They rationalize that they can safely perform essential personal transactions such as shopping and banking on mobile devices, but often they cannot access work-related content in a similar manner. Many organizations and industries are still behind the times in the mobile corporate takeover. Their business processes, enterprise content management systems (ECM) and content security procedures are inadequate for the current state of affairs in the information age.
The Good—Content
This is the good stuff because it is what we all want. There is a lot of hype today about what content is and businesses need to take a step back to define what it is to them. Its definition and common thread for many can best be described in a jumble of words, or word cloud. Content is data that is structured, unstructured, practical, tactical, transformational, analytical and functional. It is collected, generated, analyzed, consumed and warehoused. It is a catalyst for almost every business process.
We encourage our clients to contemplate how their content can help them to transform their business as content propels us into the information age. If your ECM strategy and solution platform does not allow you to work with content the way you must, survival in the information age will become extremely challenging. Your ECM is no longer just capturing paper for imaging or streams of data to feed enterprise reporting systems. Your ECM needs to understand how users are using content, provide access to the various sources where the information resides, and have the ability to deliver the information in the format and on the device where it is consumed or transformed into new information. ECM solutions must provide intelligent findability, federated repositories and have the ability to participate in business processes and provide abundant security.
The Bad—Mobility
Mobility seems to be "the bad" for many decision makers and IT managers. The speed at which the mobile market is growing is a clear indicator why mobility matters. Recent statistics indicate that today one in seven site visits are from mobile devices, compared to one in 75 three years ago. This paradigm shift is predicted to crossover this year, when most users are expected to consume their content on mobile devices instead of PCs. Can any organizations still afford to wait?
The commercial benefits associated with greater mobility have been recognized as a great stimulus for businesses looking to transform to new business strategies that capitalize on their core strength. Too often when new technology offers business new capabilities, decision makers predominantly focus adoption plans and implementation goals on replacement of their current solutions. The true benefits of mobility will require industries to rethink existing process workflows and service delivery. We are encouraging decision makers to think about how mobile strategies can improve and augment current business processes because content accessibility is often at the core of these stratagems. The largely positive experience people have had in their personal lives with their smart devices has led them to expect the same locational freedom and productivity benefits from their business applications.
The Ugly—Security
So far, these two pillars of this pattern shift don't seem too bad. We've seen and dealt with them before during earlier periods of the information age. Security sits at the nexus of BYOD, mobility, intellectual property, content governance, regulatory mandates and process innovation. It's the tug-of-war between security and user access where things begin to get ugly. The security of content on smart devices is one of the top three concerns among C-level executives, but they cannot afford to shut out access to content.
Improvement in the capabilities of Web services, geographical information systems (GIS), cryptography and cloud services have contributed to making content security practical while satisfying the concerns of industry and corporate control. Our clients implement these security features and necessities while providing seamless and simplified access to content from mobile devices deployed either behind the corporate firewall or in the wild. Combining several methods including cryptography for content in motion and at rest, and geo-security for content audit and access control, they are well outfitted to provide users, partners and clients with access to corporate content on any device from any location at any time. Geo-security and geo-fencing provide many benefits including the ability to know where data is created and consumed as well as controlling access to content repositories. Security administrators can define spatial boundaries where content can be accessed and used by leveraging the location-based services in smart devices, operating systems and computers. Auditors, marketing and corporate executives can analyze the captured big data and reap the benefits of the additional GIS metadata to peer deep into the usage and consumption of corporate content.
Organizations that do not embrace the good, the bad and the ugly of enterprise content management stand to lose in the new age of information. It has already begun to affect many industries, providing the early adopters with competitive advantages, lowering the cost of doing business, improving time to market, and improving engagements with customers, vendors and partners. Embracing mobility, improving security and providing access to enterprise content in the new wild west of the information age are prerequisites for success.