4 essential data strategies that promote secure service and delivery
A few times a year, my husband and I take a hard look at the money going out the door every month to see if we are making the best decisions, or if there is anything we can do to reduce household costs that are not fixed. This is especially true when it comes to services, where:
a) We have choices, and haven’t evaluated offerings lately
b) Costs are significant, and we want to make sure we need—and are using—what we are paying for
Lately, two areas that have come up more and more are our service providers for television and our mobile phones. It’s a whole new ballgame these days—the consumer/provider relationship—even compared with 10 years ago.
We are in an era where we, as consumers, are significantly empowered to not only choose from an unprecedented variety of providers and services (who remembers when Ma Bell was the only choice for phone?), but are actually actively driving change in service provider offerings at an unprecedented speed, simply by the way we use their products and services.
How are consumers doing this?
In the evolution of both mobile technology and “smart” technology, the way we can access products and services—say a television series or sports game—is multi-faceted. We are not tied to one way of obtaining a service (like cable vs. satellite) or one method of accessing a product. For some of us, our smart TVs are the vehicle; for others, it’s our tablet or smart phone. Often, it depends on the circumstance of the day.
But one thing is certain: We as consumers LOVE this freedom to access what we want or need, at the exact time we need it, from wherever we are. Like when my husband was able to watch an Ohio State versus Alabama game from his phone while stuck in a traffic jam.
But it wasn’t just because he had a smartphone that this was possible. It was possible because the provider had information associated with both the game and with us—data, or more specifically, metadata—that made it possible for us to find the game, and for the service provider to authenticate us and securely deliver it to us, their customer. Additionally, when we watch a certain series, we are also submitting data that enables the provider to suggest other products or services likely to be of interest to us—supporting the customer journey in the logical path of the process.
This trend is rapidly reaching every industry—not just digital entertainment—resetting the expectation of speed and security in service delivery and the ability to adapt to change.
The transformation of ECM
In the eBook The Next Wave: Moving from ECM to Intelligent Information Management, AIIM (The Association for Information and Image Management) recently had this to say:
As time goes on, content management capabilities are going to be viewed much less as a monolithic ‘solution’ and much more as a set of capabilities that will be consumed in a much more modular fashion—tied to the needs of particular business processes. Content capabilities will be tied to processes—both custom and SaaS. In the end analysis, this is the world that Gartner now calls Content Services.
Working here at Hyland, and analyzing business processes, user experiences and data-driven projects for more than 14 years, it’s no surprise to me that modular, adaptable tools and methods for managing content will likely surpass monolithic solutions. It just makes sense. It’s been our approach for more than 25 years.
But it isn’t merely our flagship vehicle, OnBase, with its powerful platform, that has optimized the capabilities for our customers to improve the delivery of information, service and care to their own customers. It’s also in our ability to securely transform the effectiveness of the organizational and customer data entering an organization in real time.
4 ways to ensure your data trends are on target with industry expectations
Here are some simple, but critical, areas to ensure you are getting the most value out of your data as part of your information management strategy, which includes enforcing effective practices to mitigate risk as data becomes more pliable:
1. Intelligent capture
Automate the capture or scanning of incoming documents with a trusted vendor or service provider. This dramatically increases throughput and security, enables better service and reduces risk.
2. Security
Ensure your metadata—or indexing—strategy and capabilities can enforce extensible layers of security, and support integrated delivery of documents and data to any enterprise system that would benefit from seeing the complete view of a transaction, encounter or case. Your solution should also support automated workflow and case management, as well mobile or cloud methods of delivery.
3. Legacy systems
As organizations grow and content and data management needs evolve, data conversions from a legacy system to a platform that is equipped to handle evolving requirements is increasingly common. It is worth your time to talk to an experienced conversion expert in vendor evaluations who can assess your goals and advise you on the best method and resources to complete the conversion.
4. Strategy
Automate governance, records management and document retention processes as much as possible. When evaluating vendors to fit your information management strategy, ask whether they offer outsourced capture and indexing services that also provide secure records management capabilities. Also, consider vendors that provide governance consultants, should you need expertise in a certain area of your compliance strategy.
With a modular approach that leads with data, and how to best get that data into the hands of those who need it, you have the power to build out solutions that truly meet the unique needs of every department in your organization. You can customize the user experience, solution capabilities and effectively control costs.
In other words, you don’t have to pay for things you are not using, and at the same time can make your users very happy. Just like my husband and I have become with our new, on-demand TV library.
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- AP automation: it’s time to join the journey, the train is in motion - 01/06/2021
