At the recent Enterprise World 2018 Conference, Stephen Ludlow, VP of Product Marketing at OpenText, spoke about the 4 strategies for content management success. He emphasized that there is actually a shift to content services from Enterprise Content Management. This is because ECM was mostly looked at as the lead application and content services represents a shift to consumable services that can be embedded into business processes and business applications.

1. Differentiate “ECM: Use-Cases

“The basics of ECM involving managing large amounts of structured and unstructured information is really differentiating itself into two significant work and use cases,” notes Ludlow. He said that the first one he would consider is the digital workplace, all the tools to make end users more productive in their day to day work, in particular around ad-hoc collaboration and communication. The other side of that is all the things around the digital business in order to make your business process more productive. That’s typically where we see content services being used to extend into business processes and business applications.

2. Amazing User Experience

“We think we need to provide an amazing user experience in order to drive user satisfaction, but also to drive efficiency for the end user and by doing so drive adoption of content services,” says Michael Sybala, VP of Product Engineering and Product Management at OpenText.” This is an area that OpenText has excelled at in my experience.

3. Workspaces Instead of Taxonomies

“If you ask me the taxonomy organizations that have deployed have ruined more ECM projects in the world than anything else I know of,” said Ludlow. “How many people have dealt with an enormous set of folders that have been created to try and organize permissions, to create and organize metadata and try and organize information? Everybody’s been through that sort of scenario.” He says that unfortunately this typically models the business rather than the business processes. for success Ludlow recommends that you use a workspace instead of a taxonomy to organize your information. “Using a workspace approach will make your users more effective,” notes Ludlow.

4. Extend Content Services and Ux Into Business Applications

“The concept of workspace is fundamental to build the integrations, we call it the extensions, into leading business applications,” says Sybala. “In large part that’s actually the secret sauce of our (OpenText’s) success over the last couple of years. It’s centered around how do we integrate into leading applications in order to serve those leading applications and the processes which are driven by them.” Applications may be in finance, procurement, HR, etc., but the key is to embed content management natively into the process so that the employee, partner or even customer can work seamlessly, possibly not even noticing that they are task jumping from platform to platform.