Hot Trends in Enterprise Content Management You Cannot Ignore

As enterprises prepare for a post-pandemic world, they need to consider the evolving content management needs and think beyond the traditional enterprise content management (ECM) platform.

Join Anurag Shah, Newgen Software, and guest speaker Cheryl McKinnon, Forrester Research Inc., in an engaging webinar where they share valuable insights about the key trends in content management.

Agenda:

• Top 5 trends in ECM according to Forrester
• Newgen’s Contextual Content Services (ECM) Platform
• Q&A

Gunjan Kalita:                    Hi. Good morning and good afternoon everyone. Welcome to the webinar titled Hot Trends in Enterprise Content Management You Cannot Ignore presented by Newgen software, a leading provider of a unified digital transformation platform with native process automation, content services, and communication management capabilities with a multitude of implementations across the globe. I’m Gunjan Kalita, and I shall be your host and the moderator for this webinar today. We have guest speaker, Cheryl McKinnon, Principle Analyst at Forrester Research, and she is joined by Anurag Shah, Newgen’s VP of Products and Solutions. At the end of the webinar, we’ll be having a question and answer session. We request you to type your questions in the question window of your GoTo Webinar anytime throughout the session. I shall take them up at the very end with our experts. Without any further ado, I hand it over to Cheryl to take us ahead.

Cheryl McKinnon:            Great, wonderful. And thanks so much for the invitation to be here as a guest on your webinar today. As mentioned, my name is Cheryl McKinnon. I’ve been with Forrester Research now for almost 10 years, and over that time have been covering a pretty broad segment of the enterprise content management market as well as related spaces, such as collaboration, modern intranets, retention, deletion, and so on. So over the next little while, we’ll be talking about the importance of content and communication in today’s, what Forrester has been calling, our anywhere-work models. We know that there’s a lot of different changes in terms of work styles, and we’ll make sure that we talk about all of those. And then we’ll talk about some of the key trends that are really shaping the market in the ECM world.

Okay. So let’s get started with the role of content and communication in anywhere-work. So we know that there’s been a lot of really kind of various forms of disruption happening over the last two and a half years, almost to the point where we don’t need to mention that we’ve had to change, in many organizations, our working styles. But as we come into some form of normality, and of course this changes by jurisdiction to jurisdiction, organizations are really exploring and in some cases experimenting with different forms of return to office, stay remote, and many forms of hybrid and remote kind of in the middle, those hybrid modes. When we think about the components that are needed to support this anywhere-work model, of course we know that it impacts things like how we set goals, the fundamentals, the culture that the organization has. And a lot of the technologies that I cover content, collaboration, communications certainly falls within that third silo there, the technology. These core technologies required to make anywhere-work a success.

Now content has a huge role in supporting these various work models, and our data shows us that highly engaged employees really value the access that they have to the information to get their job done, and the ability to collaborate with their peers. We know there’s a lot of knowledge that now we need to think about documenting more proactively because we don’t have those in-person shoulder tap moments like we did two or three years ago. So that sometimes means we have to think about different behaviors, more discipline around how we create and organize our content, better practices around sharing it with our colleagues. In some cases, our clients or other external stakeholders as well. I think the most important thing is we know that we want to have a common ground, this experience, this digital offering, so that whether I’m a home worker or I’m sitting in an office or maybe working from a hotel business center the next day, we’ve got a common set of foundational technologies upon which we can create our content, communicate, and share our information and knowledge.

So this is really what we’re looking for from a big picture point of view. Now we do have to think carefully about this because according to some of our workforce surveys, and for those of you not familiar with Forrester Research we actually have many large scale surveys that we run on an annual basis serving typically thousands of both business and technology decision makers, and we do see that 62% of organizations, decision makers expect that their organizations are going to have a much higher degree of anywhere-work. So the models that we’ve adopted by necessity over the last two and a half years will actually become permanent for many organizations. Some differences there, vertical by vertical. We see energy, high tech, financial services at the higher end, healthcare and utilities perhaps where there’s more face to face requirement or out in the field requirement, we see that comes up as a little bit less. But 62% is our overall average.

Now we really want to think about this because we know that even pre-pandemic employee experience has continued to rise as an important investment area, an important priority on the executive radar. And if we think about these three key pillars of an employee experience framework, we think about how we can empower the employees, we think about how we can inspire employees. And of course, this is where the technology components come into the mix. How can we actually enable employees to do their job better? So what are the right services IT needs to bring to the table, the right kind of familiarity and training that they can make sure they’re comfortable with the tools that are provided, and that they can get access to the information they need to get their job done. That’s really essential here.

Now in some sectors and in some jurisdictions, we know that there’s a challenge in terms of attracting, retaining, and holding onto talent. We’ve heard the buzzword around the great resignation in the headlines over the last little while. But some of the things that we need to think about is that there are some differences as we look at vertical by vertical. As we think about different sectors, the impact of this idea of employee churn or employees looking for new opportunities are quite different vertical by vertical. My colleague, Katy Tynan at Forrester has done a great report very recently digging into some of the nuances around the vertical impact here. And so, for example, we see in industries where historically there had been high levels of churn already, such as retail, leisure, travel, continues to be a struggle there. In areas that are more stable, where perhaps there’s more long term job security or growth potential, public sector, financial services, education, we see less change in terms of the turnover pre- and during pandemic.

Now when we think about employee engagement, it’s really important to think about this because the organizations out there … again, this is coming from some of our technology surveys, organizations that are considered leaders in their sectors, they’re innovators, they’re the ones who are making investments on improving the employee experience. You’ll see though that there’s quite a difference between organizations that are perceived as leaders in their verticals or in their lines of businesses and those that are considered laggards. 43% of the leaders are investing in improving their employee experiences where just 2% of the laggards are making that same investment. So again, a strong correlation there in terms of keeping up the pace of innovation and making sure your employees have the skills and the resources they need to be successful.

But of course, nothing is perfect. We know that we still have challenges out there. This is both coming from Forrester’s data, but also many customer conversations over the course of the last several months. The challenges haven’t changed all that dramatically. We still know that organizations are struggling with information sprawl. There’s many locations for documents and data, on premises and cloud, personal convenience maybe in a personal drive of some kind within a corporate system. So duplication is also an issue. And organizations may be struggling because we know that a lot of organizations had to quickly adapt to cloud services and remote work a couple of years ago, and those previous efforts in terms of investing in heavy footprint on-prem systems may have been very difficult. I also talk to a number of organizations who don’t always take full advantage of the tools that they might already even have in their inventory. Taking better advantage of the collaboration, the cloud additions of the tools they might be using to support this idea of anywhere-work.

We also know that employees are struggling in some organizations to use the knowledge more effectively. Some of it may be contained inside documents, but some of it again may be in the heads or in the experiences of their colleagues, and making that bridge from in-person to digital may be a struggle. And again we know that some organizations, especially pre-pandemic, had struggled to kind of put a business case or return on investment on improving things like collaboration, information exchange. Well, I think now we’re starting to see that it’s a must have rather than a nice to have. But even years into our digital way of work, we know that organizations are still struggling to get their employees easily accessible content, that unstructured data. Our documents, our emails, rich media in some cases often continues to be a pain point because we haven’t necessarily put a good organizational structure and some process around how we create and share our information.

One of the concepts that Forrester’s been looking at over the last year or so in terms of helping organizations become more adaptive, become more resilient, and in fact even unleash some of the creativity, is to think about this idea of a future fit technology strategy. The way that we’ve been describing that is it’s a customer focus. We use the term customer obsessed, but that could be focus on citizens if you’re in public sector. Patients, if you’re in healthcare. You’re putting your audience first. As you make those technology decisions, the ones that are going to help enable your company to quickly reconfigure business structures. Right? We know that we need to be adaptable now that we’ve gone through an area of disruption. There may be a new disruption coming around the corner. And putting those future customer and employee needs at the center. We want to make sure that we continue to be adaptive, unleash our creativity where possible, and of course, be resilient, be able to withstand whatever next shock to the system may be around the corner.

So with this whole focus on retaining employees and thinking about making sure they have the right tools and the right information to get their jobs done, we’ve actually been looking at this idea of Digital Employee Experience, and content plays a really important role here. Now we don’t think of Digital Employee Experience as being a particular technology category. We think of it as, again, sitting in the chair of that employee. It’s the sum of all of the perceptions that we have as we work with the technology, hardware, or software that they use to complete their daily work, as well as manage the relationship with their employer across their life cycle. So it’s everything from the mobile devices and the hardware I’m given to run my apps and in this case communicate with colleagues and clients, it’s the applications that we use as well as the ability to just function as a digital employee. Can I take some time off? What’s the app for that? Can I log some expenses? Make sure that’s paid in a timely fashion. So all of these little perceptions add up to a total, that sum, and that’s what we think of as the Digital Employee Experience.

Now what’s the role of content, the role of information in this area? Well, some of our data, and we’ve been watching this data kind of solidify year over year, so one of the large scale surveys that we do is what we call our workforce survey. When we ask employees who self describe themselves to be highly engaged in their work, meaning that they are keen, they’re able to help, they’re not looking for other jobs, they really appreciate the opportunities that they have. When we take a look at those highly engaged employees, the things that they appreciate most about what their employer gives them are really tied for number one, the satisfaction they have, the collaboration technologies they are given, as well as their ability to get access to the information they need to get their job done. So think about the ability to find, navigate the trusted information to submit that proposal, to complete that contract, to answer a question of a client or a colleague. These are the two of the top things when we think about those highly engaged employees and what they appreciate about the tools they’re given.

Now when we think about content management, this is a mature market. We know it’s been evolving for 20, perhaps even 30, years at this point. And we’ve really come a long way from the architected for the world of on-premises that we saw perhaps a decade ago into this spot right now where we’re seeing more and more of these cloud native platforms, both from new players coming into the market, but also some really important innovation and re-architecture by vendors that have been in this market for a number of years, kind of bringing some of their experience with them into these new cloud platforms.

And as we see this idea of the platform emerge, it means that we are now looking at these cohesive platforms upon which developers, designers using low code or no code design and development techniques can build some of these useful, meaningful applications for their line of business users. And of course, what we’ve seen coming into the market over the last couple of years, especially more infusion of intelligent content services, meaning analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, to help automate routine activities and to help surface up some connections between content and people. So really kind of this is where we are in terms of the state of the market.

So with this innovation and some of this re architecture of these content platforms, we know that innovative companies want to make best use of these tools. Integrations with content management stacks and other essential line of business applications are also really key. One of the reports that we published just a few weeks ago anticipates the rise of what we’re thinking are going to be these Digital Employee Experience teams. So again, I said that a Digital Employee Experience wasn’t a product or a technology stack, but it is that perception. And we’re seeing forward looking organizations, we interviewed probably a dozen or so very large organizations around the globe, and we saw that these organizations were starting to bring together roles that previously were somewhat distinct or working in silos.

So we see this coming together, sometimes informally, sometimes more of an org chart, sometimes just kind of a dotted line relationship, but leaders in IT, leaders in HR, there might be VPs of Collaboration or Digital Workplace Technologies, End User Computing Specialists, those who understand the operating systems, hardware, et cetera. These teams are coming together because there’s a recognition that to truly deliver on that best possible employee experience, delivering the right content, the right data, the right experiences, they need to work together. I talked to an organization that wanted to pivot and do a lot more video for their employee education and so on, but it turns out they really hadn’t refreshed their infrastructure, their hardware, mobile devices in a number of years. So there was a risk of that failing, and that happened because these teams weren’t necessarily pulling the same direction, looking at the same success metrics. So we do expect that more and more organizations will want to bring these roles together, again, because in that battle to attract, retain, and serve employees, we want to make sure we’re all working in the same direction for that best experience.

So with that kind of high level of what’s going on in the market, those macro trends, we know content is a key component of this. We’re increasingly seeing organizations want to look at content and the processes around it, the collaboration around that content, as part of bigger picture digital workplace strategies. So content we know is not created in a vacuum. It’s related to our enterprise applications, it’s related to who we collaborate with, and it has to be consumed and used on those right end user computing services, whether it’s hardware or operating systems. So we see content really becoming part of this core productivity platform in this broader workplace strategy. So with that in mind, let’s talk about some of the hot trends that we’re seeing for the rest of 2022 and into 2023.

First off, we are continuing to see AI and machine learning, what I’ve been calling intelligent content services, really start to gain more widespread adoption for some really tactical, tangible use cases. Now we’ve seen content management vendors invest in this area for a number of years, but I think the tipping point is coming as we start to see more pre-packaged or pre-trained models for some of the common use cases. Probably one of the best examples out there are things like account payable processing or invoice processing, where these tools have been maturing and trained on very large numbers of sample invoices. So we can use that as a starting point, rather than using services maybe where we have to start from scratch and bring in developers, data scientists. Now we can hit the ground running. We’re also seeing more pre-packaged capabilities to assess and detect things like sensitive data, personally identifiable data, these common patterns we want to watch for, and investment in things like smarter knowledge and social graphs, again, to better connect content and people, make better recommendations.

The second trend that we’re seeing is that I’m having a lot more conversations with line of business leaders in addition to their IT counterparts. We’re starting to see kind of this evolution in the market where we know that developers and architects want to understand the underlying capabilities of a content platform, but the business leaders want to know, “Hey. Can you develop or design or tailor a user interface or an application that helps me solve some very specific problems in the market?” So much more focus, and in fact, more budget on the side of the business leaders for these packaged applications.

Third key trend is around this idea of the content microprocess. This is something we started to track pre-pandemic, but has continued to grow in terms of adoption and evolution over the last two and a half years. This simply means we want to bring content into some of those key essential business processes, those workflows, that need engagement from your external stakeholders, which could be customers, they might be vendors, suppliers, they could be external regulators. But at some point we know that they need to be an active participant in co-creating, in reviewing, or approving content.

Fourth trend, we’re continuing to see rising interest, this resurgence of interest, in knowledge management. As I’ve been talking to organizations over the last couple years about this, we’re starting to see that we need to kind of demand more from the way that we not only organize and capture and use metadata to organize our content, but how we create content in the first place. Much more interest in terms of helping tools to curate the right knowledge components out of these massive documents that we have, and capture more knowledge in the flow of work. Again, recognizing that we’re staying in higher proportions of remote or hybrid work and that we need to capture information before employees potentially could leave our organization or change roles.

And the fifth key trend, this is a new one for this year as well, we’re seeing a lot more interest in understanding how to apply retention and disposition rules, things that may be present in an archiving or records management module in a content platform. Privacy has really started to become a primary driver in why and how organizations are looking to execute on some of their deletion policies. We know that there’s a lot more fines coming out. We’re seeing those cases in Europe, we’re seeing the emergence of privacy laws in other jurisdictions. Organizations are now looking at minimizing their data footprint, cleaning up those sprawling file shares, getting rid of risky duplication, and looking for the tools and the policies to be able to manage that consistently and execute on those deletion policies.

So those are the key trends that we’re tracking for the next year or so. Just a little bit of a click down into each of those, and then I’ll hand it over to our hosts in just a moment. Again, we talked about AI and machine learning kind of continuing to push the envelope in shaping this market. We’ve consistently seen organizations putting this on their short term roadmap, either they’re planning to implement in the next year or so. I think as we see vendors make those investments in more pre-trained models, user interfaces that are designed for the non-developer, non-data scientists, but perhaps for an information manager or a subject matter expert, this is where we’re going to start to see accelerating adoption.

I mentioned earlier that as we move into this maturing of the content platform era, I’m getting a lot more interest from line of business leaders to know, “How can we solve these very particular, tangible business problems where I have a budget where I have a pain point?” So we’re seeing interest in terms of applications for things like loan origination in financial services, quality management apps in things like construction or manufacturing, intranets, accounts payable. And again, one of the hottest areas that we’re we’re seeing right now is in the area of employee experience and HR. We’re talking to organizations that are looking to mass generate large numbers of offer letters, non-disclosures, so document generation is certainly rising in importance. Employee file management, various compliance needs in different jurisdictions, health and safety document control. So these are just examples of what I mean by the line of business really wants to understand how to solve a pain point. They have a budget to do so. The platform offerings in terms of these content services, this is where the architects and developers are going to help them make that decision on what’s the most flexible platform to deliver on these real world scenarios.

Third, we talked about the content microprocesses and the need to, at some point, break through that wall of enterprise and go out to your external party, like a customer, like a citizen, like a supplier. So if you’re onboarding a new vendor, if you’re onboarding a new employee, if you’re co-creating an agreement with a client, these are those moments where we need to reach out and get from a B2B, or perhaps a B2C point of view, get that content, submit the form, get your supporting documentation, finalize things, perhaps go for digital signature. So those moments that connect business to business is what we think of as this content microprocess.

Fourth key trend that we mentioned, knowledge management. I tend to think of knowledge as curated information. We know we have lots of data. We’ve got lots of documents out there, but at some point we need to refine and curate the best examples. Winning bids, precedence, great templates to reuse. When I think of knowledge, it’s not just the data and the content, but it’s the explanation of why a decision was made. It’s the insight into how I’ve seen this unfold 10 times over in the last couple of years, and capturing that knowledge both in terms of formal documentation, but as well, just getting that experience shared more proactively as part of making sure our information is complete. In the remote and anywhere-work model, this is going to continue to become more and more important.

And the fifth and final trend that we’ll mention here, I mentioned that privacy has emerged as one of the new drivers of rising interest in executing on retention and deletion programs. Some of my colleagues in our security and risk team do a great job every couple of years watching the trends in terms of what jurisdictions are implementing various forms of privacy and data protection laws. So that if you’re a global organization, you have a clear expectation of how you may need to change some of your data collection, your data preservation, your data deletion practices. So with that, I will turn it over to our host at Newgen.

Gunjan Kalita:                    Thank you Cheryl, I mean, for some really great insights into the latest trends that are shaping, and that will shape, the enterprise content management that we know. And as the title of the webinar goes, you just can’t ignore them. Now I invite Anurag to give us a glimpse. I’ll just hand over the control to you as well. There we go.

Anurag Shah:                     Thank you. I hope you are able to see my screen and hear me clearly?

Gunjan Kalita:                    Both okay.

Anurag Shah:                     Fantastic. Thank you. I mean, that was really a great insight from Cheryl talking about the hot trends. What I’m going to do here for the next few minutes is kind of taking a lead from what she talked about and then take you through those aspects of content in the context of business, in the context of the Digital Employee Experience, resulting into the final deliverable for the customer, which is customer experience. So let me start by giving the three aspects of digital transformation acceleration and hyperautomation.

So of course customer experience remains the central point, the central focus, which drives the top line of any enterprises, which influences the brand image of our enterprises. And within that, we are looking at increasing and growing the customer base. It encompasses your constituents like agents, solicitors, underwriters, partners. And then we are looking at what we call operational efficiency which, again, relates to the Digital Employee Experience that Cheryl talked about and touched upon several facets of that. So what all it means is how critical is the journey for completing what the customer is asking in streamlining the operations, improving the performance, and at the end of it, the entire operational efficiency drives and improves your bottom line. And then the third aspect that we are touching upon here is the innovation in the business. Again, Cheryl also talked about this with respect to the leaders and laggards within the business. We are looking at it slightly different, but correlated with what Cheryl talked about that how are you able to continuously innovate within your business, identify those new and existing business areas and opportunities, and try to grow that.

So let us see these five things which really are integral for any content and communication platform. The content, of course, the content services, which traditionally has been termed as enterprise content management. It includes the document and all of those things. But it is no longer just limited to that content management system now, and again Cheryl talked about this intelligent document within the content services. So how are we processing the document intelligently? How are we taking care of the records management, retention, disposition policies, managing the communication with your customers, managing the communication with your partners, with your service providers, suppliers, vendors? And not only limited to that, managing your communications within your employee base, within your operations, and resulting that into a contextual conversation with your customers from your employees, bringing the third party partners and vendors into that. So all of those taken together is what we are seeing today as a platform, which the enterprises need.

So if you really look at the actionable context within the content management, today we are looking at … I mean, across the enterprises, we are looking at managing a wide variety of the content and a large volume of content. It would range from the messages, social media, tweets, and documents. Not only limited to that, if you really look at complex mission critical business, for example, let’s take an example of a commercial loan in a bank, when a bank or a credit union is originating a large size commercial loan, let’s say for a commercial real estate construction, one of the skyscrapers in Manhattan with several million dollars of loan, which a borrower is asking. The banks have to really analyze and do their due diligence on a complex kind of content, which includes the balance sheets of those borrowing organizations, the profit and loss statements, the cash flows, and it runs into hundreds and hundreds of data points. It runs into tens and tens of those financial ratios as the information called out from those documents.

And across several years, maybe last three years, last five years, so that’s the kind of complexity and the content that we are talking about here. And then the drawings, the videos. I mean, in last two years we have seen … last two and a half years of pandemic, we have seen increased usage of audio and video and how you have all of those meetings that we did on audios and on videos, Teams, Zoom, WebEx, we are here on a video webinar. All of those are creating content. How are you managing those? And then how are you securing the access of these contents, including the documents and the videos? Are there PII information, sensitive information? Are you able to redact those? Not only on the static document and email and text, but also within the videos, within the audios. Anywhere access, I mean, work from home 62%, the survey within Forrester is showing that probably 62% of the workforce will continue to work from home. So are those any time and anywhere access to the entire content, enabling, viewing, editing, annotating, accessing, retrieving, searching on those, are all of those included in the workforce?

And then it is not only limited to going into a repository, searching, and working on that. Today the employees and the workforce are working in several business applications, several work group applications. Invoice processing, for example, one of the examples that Cheryl talked about. If somebody is working on an ERP application and wants to see an image of a purchase order or the goods received note or the invoice itself which came in, can we seamlessly provide that within that interface itself instead of asking the employee to come out of it, go to a content services platform, log in, search, and retrieve? Can we take all of those away and create that seamless experience for the employee? And I think that’s what Cheryl talked about, extending that digital experience for the employee. So those are the things which matter here.

So if you really see few of the examples of the documents, which typically are worked upon in enterprise … I mean, your customer identification program, CIP, or know your customer, KYC, within banks, insurance companies, your policy documents. Those documents messages not only managing those, but let us say, if you have customer whom you did your due diligence before you onboarded them on your bank or in your insurance company, are you doing that regularly every year? Complying with the regulations and guidelines or is your content services platform triggering those automated KYC and CIP yearly? And so on and so forth. There may be other examples. In the example that we took earlier, commercial loan origination, if there are governance. There are insurance governance on collaterals, and those insurance governance are due for renewal every year. Are you tracking those, getting those renewed and revised governance for your internal record keeping?

And all of this content, looking at it from a long term archival perspective, it is not only again limited to how you archive and retrieve. Are those archivals complying with a baseline, complying with the governance, complying with non-repudiation, not making duplicate copies, maintaining those integrity of all of those and various global standards? Whether your record management policies complying to Department of Defense guidelines or GDPR or if there are payment or credit card related information complying to those PCI DSS and several ones. And all of these things with the feature of including taxonomy, retention, disposition policies. Physical records as well as electronic records, both coming into the purview of your archival management.

When we look at the content and we see how those content are participating in your business really and truly it is resulting into a communication which goes out to your customers, which goes out to your partners, which works internally within your employees and your operations. So are you able to design those attractive design, quick and agile changes, rolling it out? Covering omnichannel, whether it is text on a mobile or a traditional email printing or an interactive web based media. So all of those things if you see on the customer experience, how those customer experience are getting enhanced. Whether it is, again, a customer coming to a bank for a loan and getting that approval status, approval notifications, or approval letter as a communication back to the borrower, or if it is a service request which I am going to an insurance company asking for certain service on my policy. How those status updates are coming back to me in my preferred channel, if I want it on a text on a mobile or if I want it as email or if I want to go into my online access of those things.

And there are other examples, like welcome letter for the customer onboarding. All of these communications, again, relate and become an integral part of your operational excellence that we started in my initial slide. How the leadership team is monitoring those service level agreements and circumventing the breadth of that. If, let’s say, there is a customer transaction in a bank or a credit union, if there is a customer transaction which results in anti-money laundering checks, are we able to track those and take care of those things? And you realize when you look at those conversations, the content, participating into the conversations in the digital world today, capturing and analyzing those communications, sensing those communications socially in the context of the process, in the context of the customer engagement. Whether the sentiment is neutral, picking certain keywords from those conversations, identifying the products and services being referred there, classifying the intent of those communications, assigning certain internal confidence score, deploying those artificial intelligence into all of those things, and then creating that communication journey, building that communication journey using these conversations.

So things like natural language processing technology, creating those conversational bots, being able to automatically respond to the queries, respond to the queries with resolutions, all of those things. Triaging your service requests automatically, finding those instantaneous quotes which a customers need and presenting it back to them. If there is a policy for an insurance customer and there is a renewal coming up in next 30 days, sending those reminders, again, in their preferred channel. And all of these things, we talked about content, we talked about communication and the business applications which kind of superimposed the content and the business applications getting superimposed and interact with each other, so the integration platform within the content services play a vital role here.

The catalogue of services, certain pre-integrated table stake services, for example, eSign. If there is a content, if there is a document generated which needs a signature from the customer, then is electronic signature feature built into the content management or do you have to do it time and again for each and every line of business and function? So those pre-integrated services, frameworks for the integration, creating those microservices to enable content on the business application interface. We talked about one of the examples in accounts payable for the invoice processing, where on the ERP interface, enterprise research planning business application interface itself, if we are able to present the content and the documents, DevOps for continuous improvement, continuous deployment, on cloud, on-prem, hybrid.

And last but not the least, the artificial intelligence, the role of artificial intelligence in content services platform. Bringing the insights, using the analytics, managing those taxonomies, looking at content analytics, supporting business through AI and ML. If we just take a few aspects of AI/ML, how it plays within the content management. Right? So looking at your repository, identifying those types of content based on the format, look, and feel, or based on the content, extract certain information, and try to classify, try to index, try to file those things without any human intervention. And then not only index and classify and file, but then take it to the next level within the taxonomy definition, next level of identifying those privacy and sensitive information, be able to redact those.

I mean today we all are living with the smart devices, several megapixel cameras, taking pictures, creating those videos, creating those heavy files, and then going those all into your repository. But in a day to day operation when those heavy files are required to be exchanged across different employees, across different stakeholders, does it make sense where it is possible and where it is allowed to convert those into lower size, black and white, compressed documents, images, media, so that it becomes easier and quick to share within the collaboration framework? And then looking at those businesses content processes and microprocesses that, again Cheryl talked about, looking at analytics engine to participate into that with industry specific applications. Whether it is business applications within a bank, doing a loan origination, or in invoice processing ERP, or a policy admin system in an insurance companies, all of those things. Standardizing the document set and creating those template libraries as part of all of these AI and ML technology, which goes into your repository and creates those.

So all of those things participate and create the content services platform within an organization. This is my concluding slide. If you really see the different actors who collaborate in any of the customer journey for all your business operations. So we talked about customer experience, we talked about vendors, we talked about Digital Employee Experience, and your extended ecosystem which includes your brokers, agents, lawyers. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. If you really see who all are contributing in order to deliver these things to the customers, in order to enable your employees, in order to collaborate with your ecosystem, your internal sales, products, IT, finance, your administrations, all of such functions and the related actors within those functions collaborate and participate into the journey. So when we look at the content services platform, we should not just be focused on the top of the actors, but we should also encompass and entail all of these actors within that. And with that, let me hand it back to our host Gunjan.

Gunjan Kalita:                    Thank you Anurag. That was a very wonderful overview of Newgen’s platform, and a great glimpse into how Newgen is aiding this motion. We do have some questions from the audience. Let me take them up one by one. The first question that I have right here, I can address it to Cheryl.

Cheryl McKinnon:            Okay.

Gunjan Kalita:                    What are some of the limitations in ECM systems that were exposed during the last two years?

Cheryl McKinnon:            Yeah, that’s an interesting one. I would say a couple of things kind come top of mind. One is organizations that have still invested in predominantly older on-premises architectures sometimes struggle to get that content accessible to employees. I know I talked to some large government organizations and they didn’t have sufficient laptops to send everyone at home or VPN licensing. So there was some struggle there to kind of equip people to get access to some of those older architectures. So I think the first one is that we’ve seen that cloud and hybrid really is a much more effective architecture to support anywhere-work in many scenarios. And then I think the other thing is just the fact that more of these collaborative content services have really risen to kind of the top of the requirements list. Again, just because we’re serving employees that might be in very distributed environments.

Gunjan Kalita:                    Perfect. Thank you Cheryl. And next up, let me put this across to Anurag. And this is quite interesting because legacy content management systems may be holding enterprises back, but often the worry is that the cost of migration to modern systems is not small. So how should enterprises evaluate the ROI against such investments?

Anurag Shah:                     Yes, that’s an interesting one. In fact, that’s a dilemma which a lot of enterprises and our customers and prospects that we interact with. I have been hearing that a lot. And the reason is … so let me take it in two parts. The reason why it is a concern is because the content, which is living in an enterprise or an insurance company or a bank as you see, it is living for the last, let’s say 15 years, 20 years, 30 years, and the way content has evolved. Those content in the last two or three decades which are existing are in different shapes and formats and places scattered all over enterprises. And today when we are looking at the digital experience for employees, digital experience for customers, your vendors and everyone, when we look at that, the enterprises do not want to be limited by the limitation of how and where the content is.

So when we look at modernizing the content services for an enterprise, it does not always mean that we have to migrate, but creating a platform which can one, work and coexist with whatever today you have and give you a path and a way to be able to migrate certain things, to be able to include those traditional and historical repositories within the modern platform. So things the Federation, where the content services can federate and go into your file shares, go into your other places, databases, other storage medias. And then crawling all of those deploying and employing technologies, like artificial intelligence, trying to identify, “What do I have in the last 20 years of those? Can I identify what all are my ID cards? What all are my applications? What all are my supporting documents?” And then creating a taxonomy out of that and giving that digital experience for the employees when they are trying to work in a context of any process.

So long story short, I mean, migration certainly is a concern. But more than that if the enterprises today start looking at it as a coexistent modernized platform, I think that’s the way to go.

Gunjan Kalita:                    Thank you Anurag. Perfectly answered. And these were the ones from the audience. And finally, I have one that I have carefully chosen for both of you that I drafted. This is something I ask, what is that one thing in the context of ECM that executives and technologists should be thinking about and strategizing for, to be prepared for the world in five years? Probably I can take it up with Cheryl first.

Cheryl McKinnon:            Yeah. I think if I had to pick one thing, I would look at what is the future of documents themselves going to look like. I think we’re getting ready for some change in terms of seeing more componentized or modular forms of content as well as we know that we’re using much more large scale formats, we’re doing so much video recording for now. And that introduces new questions about things like sustainability and long term preservation. So I think that’s one thing I would suggest is just the future of what is a document itself may start to change.

Gunjan Kalita:                    Alright. Thank you. Anurag?

Anurag Shah:                     I could not agree any more than that, 100% in that. I just wanted to probably add one thing in there. Yes, audio, video, interactive content is the future. It is what is going to come in the next five years. But if somehow we are able to … again, I will go back to the same migration thing. If somehow we are able to connect those with our traditionally archived last two or three decades of content. So today, for example, if in a contact center operation, there is a video interaction which is being done in an insurance company, let’s say with a policy holder, trying to do something with their policy. And there is content corelated with this service, which was collected from the policy holder let’s say five years back or 10 years back, somehow in this digital interaction if that can be presented contextually to the user of the insurance company and to the customer and the policyholder, I think that’s one of the things that will help bridge that gap and silo together to give that holistic digital experience.

Gunjan Kalita:                    Perfectly answered. Thank you Anurag and thank you Cheryl, always a pleasure hosting you.

Cheryl McKinnon:            My pleasure.

Gunjan Kalita:                    We really appreciate your time and valuable insights. Do expect an email from us with a copy of the recording. To all the attendees, those who were not able to share the questions today, please feel free to send them over via email. If you are interested to know more or if you want to see a free demo of our platform in action, do visit our website or write to us at info@newgensoft.com. Thank you again and have a great rest of the day ahead.

Anurag Shah:                     Thank you.

Cheryl McKinnon:            Thank you everyone.