Over the last decade there has been two big pushes in the technology marketplace:
- ECM: The selling and implementing of content management systems (ECM) for better capture, collaboration, control and compliance (YES – the 4 Cs).
- DATA SWAMP: The utilization of some combination of Sharepoint, network drives and cloud storage to make it easier to centrally store all the random files an organization gathers.
These two ways of gathering unstructured files and objects have always been in battle with one another. Let’s compare:
- ECM = disciplined, very expensive (limiting the largest companies to take on the risk), time consuming, enormous infrastructure investment, intimately controlled by the IT department, solving the biggest process and document problems.
- DATA SWAMP = little discipline, much less expensive, little time consumed, generally requires a network drive or cloud subscriptions, considered “shadow IT” because ran by the business groups and is solving the other 99% of document problems.
Fast forward to 2020 and beyond:
Organizations have multiple ECM systems from multiple vendors, have been putting terabytes and terabytes of files on network drives and up in the cloud and there is NO real goto-answer for the next document problem.
In conversations with clients, 100% of them have this exact problem.
They cannot find it, learn from it and important actions like mergers/acquisition, litigation or government compliance inquires are nearly impossible. Like watching the below Rube Goldberg for people to obtain – in total – what they need.
If you stare at it long enough, you will find examples in how your company manages documents.
THERE IS A BETTER FUTURE
Those ultra expensive ECM solutions are a thing of the past. Cloud options prevail today – being most popularized by Microsoft O365 with their SharePoint and OneDrive that you get for free. But other exist with AWS Workdocs, Nuxeo and AODocs sitting on Google Suite.
But this better future state needs the experts and tools to analyze and automate the cleaning up of the mess today. That is where InfoDNA Solutions with their TOPLA tools can help. Take all those ‘places’ where documents exist and turn them into a virtual single ‘collection’ to find that one-copy-of-the-truth is paramount.
