By Les Walker, President, Enterprise Content Management, KMBS – With early adopters and desperate organizations looking for a way to decrease their use of paper-processes and increase their digitized content and archive, we’ve seen Enterprise Content Management (ECM)embraced by proactive firms with transformational leaders and savvy management.  They have taken their business processes and automated them for greater agility and integration with Line-of-Business (LOB)systems to give their people the tools they need for better productivity and providing an improved customer experience.

As other businesses approach what NTT Data has described as Enterprise 3.0, they can benefit from learnings early adopters have found.  Most often found in websites, social media bloggers, referrals or word-of-mouth information, the future adopter has become well-educated about ECM and potential applications specific to their industries and departmental pain points.
Along the Journey to Digital Nirvana, we see there’s an easy road and a rough road, and choosing the right road is affected by an organization’s environment: transformational leaders, the desire to connect, enabling innovators and looking at their business with a fresh perspective that the cloud and mobility provides.

Moving the enterprise forward is critical as all organizations realize they need to make business processing changes.  For future adopters, we expect to see:

1.    Greater willingness to change – because of the need to align with organizational goals
2.    Smarter advocates – who have done their ECM homework and can see where they can benefit
3.    Enlightened users at all levels of the organization  – driven by (internal and external) customers’ demands and aware of how their day-to-day processes can improve
4.    New facilitators – sorting out the needs and guiding organizations to the relevant solutions

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ECM by its very nature transforms a business’s operations and enables that customer-focus to be realized more readily.  It is the digitized information that opens the door to access, and, in turn, gives the business owners the information they need at their fingertips to transform how their organizations manage information as an asset. Undoubtedly, with active enablers, the task of adopting ECM is an easier road.