I spend a lot of my time writing and speaking about trends in the content management marketplace. As many of you know, I regularly blog under the Digital Landfill title, and I’ve also been fortunate to be invited as a guest columnist on the DocuWare blog from time to time.
For bloggers and columnists, we all know that this holiday time of the year means it’s time for two traditions:
- A look back upon what we’ve learned;
- and a look ahead at what’s to come in 2018.
Well, who am I to break with holiday traditions?
So relative to the “look back” tradition, I asked the DocuWare folks for a list of the top 10 posts on the Docuware blog this year. That list follows; take a look.
A few of these posts are written by me and most are by Docuware CEO Thomas Schneck. They are good reading and offer a quick snapshot of the content management issues that I hear end user organizations discussing all the time:
- Automated Accounting Starts with These Four Processes
- The Why? The How? And the What? (of Document Management)
- How Cloud Document Management Can Cure 5 IT Headaches
- New European Data Protection Regulations Can Guide Your Company's Policies
- Cloud document management - What opportunities are you missing?
- The CFO is the New CIO
- A Change Management Plan: Usually Easier Said than Done
- There's No "Oops" in Regulatory Compliance
- Change Management Disrupted -- With User-Centric Document Management
- Three Reasons Cloud Content Management Changes the ECM Game
Which brings me to the second holiday tradition, a “look ahead.”
I’ve used the top 10 posts from 2017 as predictive tool to identify the core information management issues users will face in 2018. I did so by look for the most common two-word themes in the posts. Here they are (with a bit of grouping) and the 5 key trends for your 2018 planning that these keywords suggest.
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Trend |
Top two-word phrases |
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#1 -- New business pressures require new approaches to information management. |
“Digital Transformation” “Business Model” “The Cloud” |
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Organizations face pressure to refocus their business models – and the information management systems that support them – around customer, partner, and employee journeys. The cloud provides the scalability and agility needed to support new business model. |
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#2 – Business agility will become THE key competitive advantage. |
“Digital Workflows” “Process Transformation” |
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Business process automation – the “digitalization” of business processes – is no longer just a “back-office” cost-reduction exercise. These processes are now exposed to the customer and critical to customer experiences. |
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#3 – The CFO will become an increasingly important information management decision maker. |
“The CFO” “Financial Processes” |
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The information that is created by financial processes is used in countless other processes and departments. Finance is the glue – in both a good and bad sense! Organizations are demanding business process transformation in accounting and finance, creating pressure for a new and more strategic role for finance leaders. |
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#4 – As the volume, variety, and velocity of information increases, organizations must finally commit to automated compliance. |
“Regulatory Compliance” “Data Protection” |
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The new European privacy regulations – the GDPR is effective in May 2018 – will find many organizations unprepared. Leading edge organizations will realize that GDPR is just the beginning of a long-term commitment to built-in information compliance and security. |
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#5 – Self-service information management requires user-friendly and business-friendly information management tools. |
“Change Management” |
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Centralized IT department-driven information management will collapse as ownership of key processes is pushed to the business and the demand for “self-service” and SaaS solutions rises.
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It is time for organizations to make a commitment to the future – or risk irrelevancy in a rapidly changing world. In a Digital Age, information is the central nervous system of your business.
- Document management and workflow process automation free your people – your most important asset – from the manual drudgery of their jobs.
- Document management and workflow process automation provide a consistent platform for individual employees to self-improve and automate their own processes.
- Document management and workflow process automation give you a place to start on the journey to digital transformation.
- Document management and workflow process automation are critical to keeping your customer’s information private and secure.
What are you waiting for?
Put “We will treat information assets with as much seriousness as we treat financial, physical, and people assets” at the top of your list of company New Year’s resolutions.
Learn more about enterprise content management.
