How To Stress Less About Enterprise Content Management

Every company wishes that they could stress less about enterprise content management (ECM). Keeping a clean enterprise content environment is a lot like keeping a clean house. Employees are sticky-handed children with mud on our shoes, too busy slaying dragons to worry about the messes we leave in our wake.

Ok, maybe that is a bit of an exaggeration but the fact that invoice receipts, sales leads, marketing assets, and contracts tend to be haphazardly tossed in the corner like a pile of dirty laundry is true for many busy organizations. If it doesn’t require action or immediate attention, enterprise content tends to fall subject to the “out of sight, out of mind,” philosophy.

However, companies need to comply with tons of standards, regulations, and processes. And when important documents are unorganized and inaccessible, this creates a stressful business environment. At an enterprise level, a company needs to avoid the pitfalls of non-compliance, but employees don't intuitively organize as they go because instead of records management being strategically integrated into the business, it’s added on as a one-off task that is easy and tempting for busy professionals to put off for “later.”

But what if the company could put the right tools in place so that compliance is transparent, effortless, and, therefore, stressless?

I’m happy to tell you that enterprise content management doesn’t have to be a dreaded chore. Strategic business application platforms are enhancing traditional ECM with a fresh top-down perspective and on emerging technologies like cloud.

Here’s how to achieve the stress free future your team deserves:

Easy document capture

A centralized document repository isn’t exactly a revolutionary idea, but unnecessarily labor intensive and disjointed workflows create barriers for employees. If it's too much a hassle to put documents in the library, it often doesn’t happen. Employees need simple, immediately accessible ways to put documents in the right place.

Some solutions include the ability to:

• Send emails from your inbox to your repository and turn them into documents
• Drag and drop files from Google Drive
• Scan papers and send the images directly from your scanner
• Snap a photo with your mobile and upload it to your repository
• Create content in your ERP or CRM and send it to your library via a connector

Version Control and Publication Process

What's more stressful than not finding the document you're looking for? Finding too many versions of the same document!

Cross-departmental teams need to be able to retrieve information on-demand. If someone in the organization searches for the "official" sales presentation and he/she finds five instances, it will cause confusion regarding which asset to use and increase the likelihood that dated or inaccurate information is presented to an external audience. Yikes!

A clear validation and publication process for company's assets ensures that there is a single place to look for important documents and that the right version of each asset is current, accurate, and ready for use.

Automated Permissions

If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You’re probably better off than a lot of companies. So why are YOU still stressing about content management? Is it because a lot of content solutions only address tagging and filing, which leaves IT and leadership with a big steaming pile of…. security concerns?

Setting document access permissions is a critical responsibility. With the right folder structure and predefined permissions in place, employees will sleep better because they know that when their important documents are filed into the designated folder, the confidential information won’t be accidentally shared with unauthorized people.

For the best peace of mind, rely on automatic rules for sharing and unsharing documents based on specific steps in their life cycle. Each time a manual task is required to change permissions for a document, there's room for an error.

Transparent Retention

Automated retention policies add the next level of security to your information management strategy. By assigning retention rules to your repositories and folders, no one need worry nor even know the logistics about the retention or disposal of business-critical documents. As long as employees put the document in the right folder, compliance and retention can be fully automated behind the scenes.

“Our users don’t even realize they’re managing documents. They’re just doing their jobs.”

- Susan J. Sullivan CRM, Information Governance Administrator

Click here to learn how Pitkin County is leveraging automation to optimize their records management.

Incorporate, Then Migrate

As straightforward as it is to achieve a stress-free relationship with enterprise content, old habits die hard and so does old technology. A stress-less solution also requires a stress-less implementation.

Unfortunately, that is hard for some companies to find. Repository and workflow-oriented solutions operate in technological silos. The transition process for these migrations requires companies to metaphorically turn off one tool before turning on another, migrate entire libraries, and retrain the workforce - very timely and expensive burdens.

Good news! It doesn’t have to be that way. You can get rid of all your legacy systems, which fuel worries about maintenance, infrastructure costs, etc. With the right migration tools and professional services team, we will help you eliminates all stressful legacy systems.

This is where a content management platform, like AODocs, is important. A business application with big picture vision not only provides the context and structure on which to base your metadata and workflow but it also integrates solutions for executive-level concerns, like security and compliance.

To learn how to stress less about your content management systems, sign up for a complimentary consultation with one of our ECM specialists.