At this time of digital transformation, it is difficult to talk about managing content management without talking about using electronic signatures. E-signatures make it possible to create digital workflows, help to maximize ROI from content management, and enhance productivity, compliance, security, and analytics.

Quite a few content management tools include e-signature implementation such as SharePoint, Box, and other content management systems (CMS).

Electronic signatures, digital business, and content management are interdependent. Without e-signature capability, documents continue to be printed for signing, then photocopied, shipped, corrected, imaged back into the system, archived, and shredded. 90% of the time and cost of labor dedicated to managing paper can be saved by using e-signatures. There are also other benefits of using e-signatures such as faster decision making, shorter sales cycles, and improved customer experience.

In the last few years, financial services, insurance, healthcare, and government have embraced digital transformation. A major driver is compliance and risk. Many organizations are concerned about legal risk or they struggle with the constantly changing regulatory landscape in their industries, in part because manual processing is very prone to errors.

Rather than react to regulatory pressure with additional people, manual controls, and process complexity, organizations that adopt e-signatures have these benefits:

• Leverage workflow rules to execute transactions correctly and consistently.
• Capture a full audit trail and electronic evidence.
• Minimize exposure to risk due to misplaced or lost documents.
• Make the process of e-discovery easier, more reliable, and less expensive.
• Demonstrate compliance and reduce legal risk through the ability to playback the exact process that was used to capture signatures.

Let's look at this example: the VP of compliance is asking for transaction records from 5 years ago. How helpful would it be to quickly produce all signed records, in good order and replay the entire web-based signing process for context.

According to Forrester Research, organizations and customers now recognize that e-signature is an important enabler of digital business.

Today, the business is digital and e-signature is a foundational technology enabling end-to-end digitization. Let's look at this example: a customer filled out an insurance application. When the package is ready to be signed by the customer, traditionally it would revert to paper. Instead, documents are handed off to the electronic signature solution. This solution would manage every aspect of the e-sign process, including notifying and authenticating signers, presenting documents for review, capturing intent, securing documents, collecting evidence, etc.

Once e-signed, the documents can be downloaded in PDF format and stored in any archiving system. The e-signature audit trail and the security travels seamlessly with the document, ensuring the record can be verified independently or the e-signature service.

A document centric approach to embedding e-signatures within signed records allows for greater portability and easier long term storage in an CMS solution. Additional metadata related to the e-sign transaction can be handed off to the CMS as well for analytics purpose.

Adopting electronic signatures is quick and easy and does require IT or programming resources. Companies who are looking for a more integrated automated workflow, e-signature plugins for SharePoint, Salesforce, Box are available.

Organizations can quickly and easily enhance approval workflows with a more robust e-signature solution than a checkbox on an approval routing sheet, while also automating archival.

​Content Management and Change Management are connected. Change Management is needed for successful Content Management. These two subject matters support each other.

Companies can benefit from the positive relationship between these two subject matters and suitable processes about them, starting with content management. 

Improved visibility and management of documents is particularly beneficial for change management. Employees across an organization can use the same, current documents with up-to-date facts and figures, and with an automated document management system, they can do it quickly, boosting the organization’s agility in times of change.

When Content Management Takes the Lead

With a reliable and efficient content management system, individual departments and change management teams can better:

• Integrate siloed information and standardize operating procedures across the organization, thereby allowing everyone to pull from a single source of truth.
• Communicate any changes quickly throughout the entire organization.
• Increase product and process quality by ensuring employees have the right document at the right time.

By-products of these activities include improved decision-making and reduced possibility of errors, miscommunication, and regulatory actions through enforced compliance. In short, Content Management helps keep Change Management in control.

When Change Management Takes the Lead

How does change management helps to keep the content management processes in check? Whether change is driven by FDA, EMEA, or ISO regulations, or by competitive business forces, it is undeniably critical to operations. It doesn’t matter whether the change being addressed in an internal change, or a process change that must be efficiently and accurately documented to ensure adherence going forward. It must be kept in control, and to do so, it commands that other inter-related processes, including content management, be reliable at all times.

To effectively manage change, an organization must be agile. Bottlenecks to operational agility might include an inability to locate data, or outdated SOPs that expose the company to noncompliance or financial, operational, or legal risk. These bottlenecks might rest within the content management processes, rendering them unreliable. Change Management would help to resolve these problems.

An effective change management system will take charge and guide content management by starting document updates during the implementation of an approved change. This action:

• Provides a comprehensive workflow for documenting change from the initial change request through to the approvals and implementation.
• Reduces the risk of losing documents, or storing incomplete or unapproved documents.
• Increases the available transparency of what is being documented.

Content Management and Change Management are Better Together

On their own, these subject matters are strong but together they are extremely agile, and they drive continuous improvement and overall organizational quality. They are also high-achievers in the higher-level view from Quality Management point of view. Working in tandem, Content Management and Change Management benefit Quality operations through:

• Accessibility: Organized, current, and visible documentation provides an easily accessible audit trail to keep the organization on track and to satisfy regulatory requirements at a moment’s notice.
• Collaboration: When electronic change requests integrate with electronic document management, they expedite the document update process and enhance project collaboration among impacted departments and functions.
• Security: Concise storage and accessibility of current documents, particularly SOPs, ensures that the right individuals are receiving the right documents at the right time. When change is in the focus, incomplete documents or those not applicable to certain departments cannot be accessed through a “back door.”

Organizations Should Consider Adoption

Organizations would do well to adopt both quality management processes, whether on their own or as part of an automated enterprise-wide Quality Management System (QMS).

An effective automated system will integrate document and change control procedures. It also will integrate with other solutions, providing access to approved, controlled documents in other areas of the quality system, including audits, CAPAs and employee training. In these cases, an automated system’s search and retrieval capabilities, dashboards, and repositories expedite the processes.

Industry standards and regulatory guidelines recommend quality management processes which are integrated across the entire organization.

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.