Enterprise Information Management (EIM) is rapidly becoming a ‘must have’ for many organizations. It helps deliver the value in enterprise information by making it accessible, meaningful, accurate, timely and secure. In this blog, we look at the key benefits in implementing an effective enterprise-wide EIM strategy can bring to your company.
Today, the advance of digital technologies is leading to an environment where people, business, devices, content and services are all intimately connected to deliver enhanced digital experiences. Gartner describes this as the ‘intelligent digital mesh’. Chief trends towards this digital mesh are the growing use of artificial intelligence, greater digital collaboration within the workplace and wider trading communities, the ability for people to take greater control of their interaction and communication with your company and their ability to enjoy a more immersive customer experience.
In order to realize these goals, enterprise data and content has to become much more coordinated and accessible. The flip side is that there has to be a greater focus on information security and risk reduction. This can best be achieved through an effective enterprise information management (EIM) strategy.
What is EIM?
Gartner’s intelligent digital mesh requires a major emphasis of the quality, consistency and timeliness of your data and content. EIM allows you to create, manage and share enterprise information in a way that’s secure, easily accessible, meaningful and accurate. It enables you to guarantee data quality, ensure that all data sources are trustworthy, data is not siloed or hidden, and you can create end-to-end digital workflows.
What are the top 10 key benefits of EIM?
With an EIM platform in place, your organization will receive a number of business benefits, including:
1. Drive digital transformation
Digital transformation begins by replacing paper-based with digital processes. For most organizations, this transition happens over a number of years. The strong content management component in an enterprise information management strategy enables companies to gain control of enterprise information – whatever the format and location – and facilitate the process to an entirely digital business. However, the power of digital transformation is its ability to apply new technologies – such as the cloud, the Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence – to deliver better and innovative business operations, that organizations look to exploit for competitive advantage. An EIM platform represents the ideal means to manage the mountains of data associated with these technologies.
2. Release the value in corporate information
Implementing an EIM system brings central control of all information with the enterprise. More than this, EIM provides focus for your people, process, policies and EIM technologies toward how best to leverage enterprise content and data. This enables you, for the first time, to properly align all the content and data within your organization to your key business processes and workflows. With EIM, you can ensure that the right information is available to the right people at the right time – and in the right format.
3. Fully exploit both data and content
Structured data in databases and enterprise applications is growing rapidly, but it’s still being dwarfed by the explosion of unstructured data – in documents, presentations, email, web pages, social media posts – that every organization has to deal with. The challenge is that most enterprise information systems were simply not designed to deal with both structured and unstructured data. Yet without the ability to combine structured and unstructured data, you can’t make your business processes as efficient as they could be or develop a single view of the customer needed to deliver targeted, personalized services. The correct EIM software can identify, coordinate and manage both structured and unstructured data to turn it into truly enterprise information.
4. Increase operational productivity
An EIM platform will allow you to speed up and simplify your key business processes. It reduces the number of human errors from manual processing and creates more time and capacity within your organization. You are able to work smarter, not harder. Modern EIM technology allows for the increasing automation of business processes that bring content and data together in ways to arm knowledge workers in all areas of the business; from predictive maintenance keeping production lines at optimum performance, to enhanced customer service through intelligent agents and self-service portals.
5. Enhance customer experience
Today, people require you to deliver always-on, omni-channel customer engagement. Every consumer expects to consume a vast array of content across a range of platforms. An EIM solution enables you to fully exploit customer data to deliver highly targeted and personalized messages to customers at the correct point of their customer journey. It makes it easier for your customers to do business with you increasing sales, satisfaction and loyalty.
6. Increase business performance
Through a better understanding of your customer, the correct EIM software allows you to create more targeting and personalizing product development. It also provides the platform for greater business agility. EIM builds a scalable foundation for all information initiatives to accommodate future growth – allowing you to quickly take advantage of new market opportunities. In addition, EIM creates re-usable components – content, processes, etc. – that reduces the time needed to bring new systems and products to market.
7. Increase employee satisfaction
There is nothing more soul destroying than a diet of simple, mundane administrative tasks. Your employees want to be involved in interesting work that they can see add value to the business. By freeing your employees from many manual processing activities, an EIM solution helps improve the working conditions and job satisfaction for your employees. More than this, it allows them to be re-assigned to higher value tasks that increase operational productivity.
8. Improve collaboration and cooperation
An effective EIM strategy allows you to create closer, more effective relationships with customers, suppliers and other trading partners. It provides a common and central platform where you can securely share and collaborate on enterprise information. Your EIM platform delivers a ‘single version of the truth’ for any piece of data or content as well as managing the process of amendment to ensure the information is always accurate and trustworthy – and all changes and approvals are efficiently communicated to everyone who needs to know.
9. Improve decision-making
A comprehensive EIM solution allows to make sense of all the structured and unstructured data related to your business. It takes all the data and content you have and turns it into the actionable insight needed to improve decision-making. Some modern EIM software allow you to embed business intelligence and analytics into your systems to build scalable data-driven applications, dashboards, interactive data visualizations, and pixel-perfect reports—completely tailored to your organization’s requirements.
10. Reduce risk, boost compliance
Successful enterprises today understand that developing and implementing an effective information governance (IG) program is a top priority. Ensuring compliance with government regulations, customer mandates and industry standards represents one of the biggest risks to business. However, shifting scope, evolving business models, and a complex technology infrastructure can derail the best-laid plans. You can succeed in information governance by leveraging EIM technologies, utilizing best practices, and forging productive internal relationships to meet compliance and security demands in an ever-changing business landscape.
Why choose OpenText for EIM?
OpenText™ is the world leader in EIM with over 25 years of successful EIM delivery. Today, the company has more than 3400 EIM customers and over 65,000 EIM deployments worldwide. We deliver outstanding solutions for the six key pillars for successful EIM:
- Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
- Digital Process Automation
- Customer Experience Management (CEM)
- B2B Integration and EDI
- Discovery
- Analytics and Business Intelligence
To find out how OpenText can help you create an EIM platform that will release the full value of your enterprise information and drive business success, please contact us and we’ll be delighted to start the conversation.
