Organizations are buried in content. Some content is important, some is out of date, and some content is vital for an organization to survive and thrive. Content management can provide great help in ensuring that your organization gets the most value out of its content.

Managing content is similar to all the things that accumulate in your house. The longer you live in one place, the more things you accumulate. Most families don’t have retention policies in place for their personal things. They don’t write policies and procedures regarding furniture, electronics, or other things that they meant to fix several years ago and they are now gathering dust in the closet. At some point in time, the closet needs to be cleaned out or there will be no more space in a closet and then in the house.

Why do people decide to get rid of the stuff in their houses? It might be because they’ simply decided that they own too much or they are tired of paying extra money to keep things they are not using at a storage facility or they ran out of space in their house or they have been urged by a family member to stop what looks like hoarding behavior or they’ve decided to downsize and move to a smaller house. Whatever the reasons, the decision to divest themselves of personal goods leads people to donate their goods to a charity or hold a massive yard sale or maybe both.

Organizations do not hold yard sales. The content stored in organizations is frequently, but not always, in digital form. Enterprises are better at replacing outdated computers and worn out desk chairs than deciding which pieces of content are no longer relevant to running the business. Many organizations may not even really know how much content they own or where it resides.

Cleaning Out the Content House

Organizations need enterprise content management to keep their content fresh and to get the most value out of it. They need to clean out their content closets and their information garages from time to time.

Enterprise content management is not a new concept. Companies have been accumulating information for years and managing their content has been a part of business functions in many organizations but not in all organizations. For many, content management has been designed by IT departments and driven by regulatory requirements. It’s concentrated on compliance, with meeting the rules imposed upon them from outside.

Regulatory compliance remains a huge factor in doing business, and enterprise content management plays huge role in ensuring that organizations meet compliance requirements.

When it comes to handling inactive content, companies need to consider archiving by which he means retiring the content rather than keeping it. Retention schedule would greatly help in this task.

A Content Management System (CMS) would help to automate the process of content management. Human element is also very important in content management. It is important to humanize the experience of working with content.

The humans interacting with content could be employees, customers, suppliers, partners, and regulators. For content management to succeed, people must enjoy a digital and, an experience-based interaction. Behind the scenes, a content management system should organize content so that content findability is enhanced without too much work on the part of the person seeking information.

Breaking Down Information Silos

One barrier to content usability is information silos. Today’s content users do not want to constantly switch from one silo to another or from one user interface to another. Multiple systems are simply not intuitive and do not foster the collaboration needed to effectively run a business. So, a content management system should concentrate on changing the silo mentality, breaking down silos of content, and digitally connecting them.

Silos started with people. They store data as their department, their piece of the enterprise, thinks it should be done. They don’t take a holistic view of content. As the result, content ends up in many different systems.

It is important to manage content in place, where it is at the moment and add value to it in a modular way. To add value modularly, you need to think about the difference between different types of content. Modular content management lets you use content you need in real time.

Digital Transformation

A major change in the content management landscape has been digital transformation. It’s no longer just dealing with regulations. Newer technologies, such as cloud computing and mobile devices, put unprecedented pressure on those responsible for content management. The IT challenges are real and enterprise content management can provide significant assistance in the process.

Digital transformation affects all organizations. Think of the things people used to do in person that they now do online. The retail industry has been hugely affected by technology. Online ordering, price comparisons, product reviews, and mobile payments are now the ordinary way people buy books, electronics, household goods, and almost everything else. Even groceries can be ordered online and delivered to your door.

Digital information, with no paper equivalent, is increasingly the norm for enterprise content. It can be stored in multiple locations by numerous individuals working for different departments. Digital information creates interesting challenges for content management.

The world is becoming more and more digital. 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. Any digital activity implies content management.

Not just the consumer commerce is experiencing digital transformation. Regulatory agencies expect reports in digital form. Suppliers and manufacturers communicate digitally and complex supply chains are managed, controlled, and updated with digital systems.

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 makes businesses to become more agile. It is through using digital content in an agile way 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

Even though the digital transformation is real, paper documents have not disappeared. Many organizations continue to maintain paper repositories.

Organizations make the best effort on automating and removing paper documents from core business functions and processes.

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.

However, there are still a lot of paper-based documents.

Even though paper documents are digitized somewhere during the workflow sequence, they begin as paper and are often stored as paper.

Organizations are moving from paper documents to digital, but this shift is not complete. Thus, a content management system must acknowledge the existence of paper documents.

Security Concerns

Security is foremost in organizations. Part of content management is ensuring that sensitive data is secure in an organization. This means identifying content and its access permissions accordingly.

Safeguarding content is important on both the consumer and the enterprise level. Today’s content is more distributed than ever before. It is not locked up, secured, and then made compliant. Instead, content exists, and sometimes is created outside the enterprise. However, organizations must secure content.

Security is also a function of compliance. Compliance must be in place for all systems. Keeping up with what constitutes compliance and with updates in regulatory requirements should be mandatory.

What about business rules? Every organization has some business rules, and enterprise content systems must conform to these rules. 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 profoundly affects enterprise content management. Cleaning out the information closets starts with identifying what the organizations needs today and what no longer needed today but might be needed in the future.

Organizations must execute a set of strategies to ensure the content clutter is under control. Enterprise content management is not simply a technical issue. It is 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 extremely important.

Galaxy Consulting has over 20 years experience in content management. Please call us today for a free consultation.

Businesses today understand that data is an important enterprise asset, relied on by employees to deliver on their customers' needs, among other uses of data such as making business decisions and many others.

Yet too few organizations realize that addressing data quality is necessary to improve customer satisfaction. A recent Forrester  survey shows that fewer than 20% of companies see data management as a factor in improving customer relationships. This is very troubling number.

Not paying attention to data quality can have a big impact both on companies and the customers they serve. Following are just two examples:

Garbage in/garbage out erodes customer satisfaction. Customer service agents need to have the right data about their customers, their purchases, and prior service history presented to them at the right point in the service cycle to deliver answers. When their tool sets pull data from low-quality data sources, decision quality suffers, leading to significant rework and customers frustration.

Lack of trust in data has a negative impact on employees productivity. Employees begin to question the validity of underlying data when data inconsistencies and quality issues are left unchecked. This means employees will often ask a customer to validate product, service, and customer data during an interaction which makes the interaction less personal, increases call times, and instills in the customer a lack of trust in the company.

The bottom line: high-quality customer data is required to support every point in the customer journey and ultimately deliver the best possible customer experience to increase loyalty and revenue. So how can organizations most effectively manage their data quality?

While content management systems (CMS) can play a role in this process, they can't solve the data-quality issue by themselves. A common challenge in organizations in their content management initiatives is the inability to obtain a complete trusted view of the content. To get started on the data-quality journey, consider this five-step process:

1. Don't view poor data quality as a disease. Instead, it is often a symptom of broken processes. Using data-quality solutions to fix data without addressing changes in a CMS will yield limited results. CMS users will find a work-around and create other data-quality issues. Balance new data-quality services with user experience testing to stem any business processes that are causing data-quality issues.

2. Be specific about bad data's impact on business effectiveness. Business stakeholders have enough of data-quality frustrations. Often, they will describe poor data as "missing," "inaccurate," or "duplicate" data. Step beyond these adjectives to find out why these data-quality issues affect business processes and engagement with customers. These stories provide the foundation for business cases, highlight what data to focus on, and show how to prioritize data-quality efforts.

3. Scope the data-quality problem. Many data-quality programs begin with a broad profiling of data conditions. Get ahead of bottom-up approaches that are disconnected from CMS processes. Assess data conditions in the context of business processes to determine the size of the issue in terms of bad data and its impact at each decision point or step in a business process. This links data closely to business-process efficiency and effectiveness, often measured through key performance indicators in operations and at executive levels.

4. Pick the business process to support. For every business process supported by CMS, different data and customer views can be created and used. Use the scoping analysis to educate CMS stakeholders on business processes most affected and the dependencies between processes on commonly used data. Include business executives in the discussion as a way to get commitment and a decision on where to start.

5. Define recognizable success by improving data quality. Data-quality efforts are a key component of data governance that should be treated as a sustainable program, not a technology project. The goal is always to achieve better business outcomes. Identify qualitative and quantitative factors that demonstrate business success and operational success. Take a snapshot of today's CMS and data-quality conditions and continuously monitor and assess them over time. This will validate efforts as effective and create a platform to expand data-quality programs and maintain ongoing support from business stakeholders and executives.

Galaxy Consulting has over 16 years experience helping organizations to make the best use of their data and improve it. Please contact us today for a free consultation!

Amount of information is doubling every 18 months, and unstructured information volumes grow six times faster than structured. 

Employees spend far too much time, about 20% of their time, on average, looking for, not finding and recreating information. Once they find the information, 42% of employees report having used the wrong information, according to a recent survey.

To combat this reality, for years, companies have spent hundreds of thousands, even millions, to move data to centralized systems, in an effort to better manage and access its growing volumes, only to be disappointed as data continues to proliferate outside of that system. Even with a single knowledgebase in place, employees report decrease in critical customer service metrics, due to the inability to quickly locate the right knowledge and information to serve customers.

Despite best efforts to move data to centralized platforms, companies are finding that their knowledgebase runs throughout enterprise systems, departments, divisions and newly acquired subsidiaries. Knowledge is stored offline in PCs and laptops, in emails and archives, intranets, file shares, CRM systems, ERPs, home-grown systems, and many others—across departments and across geographies.

Add to this the proliferation of enterprise applications use (including social networks, wikis, blogs and more) throughout organizations and it is no wonder that efforts to consolidate data into a single knowledgebase, a single "version of the truth" have failed... and at a very high price. 

The bottom line is, moving data into a single knowledgebase is a losing battle. There remains a much more successful way to effectively manage your knowledge ecosystem without moving data.

When there are multiple systems containing organization's information are in place, a better approach is to stop moving data by combining structured and unstructured data from virtually any enterprise system, including social networks, into a central, unified index. Think of it as an indexing layer that sits above all enterprise systems, from which services can be provided to multiple departments, each configured to that department’s specific needs.

This approach enables dashboards, focused on various business departments and processes, prospective customers. Such composite views of information provide new, actionable perspectives on many business processes, including overall corporate governance. The resulting juxtaposition of key metrics and information improves decision making and operational efficiency.

This approach allows IT departments to leverage their existing technology, and avoid significant cost associated with system integration and data migration projects. It also helps companies avoid pushing their processes into a one-size-fits-all, cookie-cutter framework. 

With configurable dashboards, companies decide how/what/where information and knowledge is presented, workflows are enabled, and for what groups of employees. Information monitoring and alerts facilitate compliance. There is virtually no limit to the type of information and where it is pulled from, into the central, unified and, importantly, highly secure index: structured, unstructured, from all corporate email, files, archives, on desktops and in many CRMs, CMS, knowledgebases, etc.

Enterprise applications have proliferated throughout organizations, becoming rich with content. And yet all of that knowledge and all of that content remain locked within the community, often not even easily available to the members themselves.

Now it is possible to leverage the wisdom of communities in enterprise search efforts. User rankings, best bets and the ability to find people through the content they create are social search elements that provide the context employees and customers have come to expect from their interactions with online networks.

Imagine one of your sales executives attempting to sell one of your company’s largest accounts. They access a composite, 360 degree view of that company, and see not only the account history, sales opportunities, contact details, prior email conversations, proposals, contracts, customer service tickets, that customer’s recent comments to a blog post, complaints about service or questions posed within your customer community.

Armed with this knowledge, your sales executive is in a more informed position to better assist and sell to that customer. Without moving data your sales executive has a single, composite view of information that strategically informs the sales process.

Ubiquitous knowledge access allows employees to search where they work. Once you created the central index, you need to provide your employees with anytime/anywhere access to pertinent information and knowledge.

In many organizations, employees spend a lot of their time in MS Outlook. Other organizations with large sales teams need easy access to information on the road. Also valuable is the ability to conduct secure searches within enterprise content directly from a BlackBerry, including guided navigation. Even when systems are disconnected, including laptops, users can easily find information from these systems, directly from their mobile device. Again, without moving data, organizations can enjoy immediate, instant access to pertinent knowledge and information, anywhere, anytime.

Companies that stopped moving data report favorable results of their unified information index layer from multiple repositories such as faster customer issues resolution time, significant reduction in dedicated support resources, savings in upgrade cost for the legacy system which was replaced, increase in self-service customer satisfaction, and reducing average response time to customers' queries.

There are few applications currently in the market that fulfill these functions. These are enterprise search applications.

However, there is no "one fits all" approach. Any solution should be based on organization's business requirements.

Effective content and knowledge management is a combination of theory, practice, and technology. You should not focus too much on the technology part without considering other parts.

However, effective technology deployment are essential to content and knowledge management success. The challenge is that there is no such thing as "content and knowledge management tools" marketplace. Depending on the application, content and knowledge management can include different types of technology, comprising many diverse market segments.

Today, content and knowledge management practitioners need to follow technology developments. 

For many years, the main platforms for content and knowledge management revolved around searchable knowledgebases and discussion forums. Enterprise portals emerged to try to present enterprise information via a single dashboard. That didn't usually work out so well, although portal technology still plays a key role for many use cases today.

Similarly, enterprise search held and important part in the enterprise content management where the right information easily retrievable from multiple repositories through the single interface. Search technology still plays a critical role in many cases.

Now content management practitioners have to take into account a wide range of repositories and applications, from enterprise video to social media monitoring and intelligence. The diversity of content management technology is growing and proliferates.

Of course, knowledgebases still remain important, but the way we build and manage them has changed dramatically:

• Wikis now power some of the most definitive knowledgebases within and beyond the enterprise.
• Sophisticated social Q&A applications are generating impressive, demand-driven knowledge sets in many environments.
• Digital community spaces are not new, but richer community platforms with increasingly important facilitation features have made them far more accessible in the enterprise.
• Ideation (a.k.a., open innovation) applications are also coming of age, amid much healthy experimentation.

For content management practitioners, this means mastering a new set of technologies to address old problems. But the opposit is also true: some older technologies are finding new use within the enterprise.

Digital asset management and media asset management platforms are not new. What changed is their increasing adoption within broader enterprise contexts. More and more of our digital knowledge is not textual any more.

Much of our textual knowledge that does remain still resides in files waiting to get more liberated. Hence the meteoric rise of file sharing services, most of them based in the cloud, and many of them now targeting enterprise scenarios.

The rise of social media monitoring and intelligence has given new life to the field of text analytics, even while exposing the limitations of individual analytics engines.

Not every organization needs all those types of tools. But the savvy content management practitioners can help guide his or her colleagues to the appropriate technology for their organization.

Very often over the past decade, when content management practitioners began new projects, the preferred solution was Microsoft SharePoint - a platform that seemingly can do it all. You need to remember to not to focus too much on any one platform but base decisions on your organization business requirements.

For most organizations, initial investments in social computing have centered on creating social spaces where employees could go to engage in more informal discussions and networking. The actual results have often proved uneven, yet promising enough to sustain further investment and experimentation within most enterprises.

Social features are important to effective enterprise collaboration. More social and collaborative digital workplace experience has become increasingly essential for all enterprise computing. Your colleagues really want a social layer across their digital experience. But it could be the opposite as well. Again, remember your business requirements.

Many of new tools come with their own repositories and, left alone, will lead to more information silos reducing their long-term value. Many vendors argue that search technologies will solve that problem. You need to focus on things like filtering services for activity streams and appropriate levels of information management.

You will also add value by demonstrating that collaboration and knowledge sharing are not places people go, but things they do. 

With the rise of mobile, that kind of contextual relevancy has become more urgent. But it is going to require an understanding of a wider choice of technology choices.

Content management practitioners are uniquely positioned to help the organization to put new tools in the context of daily work. Understand the suitability of the right tool for the right job. Advocate for a scenario-based approach to all technology selections. The right tool is not sufficient for content and knowledge management success, but it is an increasingly important condition.

There has been a lot of talk lately about big data. What is big data?

Big data is is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand commonly used software tools or traditional data processing applications. The challenges include capture, governance, storage, search, sharing, transfer, analysis, and visualization. 

What is considered "big data" varies depending on the capabilities of the organization managing the data set, and on the capabilities of the applications that are traditionally used to process and analyze the data set in its domain. 

Big data sizes are a constantly moving target. As of 2012 ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set. With this difficulty, new platforms of "big data" tools are being developed to handle various aspects of large quantities of data.

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. How does it apply to us and what we do in content management?

The sheer numbers, covered in most enterprise content management (ECM) analyst reports, also extend to all aspects of the information technology sector, prompting developers to create a new generation of software and technology or distributed computing frameworks in an effort to cope with this scalability phenomenon.

Content growth is everywhere. From traditional data warehouses to new consolidated big data stores, IT infrastructure must be ready for this continuing scale; it impacts the entire IT industry, especially ECM.

Content is getting bigger. Applications are growing more complex, challenging IT as never before. How will these changes impact content management technologies? It's difficult to predict exactly, but there are insights to be found and used to plan for the future.

ECM technology is evolving toward a platform-based approach, enabling organizations to make their own content-centric and content-driven applications smarter. Analysts, vendors and users all agree: The time for "out-of-the-box" CMS applications has passed. Now each project can meet specific needs and individual requirements.

Content and data, more often than not, come with embedded intelligence whether through adding custom metadata and in-text information or by leveraging attached media and binary files and it can be utilized, whether structured or unstructured.

This can be observed on many different levels across various domains. For instance, the arrival of what some have started to call "Web 3.0": the semantic Web and the related technology that promotes intelligence out of raw content through advancements like semantic text analysis, automated relations and categorization, sentimental analysis, etc. -- effectively, giving meaning to data.

More traditional ECM components, such as workflows, content lifecycle management and flexibility, demonstrate much of the same. Smart content architecture along with intelligent, adaptive workflow and processed or deep integration with the core applications within information systems are all making enterprise content-centric applications smarter and are refining the way intelligence is brought to content.

In short, content is getting smarter on the inside as much as on the outside.

In fact, such disruptive phenomena as Big Data or the new semantic technology on the scene are huge opportunities for enterprise content management solutions. They are bringing new solutions and possibilities in business intelligence, semantic text analysis, data warehousing and caching that require integration into existing content-centric applications, all without rewriting them.

As a result, Big Data and smart content will push more of enterprise content management toward technical features such as software interoperability, extensibility and integration capabilities.

These developments will also demand a clean and adaptive architecture that is flexible enough to evolve as new standards arise to bridge CMS and semantic technologies, as well as connectors, to a back-end storage system or connectors with text-analysis solutions.

This underscores the advancements made in the development of modular and extensible platforms for content-centric applications. Taking the traditional approach of employing large enterprise content management suites that rely on older software architecture will make it harder to leverage these new and nimble opportunities.

In order to get the most value out of smart content and refine methods of dealing with Big Data, enterprise content management architects must incorporate a modern and well designed content management platform upon which to build, one that not only looks at end-user features but stays true to the development side. Enterprise content management will not be reinvented; Big Data and smart content are evolutions, not revolutions, in the industry.

I will continue on this subject in my future posts.

Current KM trends changed the way we work in KM environment. Let’s look at these current trends and how they affect KM.

Big Data

According to Cisco study, global IP traffic will reach 1.3 zettabyes annually by 2016 which is fourfold increase from 2011. By 2016 there will be 19 billion global network connections, the equivalent of two-and-a-half connections for every person on earth. Huge amount of data needs to be moved, collected, stored, and analyzed to create value out of it.

With social networking and global depression and exponential rate of information growth, the question becomes: how are you going to store, manage, and utilize this information in a way that meets your organization objectives. You need to be able to derive value from your information.

Social Computing

During last decade, social computing has widely spread in the work place. It has emerged as integral part of enterprise productivity. Social tools changed ways people work together. The proliferation of social software in the enterprise demonstrates that users find value in this new generation of tools.

In just a few years, social media has gone from cutting-edge phenomenon to a main-stream channel that companies use to engage clients, partners, and vendors.

Gartner predicts that by 2014 social networking services will replace email for interpersonal business communication for 20% business users.

Some statistics:

• 65% of world’s top companies have an active Twitter profile.
• 23% of Fortune 500 companies have a public-facing corporate blog.
• 58% of Fortune 500 companies have an active corporate Facebook account.
• Facebook has 901 million monthly active users.
• Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, sending 340 million tweets every day.
• Enterprise social software solutions are being used in 67% of organizations surveyed in 2013, up from 43% in 2011. 

This highlights the fact that social software is becoming part of business processes in the work place. Employees want to engage socially with the people they work with and build stronger relationships within their companies. Traditional content management and collaboration solutions are incorporating new features to satisfy the social and information sharing demands of the enterprise.

Enterprises are using these emerging social computing technologies to improve collaboration among employees, clients, and vendors around the globe.

Tools such as blogs, instant messaging, wikis, social tagging and bookmarking, discussion boards with comment fields. Individuals comment on case studies, exchange ideas, and contribute their own material. Employees can follow up with people, search for subject matter experts, get updates on projects, participate in conversations that are going on.

The use of social software for collaboration in a business environment is most successful when there is a business purpose. The social capabilities of enterprise applications will continue to be extended because of the value that collaboration brings to a wide variety of business activities. Meanwhile, enterprise social software products, which have matured considerably over the past 5 years, are achieving increasing acceptance by corporations.

Challenges

Emergence of social networking has been a two-edged sword for organization. On one blade rests knowledge sharing. On the other is a ton of useless information and you need to dig thought it to get to what you need. In other words, they have added to the noise, volume and diversity of information. 

When it comes to social networks, the question used to be: how much you want to connect vs how much you want to collect? The new version is: how much do you want to curate vs not curate?

Non-curated content is typical unmanaged social network content. The question is: how much of it do you want to have control over? 

Companies must understand how social media use may impact the company’s ability to manage risk. It is important to understand how business and employees engage in social media, develop and deploy policies and solutions necessary to stay compliant, to meet business requirements and be flexible at the same time.

Companies need to increase information control and visibility.

Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing gained significant adoption as a way for companies to shift from capital-intensive model of buying and running infrastructure and software to renting usage of shared infrastructure and applications.

With the power of cloud computing, small businesses can have the same level of IT infrastructure as Fortune 500 companies with vastly limited overhead.In addition to hosted servers, small businesses can purchase software as a service (SaaS) that is hosted online and completely scalable. Forrester predicts growth in SaaS applications.

While some companies are replacing licensed software with SaaS applications, most are using SaaS for new product categories that complement their existing on-premise software.

Benefits

With software purchased as a service, a small business no longer needs IT personnel on site to install and maintain software and hardware. SaaS allows businesses to purchase software without multi-year contracts and without painful software installation.

Rapid Deployment - with no hardware or software to install and no servers to buy, cloud content management virtually has no setup time. So, it can be deployed very quickly.

Access Anywhere - A cloud content management solution offers an application available anytime and from any internet browser. Information is always accessible and data can be shared instantly. The cloud gives the company centralized control of info while allowing users to access it from any computer or device.

Easy Collaboration - Since it can be accessed anywhere, cloud content management systems allow any authorized personnel to access and collaborate on content. Sharing lets you get information to those who need it instantly, and from anywhere in the world. 

Low Cost - Cloud ECM solutions offer a highly-affordable alternative to on-premise solutions.

Speed - Cloud ECM implementations typically take 24% of the time of similar on-premise projects. That rapid time-to benefit translates directly into the higher ROI that business managers want.

Flexibility - Cloud ECM implementation gives the business this flexibility, both in terms of right-sizing capacity and in terms of aligning ECM capabilities with changing business needs.

Reduced Risk - Cloud ECM projects don’t require large outlays for uncertain results. And a variety of protections can be written into vendor contracts. For these and other reasons, the cloud fits well into today’s corporate risk mitigation strategies.

For activities that involve collaboration, SasS browser access to an application is far more superior to running it behind a firewall.

It enables IT to respond quicker to business requirements. Cloud vendor often provides an effective mobile client which otherwise you would have to undertake yourself if you were to customize your on-premise platform.

Challenges

Cloud is no panacea. Even the largest cloud vendors can experience outages.

Multiple File Formats - The documents that you might like to upload into your cloud content management system may be in many different formats. The device that is being used to display the content often may not have the correct software needed to display the document or image.

A common solution is to convert the files on the server to a generic format that can be viewed by many devices. For example, most browsers and devices today can display JPEG or PNG formats for images, Microsoft Office or PDF format for documents, CAD for drawings, etc.

Document Size - It is very important to consider the size of the document, either the number of pages or the physical size of the file. Downloading the entire document can take a long time depending on available bandwidth. This is especially an issue on mobile devices with slow or crowded data connections. 

A system that provides a preview of the document can help the user to determine if they want to download the document would help.

Browser compatibility - Another challenge is that there are various browsers that are used to access the Internet and not all of them work the same way. Each browser has differences in how they operate and how the code works under the covers.

Mobile viewing - With today’s on-demand business world, it is imperative to be able to support viewing documents on mobile devices. But not all the devices behave the same way, and different operating systems are used on the various devices. Without a consistent mobile viewing platform, separate viewing applications may need to be installed on each device and results will vary. Using a single technology that supports many document types is very important in a mobile environment.

HTML5-based viewers can help resolve some of the challenges associated with browsers and mobile devices. Older versions of the browsers that are used in many government, education and businesses do not support HTML5.

Understanding that these common challenges are a possibility and preparing for them before you encounter them is important. Providing a single platform with multiple viewing technologies, including HTML5, Flash and image-based presentation, can help to ensure that all users can view documents, regardless of their specific device, browser or operating system.

Responsibility for your information in the cloud still falls on you: data ownership continuity, security, compliance. Take the same test-based approach to selecting cloud solutions as you would on-premise solutions. Focus on user experience.

Mobile Computing

The workspace is becoming increasingly mobile. Mobile computing enables access from anywhere. Forrester predicts that by 2016, smart phones and tablets will be used by a billion of global customers. Looking ahead, employees and customers will expect and demand that all business applications support mobility. Need to be able to deliver mobile experience - Ability to access content from mobile devices.

Content and systems must be optimized for mobile devices. Employees working in the field must be able to access content from their mobile devices. Employees use mobile devices to collaborate on docs, take meeting notes, create presentations, and collect data in the field. Decide what content and services make the most sense for your organization mobile devices.

"Bring Your Own Device" (BYOD)

It is becoming a reality of office life these days. It is a natural consequence in a world where people bring iPads, iPhones, Androids, and Blackberrys to work. This trend is relatively new and it continues to grow. As a result, organizations have been compelled to open up their networks to a wider variety of these devices that their employees want to use.

For corporations, trying to save IT $, it is good news – employees are now paying to acquire and maintain phones, tablets, and laptops that were once funded by IT. These organizations realized that encouraging employees to bring in their own devices can be a win-win situation for them as well as for their employees.

On the downside, the ever growing variety of BYOD devices and the fact that they are owned/controlled by employees poses serious security, workflow, and IT management issues for employers.

Employees are using their own smart phones and tablets to conduct business. While the actual device belongs to an employee, business info does not. This creates new twist in info governance initiatives.

If employees upload corporate data into a consumer-based public cloud, the cloud operator has de-facto ownership of this data.

Also, there are hackers accessing corporate data through relatively insecure consumer devices, challenge of integrating BYOD platforms with enterprise-wide corporate software, and extra IT funds being required to support a myriad of BYOD platforms.

A company can’t dictate which devices are used, in which security parameters and under what conditions.

Therefore, define and control what levels of access BYOD equipment has to a company networks, applications, and corporate data.  It is vital to establish a comprehensive governance policy.

Companies need to keep their employees happy and productive while protecting and leveraging the info they create and consume.