The “ECM generation” war has been already won. Long live Content Services

The volume of content continues to grow, in most cases exponentially, and so it’s important to have in place solution for data capture & categorization and of course minimize the impact of error prone human activities trough automation of repeatable tasks. All this while taking into consideration the compliance, governance and security requirements that may come from internal polices but often from external regulators.

From Legacy ECMs to Next Generation Intelligent Content Services Platforms.

The ECM market is in a transitional mode right now. We’ve been living the era of classic ECMs for 20 years now, but global research agencies like Forrester see a lot of interest in moving to much more modular, granular Content Services driven platforms in the market. The trend happening already in major enterprises is that the dream of a single content repository from a single vendor hasn’t necessarily been realistic. Especially in organizations that grow through mergers and acquisitions it is very typical to see that they have multiple content applications, both in cloud and on-premises and often from multiple vendors as well.

We are today at a tipping point where the generation ECM war has been already won. The CTOs in large enterprises or senior architects or senior IT decision maker that work very closely with the line of business users to understand what are these content or process applications or pain points that they are looking to resolve, all of them are looking for a more flexible platforms that are easier to deploy on-prem, as a starting point for example, but shift to cloud as their company makes it to a more clear part of their roadmap. So, these cohesive, cloud and user-friendly platforms is really where organization are looking from the modernization perspective. And as we see this increased adoption in Cloud or collaborative content management use cases we do see that some of this complexity continues to put pressure on our businesses.

Why you should take the leap towards a Content Services Platform

Right now, customer focused organization are changing their own internal operating model looking to be more efficient, more effective, more collaborative, more data and insight driven, and this means that we are moving away from more linear approaches to much more modular and digital ecosystems that can dynamically connect multiple players, transforming how they deliver value to their customers and improving their operational capabilities.

We need more flexible approaches to creating, managing, controlling and even preserving the content that we work with. For example, we may bring together a group of high-profile architects or consultants for a two-year project or initiative and we need to serve them with all the tool capabilities to get their job done but after that consortium might break apart and the content will move with it. So, business models are becoming more flexible, project and product driven, teams come together, and they split apart, and so we need to rethink our processing content services to reflect this new more flexible business model coming into various markets.

Right now, the market has already decomposed a lot of the features we expected in a traditional content management suite into granular services, driven by APIs that we can call or use to invoke the capabilities we need as we build up content or process rich applications for our specific users or personas. In the next couple of years intelligent content services will come into the mix meaning artificial intelligence, advanced analytics, machine learning with a lot of opportunities for automation of extracting meaningful data.

A next generation content platform is in fact a software platform architected specifically for document, content, or process rich applications driven by services and APIs that can support cross-repository and cross-system integration with flexible pricing and licensing models, modularity and “low-code or no-code” application design, delivering the best user experience across devices (including mobile) and geographies.

Content is not something created from thin air but rather a key part of core enterprise processes and as such it needs to get proper attention by leveraging the power of metadata to bring up the entire value just sitting there, distributed across repositories or held back in some paper cabinets.

If you need a deeper dive in planning and executing your strategy for digital transformation, please do not hesitate to drop us an e-mail at products@star-storage.eu