Today’s number one business challenge is keeping track of information. Whether we are talking about user or business-process generated information, the volumes, types and sources are increasing rapidly, and there is a recognition — some would say an anxiety — that organizations are losing control of their information and the value it contains.
Effectively connecting information across sources and end users starts with a logical, repeatable ingestion methodology for all the content types. However, this often becomes difficult when relying on manual processes because:
- Users don’t always have the time or judgement to correctly assign comprehensive metadata
- It’s impossible to predict all the users that might need access to the information, or what they may need it for
- Classifying documents needs to be based on more than just filetype — it must be grounded in how the information will be used
Manually classifying and applying metadata leaves a lot of integral value on the table. Here are some scenarios and examples of the information that is left on the table when relying on manual classification:
- An internal user creates content and uploads it to a content repository. They may or may not add metadata, but there is a good chance they will email the document to a colleague for approval or collaboration purposes. What if we could automatically extract the most appropriate metadata from the correspondence?
- An invoice, form or other semi-structured content comes in to start a process. A user then emails it to a system or another user in another department. What if we automatically extracted and classified the data and used the information in the system of action to complete the metadata?
- A web form or general-inquiry email comes in from a customer, partner or employee asking for help. What if we could automatically route the email based on the email address, form type and extracted text?
With the new generation of intelligent capture solutions, you can do all of this and more.
Intelligent capture solutions
As with most content services, the focus of intelligent capture is on the ensuring that relevant information and content is available to the appropriate systems and users. This is key to both process automation projects, which require high quality metadata, as well as “simple” records and disposition projects.
As highlighted below, enterprise-wide organization of content is much different than how an individual would organize their personal information. The value of bringing “smarts” into the capture step is that it simplifies our information management lifecycle by extracting key tags/metadata/descriptors for every piece of information that comes into the organization.
In turn, this provides the foundational information that powers a complete enterprise content management (ECM) lifecycle strategy. At its core, capture provides a bridge between how users handle information on a process-by-process manner and how enterprise want information handled on a global level.
The recognition that capture provides not only process-by-process wins for users (e.g. invoice processing) but also can be part of the larger ECM strategy is part of what is leading to a renaissance in capture software. And it’s the primary focus of the new release of OpenText™ Captiva™ 16.5. Captiva 16.5 provides a wide-ranging list of connections to OpenText technology, as well as services to expand on the process integration and application integration for content heavy processes (e.g. order processing).
The future
As we look to the future, the next generation of capture solutions will be even more capable, including our AI-augmented capture solution that enhances Captiva with a full artificial intelligence module. This focused use of AI to increase the speed and efficiency of capture is already starting to show benefits for our customer’s bottom lines and business practices (e.g. automated workflow from text or emails).
Whether you are looking for a cloud-based or on-premise approach, OpenText offers capture solutions that can be deployed to ease both user tasks as well as simplify organization of content. Learn more by exploring OpenText Capture solutions and OpenText™ Content Services.
