The era of legacy Enterprise Content Management system (ECM) is rapidly nearing its sunset as enterprises increasingly require more than just documents to drive business processes. Today, the range of content being managed encompasses rich content types, including images, audio, video, slideshows, surveys, email, social media feeds, web content, corporate records, 3D renderings, and more. How can these diverse forms of content be managed effectively to ensure the enterprise gains maximum value from the information, whether sharing, distributing, or analyzing the content?
Legacy ECM Limitations
The technology of traditional ECM systems has been pushed beyond its limitations. Among the problems not easily circumvented:
- An infrastructure consisting of multiple, disconnected systems
- Lack of support for multiple endpoints (smartphones, tablets)
- Lost productivity due to difficulties accessing essential files
- Barriers that disrupt compliance with regulatory mandates
In a landmark report, Reinventing ECM: Introducing Content Services Platforms and Applications, Gartner coined the term Content Services Platform (CSP) to better reflect modern organizational content management strategies and to accommodate cloud and mobility advances. The CSP market, as defined by Gartner, has these characteristics: “They [content services platforms] support a broad range of functions, ranging from horizontal ones such as HR employee onboarding to industry-specific ones such as insurance claims management. To support this breadth, they need to combine capabilities including robust content and metadata management, process automation, intelligent classification and information governance. Integration with common business applications via configuration is also key.”
Citing Nuxeo’s modern, flexible architecture; federated content management; and an exceptional user interface, Gartner recognized Nuxeo as a visionary in the 2019 Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms.
Designing around the User Experience
In the Gartner MQ for CSP, Gartner identified user-centricity as a central component of a well-designed CSP, using these terms:
A consumerized user experience with embedded mobility and consistency across devices. A focus on the overall user experience is of paramount importance for driving adoption and realizing the expected benefits of this technology.
Flexibility makes the difference. A modern content service platform offers a means of tackling today’s most pressing enterprise content challenges and unifies the data and content resources across the whole of an organization. Replacing an outdated ECM can enhance productivity, maximize the value of digital content across different organizational groups, and help resolve the legal and regulatory issues every enterprise faces.
The financial services sector provides a good example of how content management has evolved and expanded the types of content requiring management. Paperwork used to be the lifeblood of financial services companies, built around business processes developed to store, access, and distribute documents. Rich media wasn’t a major part of this early era, but as images, video, audio, and other media types have become a fundamental part of business processes—driven by smart forms and mobile devices rather than paper—the need to manage these types of content has grown dramatically.
For example, many insurance firms have moved toward using photos and videos captured by mobile devices, rather than police and accident reports for processing claims. Insurance firms also harvest and use large volumes of telematics data from connected cars to provide a smarter way to assess driver risk and formulate usage-based insurance models.
Upgrading to a Modern Content Services Platform
Nuxeo’s pioneering work developing a powerful, scalable CSP based on an open architecture framework and robust APIs offers substantial opportunities for enterprises ready to upgrade an existing ECM system to a more flexible platform. Nuxeo Insight, our AI product, makes it possible to extract and enhance data from available content, as well as analyze this data for improving business-specific processes and decision making.
To keep pace with the hyperscale requirements of today’s enterprise, our CSP can ingest, sort, store, and analyze tens of billions of objects with management capabilities for multiple petabytes of diverse types of information.
To learn more about the benefits of the latest platform technology for managing and accessing all forms of content, read 8 Reasons to Modernize with a Content Services Platform.