The Opportunity at the Nexus of Content, Data and Output Management

Introduction

It’s no surprise that information drives the process of business today. Pick any process and you can bet that information is at the heart of that business activity. According to IBM, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. What’s more, this is expected to double in the next year and a half.

But simply collecting more and more information does not bring about improvements to organizational performance. To remain competitive, organizations today must use information in new and more profitable ways, extending the value and impact beyond isolated technologies and siloed processes to truly transform strategic decision-making and business workflow in ways that make a difference fundamentally to the enterprise. In short: what is needed is more innovation, not more information.

The Evolution of Enterprise Content Management

Over time, the distinction between content, data and output has become less and less clear. As a result, the idea of “Enterprise Content Management” emerged as a convenient construct to guide the confluence of content, data and documents across an enterprise. But unfortunately ECM can have a lot of different meanings and implications and, despite the acronym, many organizations continue to struggle to put the “E” in Enterprise Content Management. Most strategic approaches remain primarily rooted as an outgrowth of earlier business concepts like Records Management, Information Management and Document Management.
One study conducted by AIIM took aim at predicting the state of Enterprise Content Management in the next five years. They defined the following “eras of ECM” in their executive brief Thinking Beyond ECM. Consider how the business conditions and technological capabilities have evolved sympathetically over time.
The Paper Era – for hundreds of years business has been fueled by paper.

• The Micrographics Era – during the 1950’s paper began to be replace by microfilm and microfiche.
• The ERP Era – from the 60’s through the 80’s the computer age transformed business data.
• The Document Management Era – since the 1990’s organizations work to replace paper with digital.
• The ECM Era –managing many different types of data, documents and records across the enterprise.

Is the term “ECM” past its prime? Perhaps. But one distinction is clear: Today’s organizations are looking to move beyond isolated application and decision-making, and adopt a more holistic approach to managing enterprise information. Herein lies the opportunity at the nexus of content, data and output.

Convergence, Confluence and Customer Demands

As the need for more agile response to demands of customers in today’s info-intense business world increases, more and more strategic focus must be applied to understanding and maximizing the confluence of these different enterprise content stores and systems. C-level executives find that, no matter what you call it, all of this information is essential to organizational performance and it is no longer adequate to allow content, data and output to be managed via isolated business and technology strategies. Here are just a few of the implications:

• Siloed business units result in duplicate effort and over spending
• Siloed solutions and applications result in redundant systems and increased complexity
• Siloed strategies result in a lack of process optimization and lost opportunity for innovation

If you have isolated solutions and disparate strategies you are missing the opportunity to bring new levels of agility, insight and response to your organizations processes. Instead focus on the convergence and confluence of customer demands to uncover new opportunity to optimize cost, service, innovation, and more.

Opportunity at the Nexus

At Crawford Technologies, we believe that there is great opportunity for innovation and improvement at the nexus of enterprise content, data and output. It simply no longer makes sense to manage “ECM content” in isolation from the systems and processes that support things like corporate records, IT databases, transactional customer communications and output management. By bringing these pockets of process and information together, both technologically and strategically, organizations find that they save money, increase agility and responsiveness, and position the enterprise to design and implement process improvements that make a real difference. Here are just a few important examples to consider:

• Leverage disparate content stores for more insight and decision-making
• Eliminate the traditional boundaries of departmental turf and technological complexity
• Understand how the flow and impact of information is influenced
• Digitize paper-bound process and reduce manual workflow
• Enable multi-channel communications across print, e-delivery and mobile devices
• Create accessible documents (e.g., Braille and PDF/UA) for the visually impaired
• Transform content archives from mainframe to the cloud

Extend, Expand, Integrate and Share

Our core technology and know-how is unique. We help you extend the power of information in new and more profitable ways by leveraging your existing investments and getting more from the information you already have. Fundamentally, our knowledge regarding how to “liberate” enterprise data and documents that have been originally generated, stored and distributed in one environment for a specific purpose to be used in new applications and in new environments in ways not envisioned when they were originally created.

Our extensive suite of award-winning solutions work to improve and manage enterprise content, data archives and production, and advanced output management. Our approaches help you save, search, find and protect the vital information that makes any business run, all the while working to reduce the cost and eliminate the complexity of managing enterprise content…no matter what form it takes or where it resides. We streamline the processing of high value, high volume transactional documents, and our Document Accessibility Services deliver correspondence in alternate formats for a higher degree of accessibility. Here are just some of the benefits to consider:

• Reduce operational expenses and redundancy
• Improve customer satisfaction and service agility
• Ease process workflow and eliminate complexity
• Eliminate isolated process and pockets of isolated technology
• Migrate to multi-channel delivery and boost brand consistency
• Reduce the cost of content administration overall

Unify Your Strategy with CrawfordTech

Why should you partner with CrawfordTech? Beyond our decades of enterprise experience is the underlying philosophy at CrawfordTech to help organizations unify “content technology” under a more strategic and holistic approach. This helps improve organizational performance, improve customer experience and save money.
We help the largest banks, insurers, healthcare providers, utility companies in the world digitize, present, secure and make accessible their customer communications. We sit at the center of our customer’s transformation into a modern digital business and work effectively to organize and optimize the business-critical processes. Our systems support modern advanced inkjet printing systems, next generation enterprise content archives, new accessible document standards, and the latest document protection technologies. We integrate seamlessly with enterprise print and digital infrastructure.

Moving Forward

It is time for organizations to capture the opportunity at the nexus of enterprise content, data and output. But most cannot do it – or afford to do it – all by themselves. The technical hurdles are just too complex and diverse. That’s where we come in. CrawfordTech is the only partner positioned to solve all the data and document issues at “the nexus” and truly take advantage of the opportunities available. With CrawfordTech as a partner, organizations are more able to meet the onslaught of compliance demands with regard to security, privacy and accessibility, as well as the ongoing need to exchange information between the many different content, data warehouses and document systems/repositories across an enterprise.

Want to learn more? Simply call 1-866-679-0864 for a free executive consultation.