Start Now: The Future of Enterprise Content Management

The past year has seen a sweeping change of perspective and priorities in the world of Enterprise Content Management. For a set of technologies that had seemed mostly settled and clear, the changes are especially jarring. Those familiar with the space will have noticed three particular trends:

The rise of hybrid architecture. Organizations are working hard to deploy content across private and public cloud to ease access and empower workers.

The need for global solutions. Firms focused on finance, retail, energy, life sciences, manufacturing, and more are demanding systems and strategies that streamline content management while navigating a growing set of cross-border requirements around security and regulation.

The demand for cognitive analytics. As content proliferates, organizations need smart, fast, embedded analytic systems to digest, parse, and organize data into visible trends and predictions. This is particularly true of the unstructured content that is typically coordinated by ECM systems.

Unstructured Content and the New Phase of Analytics and Cognitive

Let’s take a step back and ask what those three trends are all about. What’s driving them? And where are they taking us? Gartner’s most recent Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management anticipates that by 2019, “70% of all business content will be non-textual.” The report goes on to predict that this trend “will require organizations to invest more widely in analytics as part of their content management efforts.” In a report that’s full of keen observations and predictions, this one stands out to me above the others. It tells us that data analytics — and cognitive analytics, in particular — is entering a new phase.

Currently, automated analytics (including most machine learning) is focused largely on structured content: log data, master data, transactional data, and reference data. That focus makes sense since there’s a great deal of understanding to be gained from that data. The focus also makes sense because the analytic tools and algorithms are significantly more straightforward for structured data than for unstructured data.

But as organizations establish the hybrid architecture and data governance that enables analytics of structured data — and as insights continue to improve strategy — the leaders in those same organizations may turn more attention to unstructured data to understand how to improve their strategies even further. To maintain competitiveness, they may look more deeply at what knowledge can be gained by analyzing photographs, web sites, streaming instrument data, slide presentations, emails, blogs, wikis, PDFs, and word processing files.

We know that analysis of unstructured data is not only possible, but thriving — both within the general arena of deep learning, and within the specific advances in Watson’s cognitive capabilities. (Specific to ECM, IBM is offering a cognitive version of DataCap, as well as the new “Cognitive Case” capability for Case Manager.) Offerings like those are only beginning to enter the mainstream, but as momentum builds, organizations will need to be ready with full ECM systems that are robust enough, secure enough, and smart enough to handle that new wave of unstructured analytics.

Start Now

A flexible, battle-tested ECM system is especially crucial for large, cross-border organizations whose storehouse of unstructured data can run to hundreds of petabytes. Yet as we all know, the larger and more distributed the organization, the longer it can take to build consensus around the wide-ranging data processes that will keep the business competitive. The sooner you drive forward the conversation about ECM, the sooner you’ll start:

• Delivering content in context
• Creating more flexible business processes
• Collaborating with stakeholders inside and outside the organization
• Enabling mobile capabilities across the organization
• Deploying fully on cloud
• Embedding analytics
• Embedding cognitive

The ECM conversation is urgent and wide ranging. It can help bring together the architects of your hybrid cloud, your leaders in data governance, and your data science teams. It’s no secret that it’s a conversation critical to success. These days, any organization whose data management and analysis isn’t running smoothly is an organization headed for trouble — trouble with strategy, trouble with innovation, and trouble with revenue.

Fortunately, IBM can help. That same Gartner report I mentioned earlier ranked IBM highest on both axes of the quadrant: for Leadership and for Vision. It’s a rare distinction, but not a surprise to our clients — clients across sectors and around the world who have trusted and collaborated with IBM for decades.

I invite you to explore further and reach out. Let’s discuss your vision for the future of data and content.