Digital transformation and content Services? It’s VATI!
The concept of digital transformation has been around for a few years and organizations of every type are considering what it might offer to their mission, revenue and customer service work. It represents a change management effort and a change in philosophy and, although every new tablet and smartphone release brings more people into the “digital by default” fold, it’s still an important business decision. The consequences include cost, staff time, solution investment and the possibility of disappointing internal users and your customers.
Like most disruptive technologies, there’s a perception of risk, the question of whether the hot trend will really be useful and the concern over what to invest in and who to partner with. As IT leaders, you can be forgiven for pausing to reflect before you embark on another initiative that involves time, money and staff.
This is where content services comes in. One trend, digital transformation, might seem so daunting it’s easy to avoid. But others – such as REST services, easy integration, connected content repositories, case management, configurability, automation, continuous upgrades – like those at the core of content services platforms, are necessary and will lead your organisation to better efficiency, lower costs, better user experiences and a digital-by-default platform for your organization.
4 important IT goals: VATI
Need to hear more? Maybe these are goals you have for your IT efforts:
- Visibility (V)
Whether it is information or processes, visibility goes to the transaction or process in front of you and the overall picture you can form about the state of your business or mission. Digital by default improves visibility because data and processes are not paper-bound, lost on desks or stranded in some remote location. Digital means secure, accessible from any device and available when a decision needs to be made or a process is in flight.
- Accuracy (A)
All data systems, programs and processes turn on having accurate data and adherence to compliance and business rules. Disconnected systems relying on manual data entry can lead to inaccurate data, duplicative data entry and ultimately, decisions based on bad data that are deadly to your business or your mission.
- Timeliness (T)
Decisions turn on timely information and customer trust relies on the timeliness of your responses to them. Whether you are government organisation assisting citizens or a business driving revenue, timeliness will appeal to your program and business teams. In a paper-based world, staff are weighted down with the extra tasks that paper generates (filing, printing, copying, shredding) and your organisation incurs needless costs for the privilege of adding these low-value tasks to the workload.
- Innovation (I)
Another “hot” word that can keep you up at night, but it’s important to invest for more than today’s trends and challenges. Is the solution you deploy today going to support you into the future? Does it drive your mission forward? Does the platform vendor build enhancements and improvements as a matter of course, taking your maintenance, but keeping you current? These are key questions. Perhaps the greatest hesitation in chasing the “hot trends” is the concern that your investment will be a dead end or that somehow, the vendors you partner with will abandon the trend to chase another revenue-producing solution.
How to achieve your goals
These four items, or VATI, are some of the many benefits of digital transformation. To the extent that the thoughts above fit into challenges you are facing or initiatives you are trying to support, your organization is a good candidate for digital transformation.
Beyond being some of the benefits of digital by default, they are also the key benefits of adopting a content services platform. At its core, content services is digital by default, offers automation tools and capture tools that support accuracy and timeliness and overall, without paper, provide visibility for information, content and processes. Moreover, content services assumes that you have invested in a number of solutions and that content and information should flow between those solutions, adding weight to your accuracy improvements.
But, from our perspective as IT professionals, it’s the innovation piece of VATI that content services excels at, delivering agile and flexible ways to make existing investments work, to develop impactful new solutions and to keep you current across broad needs like mobility, case management, security and process improvement. Selecting content services brings considerable tools for you to keep up with business user needs and do so with fewer solutions to support and fewer concerns over the investment’s shelf life.
It’s likely that your own efforts are driven by the need for one or more of these deliverables, regardless of mission, business or organisational type. If these are keys to digital transformation efforts and are present in content services platforms, that type of platform investment ticks many boxes at once.
If your organisation is ready for better visibility, accuracy, timeliness and innovation, it’s time to take a look at content services.
- It’s one thing to have a plan, and another thing to deliver value - 10/14/2020
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- Getting strategic: Why you need a strategic workshop - 02/17/2020
