After the recent 2019 Document Strategy Forum in Anaheim, I’m getting the sense that, in the words of Kylie Minogue, “I’m spinning around”. Why so, I hear you ask?

Well, despite all of the talk about how artificial intelligence (AI) is moving from fiction to reality, how low code is reducing development times, and how content services has become the latest and greatest incarnation of information management, an awful lot of the talk on the floor was a little more grounded. Questions like - “How can I move away from legacy system?”“Does moving to the cloud solve my ECM problems - or just make them cloud-based problems?”

These questions point towards a growing disconnect between many vendors in the information management space and their customers. Customers are smart - they realize that they have issues with legacy installations, that the cloud gives them benefits, and that customer/citizen/employee engagement is a high priority. But many vendors seem to be ignoring these real-world challenges and focus more on innovation than reality. Hence leading me to constantly spin from tech to reality to tech to reality…

There always has been, and will be, a need for vendors to innovate - and I’m proud to say that Nuxeo innovates in this space as much (if not more) than anyone else. From the use of MongoDB, to true content federation, to AI models that can be easily trained with enterprise-specific content and data, we keep pushing the technical envelope as much as we can. But we are also firmly grounded in the realities of day to day business life.

Modernization of Legacy Systems at Document Strategy Forum

For those that didn’t see it when it was launched last year, take a look at our page: Modernize Information Management Systems. This plethora of content explores the need for a new approach to managing the myriad of tools currently in use to control information within many organizations. This is not a technology first play - but a business first, common sense first approach to how using technology wisely can address and solve business challenges.

This measured approach to modernization came up in conversation several times last week, including in a video interview I did with Allison Lloyd of Document Strategy Media (we’ll share this on our social media channels when it’s published) where we talked about the information management market in detail, including where some of the hype cycles need to turn to reality.

Get a tip sheet from AIIM on what does information management modernization mean

From my conversations, there appears to be a clear appreciation of the challenges faced within organizations today (at least from the organizations themselves). Digital transformation is needed, but early attempts at this have stalled - and the tools in place currently aren’t ideally architected to change that.

Learn more about the digital transformation imperative

Learn more about ways to solve legacy modernization challenges in our whitepaper.

But from an immensely positive perspective, those challenges come with a desire to change, to innovate, and to solve business problems - not with a single silver bullet, but with the practical, logical, and progressive tackling of those challenges one by one, with technology as THE key enabler. This desire and positivity, coupled with a dose of practicality by the vendors, can act as a way for us to break this spinning top-like whirlwind we find ourselves in, giving us the ability to slingshot out of the spin, straight into a platform-based, new age of effective and Intelligent Information Management.