"From the first document management systems in the 1980’s through to the ECM systems of the 2000s and 2010s, the vision has always been to create a single, central repository for all of the documents, emails, digital assets, and records stored and managed throughout the organization. As we have seen, the reality has been very different. Most businesses have multiple document and content management systems, many provisioned as departmental solutions, others embedded within financial, operational, or project-specific systems, and others as legacy implementations that were intended to be broad-scale content lifecycle management initiatives, but that did not live up to expectations.
New thinking is needed, and at the core of this new service-oriented view is the user, and what they need to do their daily job. They want somewhere secure to put the deluge of content coming to them from all directions. They want to be able to find that content when needed. They want to be able to share it with others in a safe way. And they want to be able to pull together all of the content that other people – and other business processes – have generated or stored in order to move their own business processes forward.
The user doesn’t really care where content is stored as long as they can always find it with ease, and then re-use it, share it, and/or embed it in their processes. Their biggest frustration (and productivity block) is when they’re prevented from finding or using content that resides in disparate systems that are difficult to access due to connectivity issues, login restrictions, search limitations, or lack of cloud and mobile capabilities.
In this report, we’ll look at how prevalent hard-to-access legacy systems are, how they impact performance, the difficulties involved in replacing them, and the benefits of deploying a content services platform to connect and consolidate them."
