With information continuing to grow at an exponential rate year after year, organizations face a lot of challenges managing their information and that’s where ECM solutions can be of an extreme help.
Through their unified repository across the organization, ECM solutions made it easier to manage and retrieve content. Taking that into consideration and knowing that information has become the most valuable asset, ECM with the help of BI tools will allow companies translate their collected vital data into insights of their business processes.
In this article, we will see the importance of leveraging the organization information using the most powerful business intelligence tools in the market and the benefits of having these tools integrated within your ECM system.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics.
Wikipedia
Why Business Intelligence should be part of ECM?
As mentioned earlier, ECM provides centralized information repository across the organization. Having all organization information in one place and with the help of business intelligence tools, executives and managers will be able to make faster business decisions based on insight information.
Having a system that will allow your organization to collect its information and the capability to help in data analysis and make the data visually meaningful to executives and managers will certainly make a big difference in how your organization do business.
ECM solutions should have seamless integration with some of the most powerful business intelligence tools in the market i.e QLIK, Decision Point, PowerBI to allow users to have ONE SINGLE SYSTEM to manage and organize content, automate processes, and enable fast decision making.
Advanced Data Visualization
Some ECM solutions available in the market provide advanced data visualization capabilities which will also compliment the need for integration with business intelligence tools.
Some of these capabilities could be
- Charts (pie, column, bar, etc.)
- gauges
- Pivot
Using these capabilities will allow top level managers to visually identify a certain concern or to draw attention on some aspects of business operations.
For instance, in one implementation of the ECM solution i’m currently managing, a multinational construction company used it within their HSE (Health, Safety, and Environment) department. An employee will make sure to submit incidents and their details happening in the construction project on a daily basis. After some time, using the charts capabilities available in the system, they were visually able to report the data for managers for detailed analysis. As an example, one of the charts was to show what are the most body parts getting injured and which time most of injuries are happening.
In summary as ECM solutions are evolving, organizations will be able to achieve higher level of ROI and that explains why the market size of these solutions will continue to grow in the future.
How do you handle the areas or people who still want to maintain a copy in their area outside of the EMC? For instance – payment dates or modifications to the Agreement. Handling duplication of records?
If some of the documents need to be available as hard copy, it should also exist in electronic form in ECM or document management system. whatever happens to the physical document, it should be reflected in ECM (new version, etc)
in this way, it will Increase accountability by tracking the chain of custody through an auditable access history in addition to faster locating physical record information as it relates to electronic content