Information management is changing – we can all agree on that. But exactly how, where, and at what speed are questions that often don’t get asked. Until now.
Early in 2018, Nuxeo and AIIM partnered to ask exactly these sorts of questions - and the results were both staggering and scary. Below we detail the top three information management challenges in 2018.
1. It’s Increasingly Difficult to Find What You Want
When I was growing up, I went to school with someone called Simon. Simon was also known as Alec – Smart Alec to be precise. He was called this, rather cruelly sometimes, because of his innate ability to remember things – literally anything. Other than being really good at general knowledge quizzes, Simon also excelled at school (and no doubt in life afterward), but things are different today. In today’s day and age, if you want to know something, you simply Google it or ask Alexa, or Siri or whoever. At least in your personal life, you do. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of how we find information at work.
According to our research, over 75% of people struggle to find information in a timely manner. When you combine that with the fact that many of us complain about enterprise information overload (75% to be precise) it gets rather frightening. There’s just too much stuff, and once we’ve got it, we can’t actually find the piece we need to do our job. Not a good situation – and understandably the top of our list of challenges for enterprise information management in 2018.
2. Information Management Usability – or Lack of It
Second up is usability – or what happens once you’ve actually managed to find the right information. Most people tend not to work in isolation – they have colleagues, teammates, suppliers, and so on who they need to communicate and share information with. Unfortunately, this also is not easy, with 63% claiming to struggle when needing to share information and content with others. Again – not good.
Mobility is also lacking for 57% of respondents – illustrating the current gap between personal technology and information use, and the way in which we interact with it in our work lives. Can you imagine using an app on your mobile that didn’t do what you wanted it to do? No – you’d simply ditch it and find one that did do what you wanted. We can’t do that at work though – and we’re left to work with difficult to use information management systems, designed by overly technical people, in an age where usability was a nice to have. Which leads us to challenge number three.
3. Integrating IM Across Systems
The systems we have at work don’t talk to each other, which is rather frustrating. Think again to your mobile device. You download a new app and immediately you can log in with your Facebook, or LinkedIn details – you can access images from other apps, you can share content straight to Dropbox, iCloud, or wherever your chosen EFSS tool rests.
Not so in the business world apparently.
79% of people are having issues connecting information from different systems together, leading to a copy and paste culture that is both mind-numbing but also incredibly error-prone. And that is if you can access the system at all – a separate story (and I’m sure a future blog) revolves around how difficult it is to access content and information that is locked within legacy systems.
So there you have it – the top three EIM challenges in 2018.
Are these the only challenges – no, absolutely not. But these are the ones that are resonating most with the average end user, the people who for so long information management, or more specifically enterprise content management system vendors have failed to serve. But there is good news, lurking at the end of this blog! Enterprises have now realized why information management is important.
The future is bright – the new sheriff in town is the Content Services Platform. A new, bold and innovative challenger to kick ECM into the dim and dark past. A business-driven ideology that addresses all of the challenges detailed above, and more. A modern solution to modern problems – and more than that, a real solution to the challenges faced by everyday people trying to do their job as efficiently and effectively as they possibly can. Or to be precise, to be able to do their job as well as they can share birthday photos on Instagram.
2018 will be a year of change. Where outdated solutions and approaches for managing enterprise information disappear, and people start to look to Content Services Platforms to more effectively manage and harness their most valuable asset - their information assets.