There is no one-size-fits-all strategy for information management, nor should there be. So, how do you know which enterprise content management (ECM) approach is right for your business?
According to a Foundry Research survey, there are three factors that motivate organizations’ technology decisions[1]:
- Increasing operational efficiency (cited by 34% as “most important”)
- Reducing cost (27%)
- Improving customer experiences (18%)
Certainly, enterprise content management can deliver on all three points by bringing content and processes together to provide access to information when and where needed. But knowing exactly which questions to ask during the evaluation and selection process can be challenging—and often hindsight is 20/20.
To anticipate future needs and avoid deployment roadblocks and security headaches down the road, here are five questions to guide your search to allow you to tap into the full promise of enterprise content management software.
Can the enterprise content management softwaregrow with your business?
Despite having “enterprise” in the name, not all enterprise content management tools are created equal. While most solutions claim to scale up and down to meet any use case, it’s important to take a hard look at scalability to assess if the ECM platform will manage the expected load—for information, transactions, and users. While perhaps difficult to predict, think about anticipated growth and the solution’s ability to support millions of documents, hundreds of thousands of transactions, information ingestion at a global scale, and seamless access for the required number of internal and external users.
Will the enterprise content management software bridge cloud silos?
Whether you’re committing to an on-premise deployment, currently navigating the middle ground with a hybrid environment, or embracing a cloud-first strategy, your ECM solution should accommodate your desired environment—not the other way around. True ECM flexibility means the ability to support applications across multiple clouds and computing environments, including private cloud, public, multitenant SaaS, and everything in between. It’s important to ensure your applications, workloads, and business processes can continue to operate in a mix of computing environments, if desired, while meeting regulations tied to data sovereignty and access control.
As organizations continue to invest in cloud-based enterprise applications, such as SAP Rise, Salesforce, Google Workspace, Guidewire, and Microsoft 365, enterprise content management tools can serve as the connecting force. With out-of-the-box integrations across a multi-cloud environment, you can make information within these applications accessible to those who need it—driving value from cloud investments and creating a seamless experience for knowledge workers.
How intelligent is information governance?
Your enterprise information is one of your most valued assets—and should be protected as such. Enterprise content management software brings control to content chaos but also needs to control risk with trusted information governance. It’s important to assess governance capabilities within the ECM system, looking for intelligent, automated, and policy-driven features to help you stay compliant and secure. With users operating across multiple applications, each with unique content requirements, information needs to be monitored and managed as it flows throughout business processes, able to be tracked and audited at any time. Plus, well-governed enterprise content management tools provide the foundation of accurate, trusted data for use with GenAI, improving the generation, access, and use of information.
Is the enterprise content management software AI-ready?
AI has become a business necessity, helping employees work smarter by using information in new, more insightful ways. While an ECM platform delivers a single source of truth with information users can trust, GenAI takes content to the next level. By enhancing enterprise content management tools with an AI content assistant using a conversational chat interface, users can quickly find, create, and summarize information. And the power of search and summarization should extend across business applications, integrating intelligence directly into critical processes to unlock efficiencies at scale.
Will enterprise content management help users do more with less?
Investing in an ECM solution promises improved productivity, allowing the business to continue at a desired or future level of operations without adding new resources. It’s important to assess process automation capabilities, including the ability to use workflow capabilities within the enterprise content management software to boost efficiencies across entire departments—while keeping users within preferred applications. From pushing documents, such as invoices or resumes, through approval processes to enabling more informed customer engagement, the right ECM solution can automate repeatable, content-heavy processes with configurable workflow templates.
Take the guesswork out of your ECM decision
Discover why OpenText is the leading vendor of choice for enterprise content management, trusted by global organizations to power and protect information to drive secure, data-driven operations.
See what intelligent enterprise content management tools can do for your business[1] Foundry Research, MarketPulse Survey: Digital Friction, September 2024
