Time to challenge the legacy

Content is the undisputed driver for business. But, asks Tim Hood, VP EMEA and APAC of Hyland, do you have a strategy to manage it?

We live in a post-truth world. We also live in a world that's experienced a pandemic. It has been a tumultuous 18 months or so and businesses and organisations everywhere have been stepping up to the 'new normal'. The near-overnight shift to remote working meant that many businesses were unprepared for this sudden disruption. Working from home transcended remote meetings, emails and collaborative tools, that were already available at on-site workplaces. So, what was different this time around, that requires organisations to urgently rethink, redefine and reimagine how they work?

Businesses have not been shy of investing in technology to manage different functional areas, including accounting, HR, marketing, manufacturing and so on. These tools have undoubtedly brought in a greater degree of automation and business intelligence, fuelling efficiency and productivity. However, despite the introduction of technology within functional areas, the one aspect that is critical to all businesses, bar none and continues to be a barrier, is a seamless and effective content management strategy. In an interconnected world, surprisingly, the majority of departmental teams continue to work in isolation, or 'silos'.

Colleagues within teams continue to spend time searching for important information, across a variety of formats, a process that poses bandwidth challenges and drain productive time.

A recent Forrester study commissioned by Hyland found that only 24 percent of businesses agreed that employees in their organisations didn't waste time finding or recreating content, as against 29 percent just a year ago. This five percent drop is a telling commentary on the decline in confidence of how content sharing and overall content management strategies have been found wanting.

The pandemic has put the spotlight on the need for businesses to embrace the idea of remote and hybrid workforces as the new normal, and completely rewrite employee experience (EX) and customer experience (CX) stories, to stay ahead of their peers. For instance, earlier, an 'office' meant that people could come in to work, had dedicated spaces that allowed them to operate efficiently. What's more, critical day-to-day functions that relied on paper-based processes could still work and on-site, in-person manual transactions were carried out relatively smoothly. However, with new rules of work being written overnight, existing governance and processes for managing information and content failed to deliver, posing new challenges to decision makers.

For example, organisations have realised that when people leave, they take their knowledge with them and they are finding it difficult to fill these gaps. As one director of a financial services firm put it, "we could not operate at our full efficiency due to lack of manpower, and that resulted in the disruption of content."

Now more than ever, it is imperative for enterprises to shed their legacy and re-energise their strategies for digital transformation, allowing critical functions to share, search and collaborate on content with various stakeholders, seamlessly and effectively.

ENTERPRISE CONTENT SERVICES: CRITICAL FOR SUCCESS
The last 18 months have proved, if anything, that we live in an unpredictable world. Natural disasters, increased economic uncertainty, market volatility and political instability, not to forget Covid-19, have put the spotlight on sudden disruption.

Businesses are scrutinising their budgets while some are downsizing, resulting in a knowledge vacuum across several functions and departments.

For the sake of business continuity, organisations need to accelerate their content management strategies if they wish to reclaim employee confidence and future-proof their operations. Increasing complexity of data shared or received, the interconnectedness of internal business functions and the pressure to improve customer experience are three facets that need continuous focus. Now more than ever, organisations need to invest in content management platforms that offer them flexibility, reliability and security for more meaningful engagement with internal and external stakeholders. The Forrester study commissioned by Hyland observed that more than 50 percent of businesses have already doubled down on their digital initiatives (see diagram above), which is encouraging.

But content services strategies need to be a top priority for businesses, because the return to work is going to depend on the agile content service platforms that are future-fit. As the recent turmoil settles down and people return to the office, continue to work from home or opt for flexible in-office and remote solutions, senior executives must take a long, hard look at their overall processes, and especially focus on content. The volume of content generated is growing exponentially and managing both structured and unstructured content is getting harder for businesses. As a result, organisations need to implement content management systems that facilitate cloud deployment and collaboration, and bring together data and analytics, collaboration, security, agile development, and intelligent automation, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, to maximise value.

CONTENT STRATEGIES FOR THE FUTURE
Businesses have to be prepared for anything and must plan for tomorrow, by making decisions that have a forward-looking focus. A detailed assessment of what's working - or not - is an absolute must as we head into 2022 and beyond. Industries across the board will have to plan, budget and implement services if they want to remain relevant. From retail to healthcare, mining to construction, and even arts & entertainment to hospitality and travel, every sector must prioritise content services and investigate solutions and platforms that are designed to support customer and employee experience, besides being robust and resilient.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER

  • Can a content services platform improve the enquiry handling time by providing all the information in a centralised dashboard for customer service agents?
  • Can insurance companies shorten their claims processing times?
  • Can companies improve their Accounts Payable by having a system that handle large number of invoices and extracts at least 90 percent of data through optical character recognition technology?

Questions like the above need to be asked, analysed and reviewed, before taking the next steps. Of critical importance will be the capability of the content services strategy to deliver a technology-agnostic hub, which unifies disparate content from across the business. This will help avoid yet one more system that does not integrate with other platforms, or fails to break down barriers to seamless and effective communication and collaboration across the organisation.

If businesses want to remain competitive, efficient management of their content is a non-negotiable. Leaders must ask: how do we capture, consolidate, manage, automate and report content that resides in several disparate repositories? How agile they are at answering this, reimagining their business processes, applying technologies and adapting to intelligent and automated systems will define their fate. After all, if content is king, then it must have kingdoms to rule over, or else business empires will be history.

More info: www.hyland.com