With digitalization, the demands of information and document management in companies have fundamentally changed. Content needs to be handled flexibly, and customer issues must be handled quickly and easily in order to stay competitive.
At the same time, it is important to be able to follow the service level agreements of Internet giants such as Google and Amazon: disruptive insurance paperless form conclusions, consultation consultations via video chat, reactions to customer questions in real time via mobile applications, online transfers and product shipments within 24 hours.
The functionality of the old Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution - the collection, management, storage and archiving of documents and information - no longer meets these new requirements. This is where content services from the cloud come into play.
What is Content Services?
Content Services are web-based services that are designed either as separate applications or as integrated solutions. They help companies manage content in a flexible, fast, and independent way from content types throughout the company. In addition to storing and archiving, they focus on the use and processing of content that is efficient and flexible. This contributes significantly to the acceleration of business processes.
The Content Services Platform combines enterprise content and has a central data repository. Unlike a monolithic ECM platform, it can be easily integrated with other repositories and archives thanks to various interfaces. This makes it easier for companies to track information, especially with an increasing number of digital sources - email, mobile applications, chat, online forms, and more.
The most common content services include data collection, indexing and categorization as well as documents, records and workflow management and analytics. Combined, this includes the life cycle of documents or information and digitizing and accelerating the document intensive process.
Integrated applications also provide solutions for specific applications. For example, think about digital personnel files, contract management and accounting applications, and industry-specific vertical applications, such as: For engineering or finance and insurance.
Step by step to the clouds
The migration from existing ECM systems to the cloud arises, depending on the size of the company, the volume of data and the number of applications used as giant projects. Many companies often avoid the clouds because of their thin size.
Conclusions promised by Content Services: they enable gradual changes in information management and integration of new cloud-based content services into existing on-premise systems. Such hybrid solutions give organizations the flexibility to migrate features to the cloud as needed and over a longer period of time.
In addition to high flexibility, cloud content solutions also offer other benefits: they can be implemented quickly, are easily scalable and require far less maintenance than on-premise models. The so-called low-code platform can also be comprehensively configured without programming efforts, according to department specific roles, roles, and regions. This can be specific functional as well as compliance requirements - the DSGVO keyword. Sophisticated disaster recovery capabilities also help IT quickly improve solutions in emergencies and restore critical business processes.
Digital work - anytime, anywhere
Digital Workplaces come true: content service platforms provide employees with content relevant to their work, anytime, anywhere, from the cloud - on a laptop, tablet or smartphone. Through workplaces that can be configured and personalized, they have access to the information and applications that they really need for their tasks.
This helps prevent overcompaction with large amounts of company content and applications, and ensures compliance with privacy and compliance guidelines. For example, a marketing employee does not need and may not access content from the legal, R&D or HR departments.
Employees can not only view content. You also have the opportunity to immediately edit important documents and assignments, regardless of where you are in the office, on the train or at the customer's location, and, if necessary, route into further workflows. This means, for example, that steps in the new customer orientation process can still begin at the first customer meeting - preparation of contract documents or compliance checks.
Workflows, collaborations, and intelligent automation tools also help relieve employees, speed up processes, process customer questions faster and thus increase customer satisfaction in the long run.
