6 insights from the OnBase Summit EMEA for 2017 and beyond
Thanks to our customers, partners and the Hyland team, the OnBase Summit EMEA turned out to be just amazing. For Hyland today, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) now means 40 customer organizations, 35 partners, 26 countries and 19 languages – wow, impressive!
I was very pleased to be able to participate in some quite intensive talks with our customers and partners during the stay in wonderful Berlin. And, I think the event staff did a great job in choosing Germany’s capital as a venue.
Tearing down walls, transforming digitally
Why? Because no other city in Europe stands more for transformation than Berlin. When the iron curtain fell in 1989, the city became a vibrant cultural scene, powered by new political and commercial impulses. The city is a living analogy to here and now, comparable to the huge efforts we need to undertake to transform our businesses. Because we, and our customers, also have to tear down “walls” in order to succeed in digital transformation.
The fantastic individuals who spoke at the Summit were extremely helpful to all of us engaged in transforming our businesses. Sharing their insights, they had a clear vision for the future and astute predictions for enterprise content management (ECM) and enterprise information platforms in 2017 and for the years ahead.
Here are six insights I took away from the summit:
- Usability is everything
ECM expert Bernhard Zöller identified deep linkage between modern collaboration tools – such as Slack or Teams by Microsoft – and ECM solutions. He insists that if a company makes use of collaboration tools, its ECM solutions must be able to work with them in tandem and without friction, in terms of both functionality and usability.
Ease of use and simple in application is key in 2017.
- Mobile ECM means mobile workforce
It´s also quite a benefit if you can utilize ECM on a tablet or even on a smartphone. But there is a difference between using an ECM system and really working with it. With the right solution, you can synchronize a business-grade ECM solution whilst travelling, keeping processes moving. And workflows don´t face delays because your coworkers are on the road.
- Think about the cloud
While we would never require anyone to deploy their ECM solution in the cloud, I’d like to recall what our keynote speaker Kamales Lardi shared with us about U.S. banks. Some financial institutions saved more than $1 billion just by hosting a portion of their information in a private cloud. Security and privacy are important issues, especially in the banking industry, and important to keep in mind when evaluating vendors.
As you think about those kind of savings, remember not all cloud providers are the same. For example, we’ve been offering a cloud ECM solution since 2000, and more than 500 global organizations use it to capitalize on its flexibility and speed of implementation.
- Forget about your file systems!
In the era of digitization, it´s now finally time to say goodbye to the massive and ineffective file systems that companies still have in use to “organize” their content. You really can´t be successful in the digital age with antiquated and inefficient paper-based systems.
- Don´t want to modernize? Think about compliance
It´s not only the digitization that stresses organizations, it’s the increase in compliance-related rules and associated audits. Furthermore, the right records management solution will manage length of retention and final disposition of documents. Whether its hard copy filing system or an outdated ECM solution, now is the time to change!
- We live in the information age
“We´re no longer in the age of enterprise content management,” Ed McQuiston, Hyland’s senior vice president of sales & marketing recently said. “We´re in the information age.”
That means ECM has arrived and is at the heart of other business processes. A user doesn´t want to have an elaborate exchange of letters with his insurance company. He wants to quickly and reliably share information – and maybe a picture of his crashed car – through an app on his smartphone. A company set up to offer its services this way has a great advantage over its competitors.
You don’t need to be an organization located in Europe to realize that if you’re living in a paper-based world, you aren’t keeping up – with your customers or the competition.
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