The digital realm is witnessing an explosion in the amount of content generated and stored. To put this in perspective, in 2020 alone, the world churned out 463 exabytes of data. Predictions suggest that this number could soar to a staggering 181 zettabytes by 2025. These figures highlight the urgency and need to revolutionize content management systems (CMS). Traditional systems are buckling under the weight of such a colossal amount of data, signaling a paradigm shift towards more advanced electronic content management (ECM) methodologies, predominantly powered by automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Electronic Content Management Trends

As businesses grapple with this deluge of data, merely managing content isn't enough. The focus has now pivoted towards intelligent content management that is not just responsive but proactive, predicting future trends and user behaviors. Automation and AI play pivotal roles in this transformation, offering solutions that are not only scalable but also intuitive, fostering real-time decision-making and improving content accessibility and engagement.

Here's a closer look at the trends that are poised to redefine the landscape of ECM.

Cloud-Based ECM

Cloud-based ECM is a service that allows users to store, manage, and access content on remote servers hosted on the internet, rather than on local servers or computer systems. Also, leading cloud providers prioritize compliance and offer tools for information governance.

Cloud-based ECM harnesses the benefits of cloud computing, like scalability, flexibility, and cost efficiency, to offer a more advanced content management solution.

With the increasing adoption of AI and machine learning (ML), cloud-based ECMs are becoming more intelligent. They can automatically classify content, optimize search functionalities, predict user behaviors, and offer personalized content experiences. The integration of these technologies will further enhance the capabilities of ECMs, making them even more essential for businesses.

Advanced Automation in Content Management

Automation’s role in ECM has gone beyond mere manual task reduction. It can streamline complex content management tasks, such as content curation, categorization, distribution, and analysis. It aims to reduce manual interventions, improve accuracy, and increase efficiency. Some areas of advanced automation in content management include: 

• Document Classification and Indexing: Automation can discern patterns, ensuring content is categorized and tagged appropriately for quicker retrieval.
• Content Scheduling: Intelligent algorithms determine optimal release times for content based on audience analytics and peak engagement periods.
• Intelligent Archiving: Content relevancy changes over time. Automation tools ensure that outdated content is archived, maintaining the relevance of accessible content.

Intelligent ECM

Harnessing AI's power, intelligent ECM systems are not just reactive but also proactive. Intelligent ECM is a sophisticated content management system that harnesses the power of AI and ML to manage, store, retrieve, and analyze content more intelligently. It adds cognitive capabilities to standard ECM functionalities, enabling the system to learn, predict, and adapt over time.

The future holds even tighter integration of AI and ML capabilities, with systems that can understand deeper nuances, contexts, and even emotions related to content. Additionally, as other technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT) evolve, intelligent ECM will likely play a vital role in managing the vast amounts of content generated by connected devices.

Here are some examples of intelligent ECM:

• Smart Classification: Beyond just categorizing, these systems can suggest tags and optimize search results based on user queries.
• Data-Driven Insights: AI can delve deep into content, extracting actionable insights that can guide content strategies.
• Predictive Analysis: AI can forecast content trends, allowing businesses to remain ahead in their content game.

Collaborative ECM

Modern businesses require fluid collaborations across various departments and locations. Collaborative ECM integrates features that foster joint content creation, review, editing, and management. It bridges the gap between individual content contributors, ensuring that multiple stakeholders can work together seamlessly, regardless of their physical location.

In the future, we can expect collaborative ECM systems to become even more intuitive, with advanced AI integrations for task automation, more robust real-time collaboration features, and tighter security protocols.

Collaborative ECM systems may include:

• Simultaneous Editing: Allow multiple users to work on content, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring consistency.
• Real-Time Updates: Stakeholders receive instant updates, making decision-making faster and more informed.

Benefits of Embracing AI and Automation in ECM

The integration of AI and automation in ECM systems offers businesses a competitive edge:

• Cost Efficiency: Streamlining processes like document classification reduces operational costs.
• Operational Efficiency: Insights derived from AI lead to better decision-making, optimizing content strategies.
• Regulatory Compliance: AI can ensure content adheres to regulatory standards, minimizing legal ramifications.
• Enhanced Security: AI identifies and counters unauthorized access attempts.
• Improved Collaboration: Modern ECM tools facilitate smoother team collaborations, even across geographies.
• Content Personalization: AI-driven systems enhance user experiences by delivering content that resonates with individual preferences.

Exela's State-of-the-Art Electronic Content Management Solution

Recognizing the crucial role of effective content in propelling successful business operations, Exela has developed a comprehensive content management solution using our state-of-the-art content management software. Our Electronic Content Management solution encapsulates every facet of the content journey, from ideation and creation to production, digitization, and widespread distribution.

Exela's ECM solution emphasizes compliant information governance, ensuring that all content and data are managed, stored, and accessed following industry standards and regulations. With robust audit trails, automated retention policies, and periodic compliance checks, businesses can have peace of mind knowing their content is in good hands.

Why Choose Exela's ECM Solution?

• Decades of Expertise: With over 30 years in content publishing, our experience speaks for itself.
• Versatility: Our comprehensive suite of core services confirms every content need is met.
• Cost-Efficiency: Clients generally notice a significant decrease in costs when using our services. This reduction makes managing and deploying content more affordable and accessible, ensuring your budget goes further.
• Swift Turnaround: Our operations lead to a noticeable average reduction in turnaround times (TATs). This efficiency means your content reaches your audience faster, keeping your business agile and responsive to market needs.

With our tailored Electronic Content Management solution, businesses receive customized plans to automate, streamline, and enhance their workflows. With our technology-first approach, Exela propels businesses into the future. 

Conclusion

As we navigate this era of unprecedented digital content growth, the need for sophisticated ECM solutions has never been more pronounced. With innovations from Exela and the incorporation of automation and AI, businesses can experience enhanced efficiency, engagement, security, and, most importantly, relevance in a data-driven world. Contact us today to learn more about our solutions. 

The end game of Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is refining raw information into a valuable enterprise asset. What makes information/data valuable is a function of:

• The nature of the information/data in question
• The ways the proprietors of that information/data can envision using it
• The technology available
• The insight, talent, and skill of those charged with executing EIM strategy.

Thus, while it’s common to think of EIM as tech-driven, the most successful EIM strategies are actually far more business-driven than one might expect. Here’s a look at best practices planning and executing an EIM strategy:

Approach it from a pain-point perspective

Perhaps your marketing department is mired in data inconsistencies and duplications, making communications-driven campaigns unwieldy and inefficient. Perhaps the rapidly evolving set of regulations and standards applicable to your business means your compliance program is straining to aim at a moving target. Perhaps you’re a provider, and the six different payers with whom you’re under contract have six different sets of forms and requirements. If you’re thinking about adopting EIM, you probably already have in mind some of the challenges you believe can be addressed through better information management. Such challenges can create concrete business cases you can present to potential executive sponsors and which can form a foundation for assessing the success of your strategy.

Get your stakeholders involved from the get-go

Involving your stakeholders in brainstorming and strategic discussions is, itself, a low-tech form of information management. That’s because EIM is best positioned as a way of supporting critical business activities. Where do your identified pain points interfere with the key business priorities of your stakeholders? How can they be addressed through information management?

Assess your baseline

What’s your baseline level of information management? What are the systems you’re currently using? Who are the vendor(s)? How long are the contractual relationships meant to run? What’s your organization’s approach to information governance?

Secure executive sponsorship

One or more strong executive sponsors can be helpful in securing the necessary funding and support for an EIM initiative. You’ll want to marshal your allies right at the outset, keeping them informed and on-board and available to manage points of friction.

Cultivate enterprise awareness

Congratulations, you understand the need for EIM. But not everyone does. At least not yet. Communicating the need for EIM, the challenges it addresses, unrealized value of information as an asset will go a long way toward readying the people in your organization for the changes envisioned. Overall, your organization needs to be “ready” for EIM, and here are some factors to consider in assessing that readiness.

Adopt a phase-in approach to implementation

You may have a global/big-picture vision of what your organization can achieve as a result of implementing comprehensive EIM, and while EIM is, at its core, an enterprise-wide strategy, it can only be accomplished in manageable bites. But your overall plan should be global and take into account how each phase may affect the next one and the big picture overall. For more specific guidance, each of the factors identified here are equally applicable to EIM as they are to digital transformation in general.

Come up with objective standards for measuring success

The best argument for moving from the first phase to the second and the second to the third, and so on, is results. Ideally, you’ll come up with a way of objectively measuring those results before you begin EIM implementation.

Start with a quick-and-easy win

Starting with a project that’s relatively quick to implement and evaluate, and that’s likely to be a win, will go a long way toward cultivating the continued support and cooperation of your sponsors and stakeholders.

Choose the right partner

EIM implementation requires more than a technology vendor and more than a service provider. EIM implementation requires a strategic partner, one that’s experienced in all aspects of comprehensive EIM planning and implantation. Ideally, your EIM partner will have experience in EIM planning and implementation within your particular industry, as well as in working with customers around the same size as your organization.

As a global leader in business process optimization, Exela works with over 4,000 customers in more than 50 countries and in numerous industries, including banking, finance, healthcare, legal, manufacturing, the public sector. Although we count over 60% of the Fortune® 100 among our customer roster, we work with organizations of all size and on projects of all imaginable scale. We’d welcome the opportunity to talk to you about your organization’s specific challenges and needs.

Information is in abundance, and it’s only becoming more so. The availability of information presents opportunities to create new value and optimize experience for both customers and employees. But leveraging information as an asset presents challenges and risks, including:

• The sheer volume at which data, and especially unstructured (data not easily parsed by basic algorithms) is entering organizations, which volume is only accelerating
• Inconsistent data sources
• Data duplication
• Data inaccuracy, including data that was, at one time, accurate, but no longer is
• Data content inconsistencies
• Data security
• Data privacy
• Compliance with global regulations and industry standards.

The good news is these challenges and risks can be met via “Enterprise Information Management” (EIM), which is also known as “Enterprise Data Management” and “Master Data Management.” EIM is an aspect of Information Governance (IG), which is also known as Data Governance and refers to a business’s overarching policy for handling all information in any form, received from any source or generated by the enterprise, with the end game being the optimization of that information (i.e. maximizing value while mitigating risk associated with the information). You can learn more about IG here.

How is EIM different from IG?

IG addresses an enterprise’s overarching policies and strategies with regard to information. EIM addresses how those policies and strategies are carried out within the enterprise.

So what is EIM?

EIM is an integrative discipline for structuring, describing, and governing information assets across organizational and technological boundaries to improve efficiency, promote transparency and enable business insight. In other words, it’s not any one thing, and it can’t be achieved through the “plugging in” of any one solution or platform. EIM may be best understood as the following four pillars that support the structure of your business:

• Enterprise Content Management (ECM), which is a system for managing information flows across a business, from ingestion to archiving and disposition. Included within ECM is content digitization. Content digitization addresses, among other things, the challenge presented by inconsistent data sources and unstructured data. Also included within ECM is content organization and storage, which establishes rules for storing, sharing, securing, and culling information for use in business analytics and process automation. Exela’s ECM solutions leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), among other tools, for establishment and carrying out of such rules.
• Business Process Management (BPM), which is a system for routing your content-managed information into day-to-day processes, working across information siloes while maintaining data privacy as required by government regulation and business standards. The end goal of BPM is optimizing business efficiency while reducing enterprise risk. Exela’s BPM solutions make use of AI and ML, among other tools, to optimize employee experience at both the front-office and the back.
• Customer Experience Management (CEM), which sets up a process for culling your managed content to track and gain insight into customer interactions, make predictions, and optimize each part of the customer experience journey, from business generation to end-user-experience. Powered by AI and ML, among other tools, Exela’s CEM solutions help businesses to optimize customer experience, including by identifying and addressing customer needs and maximizing reach.
• Business Intelligence (BI), which refers to turning information into actionable insight leading to better decision-making and then making that insight work for you through consolidation, visualization, alerts, and search capabilities. Exela’s BI solutions include AI-powered information management and consolidation/centralization of search capabilities.

We’ll be discussing more about EIM and how best to implement EIM in future blogs so stay tuned to the Exela Blog. In the meantime, don’t miss this insightful thought leadership article from Exela’s President, Suresh Yannamani on how healthcare organizations can use EIM to prevent fraud

If you have any association with the tech industry, then you know that data rules the world. It has become the digital currency and businesses that learn to harness the power of data are the ones who manage to be the leaders. Dig deeper and you’ll find that businesses keen on growth always ensure that enterprise data management is their key strength. Call it information management, database management systems or enterprise information management, data-driven digital strategies have become part of boardroom discussions in enterprise organizations.

What is Enterprise Data Management?

Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is an organization’s capacity to integrate, govern, secure, and distribute data from multiple data streams, online and offline. This includes the ability to accurately and safely transfer data across processes, applications, subsidiaries, and/or partners. Effective information management is no easy feat and can only be accomplished by fully understanding your data and implementing an intelligent EDM strategy.

Why is Data Management Important?

Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is about the overall management of information assets. Data generated by different departments live in siloed systems and can be used to create some of the most innovative solutions for your customers. The trick is to create a data lake and interconnect systems breaking the silo organizational culture. Organizations create their own source of superpower when an additional layer of automation intelligence is added to the data lake creating information flows that can transform business processes.

How Does it Benefit Businesses?

If data drives the world, the ones who can control their data can truly benefit from it. The advantages of having an efficient enterprise data management system are numerous. Some of the important ones are as below.

• - Drive digital transformation: A strong enterprise data management strategy is the first step.
• - Fully leverage data: Control and analyze structured and unstructured data for efficient business processes.
• - Enhance customer experience: Deliver highly targeted and personalized experience to your customers.
• - Improve operational efficiency: Speed up business processes by connecting to the correct data streams.
• - Increase business agility: The right data at your fingertips allows you to respond faster and keep up in the digital age.
• - Improve decision-making: Analysis of the data can potentially turn into the actionable insights needed to improve decision-making.

If data management and information systems interest you, you’d also like our eBook. It’s an insightful report based on interactions with various Fortune 100 companies that happen to be our customers.