Drive Digital Transformation with Enterprise Content Integration

Competition has intensified and forced businesses to innovate more quickly, generating new ways of serving customers, sometimes even with new business models or new business units or spun-off organizations. To remain relevant and grow amid this intensifying competition, businesses must undertake digital transformation. This is enabled by enterprise content integration.

Digital Transformation Defined

Digital transformation is the reinvention of an organization’s strategies and operations through the use of digital technology. (The term “digital” can be generally considered to mean technology that generates, stores and processes data.) Every business is already digital, but most businesses have not made full use of the latest digital technologies to re-imagine their products and services and deliver outcomes with greater value, agility, and efficiency.

These digitally transformed processes or workflows depend on files, communication, and collaboration. Files used for business aren’t found just anywhere. They’re typically stored in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint and Autonomy Documentum. Enterprise content integration securely connects these file repositories to other applications, workflows and interfaces, so their content can be accessed for business processes.

There is a growing need for businesses to use enterprise content integration, to support digital transformation, however, IT faces key challenges:

• Extending legacy systems and custom workflows to customers and partners
• Enabling businesses to choose best-of-breed applications, such as Office 365, Salesforce, Workday and others
• Delivering “one stop shop” access to end users looking for content stored on-premise and in-the-cloud, across multiple channels of engagement
• Ensuring data security and compliance with rigorous industry standards

The best approach to a successful digital transformation involves an agile and blended approach that extends legacy systems and enables new apps that leverage technologies such as SaaS, IaaS and PaaS. McKinsey and Associates refers to this as a “two-speed architecture,” supporting both rapid innovation in key customer-facing areas while ensuring that core, revenue-generating operations continue to hum along without interruption.

This blended or “two-speed” approach puts organizations in a much better position to implement digital interactions between employees, customers, and partners that rapidly deliver value, accelerate time to market, improve user experience, and provide a competitive advantage.

What does a successful digital transformation look like? Gys Hyman of Deloitte Consulting, paints a vivid picture in a recent article on digital banking:

A potential customer who opens a bank account in a matter of minutes—on a smartphone in a coffee shop with a selfie and optical recognition for physical ID—already likes her new bank. When her out-of-state ID triggers a personalized message, “It looks like you’re moving to our state—welcome!”—and invites her to click for information on pre-approved home loans, the customer relationship deepens. At the airport on her laptop a week later, when the customer reads the real estate statistics you sent, she now values the relationship. On her daughter’s 13th birthday, you let her know she’s eligible for a teen money management course, and she feels like she’s gained more than a bank.

This is digital transformation in action. It highlights how an organization can use digital technology to enhance innovation, creativity and customer satisfaction. This is possible because customer information is easily found and shared, which is enabled by enterprise content integration. Any organization, banking or otherwise, would be foolish not to embrace true digital transformation.

Security: A Growing Concern

It cannot be overlooked that the digital transformation is occurring at a time when data breaches are increasing in both severity and frequency. A digital workplace therefore must be a secure workplace. And this is no longer the sole responsibility of the IT department. A recent study conducted by BMC and Forbes Insights revealed 69% of executives confirmed that digital transformation is creating fundamental changes to their security strategies.

As developers, operations teams, and other members of the IT integration work on new digital transformation initiatives, it’s critical that they build security into the solutions they’re building. Enterprise content integration should follow best practices for authentication, encryption, and so on. Sharing of sensitive files should always be secure and auditable.

Enterprises should strive to innovate and accelerate their operations while also making them more secure and manageable.

Bringing it All Together with Enterprise Content Integration

Embracing digital transformation to enhance customer engagement enables organizations to realize a number of key benefits, including:

• Accelerate sharing of data and ability to communicate across multi-channel environments;
• Improve customer satisfaction by removing friction and delays in how information is exchanged;
• Protect customer data and adhere to compliance standards when sharing and collaborating on sensitive information.

One of the fundamentals of digital transformation is enabling organizations to share and act on content securely, including customer data, financial records, contracts, sales forecasts, marketing materials, multimedia, etc. Driving increased efficiency, policy enforcement and security to drive trust and value in the digital age especially in highly regulated and segmented industries like banking and healthcare, isn’t just beneficial but an imperative.

Additional Resources

• Blog Post Managed File Transfer Software
• Blog Post Enterprise File Sharing with Maximum Security & Compliance
• Blog Post Best Business File Sharing Software Solutions
• Blog Post Enterprise Content Management