In today’s global economy, business success and growth are affected by rapid changes in market requirements, short innovation cycles and rising demands for internal and external communication. And all this is set against a background of continually growing—and often multilingual—data volumes that are becoming ever-more structurally complex.
Businesses also face challenges from ongoing workforce and workplace changes, and from company mergers that shift how economic power is distributed globally.
At the same time, data protection-related compliance and data governance requirements (GDPR, PII, PCI, etc.) are also changing. As a result, following a policy of ‘If in doubt, we will save the data until further notice,’ is no longer just negligent—it can become really expensive for companies in several respects.
In my last blog on the topic of records management, I talked about evaluating and analyzing the organizational status quo with regard to the implementation of a records management strategy. While my perspective there was primarily forward-looking, this step is often viewed retrospectively as a rather worthless or tiresome reappraisal of the past. Those who are responsible or affected might question how meaningful such an undertaking is. They might ask, for example, ‘Do more important issues deserve attention?’ or ‘Will the result be of limited value?’
Lack of control over data is expensive
The lack of control over data can be very expensive for companies in several ways. The obvious ones include:
- Risk of large fines for violating compliance and data governance requirements
- Loss of reputation with customers
At different points, more indirect and difficult identifiable costs can also affect business management:
- Reduced productivity as IT users become frustrated by information silos that result in inadequate usability
- Fragmented IT landscape with redundant structures, often paired with unsatisfactory system performance and high administration costs
- Lack of transparency due to ‘gray zones’ of legacy risk that are difficult to assess but burden business activities with an apparent loss of control
Solving the piece of the ECM puzzle
OpenText™ File Intelligence allows organizations to identify and analyze potentially regulated, confidential or personal information, wherever that content might reside—laptop, application, file server, etc. OpenText File Intelligence provides a toolbox to help you act systematically, make decisions and draw the right conclusions. This lets you build a foundation for keeping all content up to date. Different integrations—such as Microsoft O365, OCR or OpenText™ Magellan™—allow you to expand functionality for text mining and concept searches.
The File Intelligence process is split into three parts:
- Catalog (crawl data sources, indexing)
- Analyze (classification with metadata and keywords, applying policies, search and report)
- Act (take policy-based actions)
With flexible implementation scenarios, it is possible to serve different scenarios, including record identification, file and storage management, file search and retrieval, monitoring and much more.
The results and benefits are obvious: File Intelligence can help you understand your file repositories, reduce costs and risks, apply policies and improve response quality. And this allows you to focus on your business growth and success.
OpenText Professional Services can support you with expert implementation guidance on connected information management topics such as enterprise content management (ECM), records management and application archiving. We act as a trusted advisor on your ECM journey. For more information, please contact us.
Author: Martin Schwanke, Manager Professional Services
