The exponential multiplication of digital documents (but also of other content such as images, photos, audio, video, tickets, chat, logs, etc.), poses new technological challenges to Corporate ITs to which Document Management Systems (DMS) and traditional Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions – originally conceived as collaboration tools, rather than archiving – struggle to give effective answers.
In fact, medium and large companies that over time have adopted Legacy document platforms (for example, IBM Filenet, Content Manager, Content Manager On-Demand, OpenText Documentum), but also Open solutions (eg. Alfresco), and/or Database/File System custom or proprietary applications, in order to meet the new requirements that Digital Transformation imposes on Front-end (Home Banking, Home Insurance, portals, e-commerce,…) and Back-office apps, they find themselves forced to start long integration projects that must necessarily consider these document sources complexity and heterogeneity.
Moreover, the “Single View of Customer” (SVOC) necessary to activate new generation functionalities and to respond adequately to regulations such as the GDPR, often turns out to be a chimera, precisely because of the number, proliferation and technological variety of these repositories.
What evolutionary paths can be imagined?
The traditional DMS migration to more innovative and economical on-premise or cloud platforms would be the most obvious solution, especially considering that today there are software solutions that can implement, with reasonable effort, complex transfers of millions or billions of documents (equivalent to tens or hundreds of Terabytes), wherever they are.
But often, especially in large companies, there can be internal resistances to one-shot migration. So, what to do?
In these cases, there is an interesting opportunity to allow a centralized orchestration of the digital content present in the various existing document repositories, without “touching” DMS, relieving them of the burden of queries, enabling them to contemporary technological architectures and avoiding annoying lock-ins related to storage and software licenses.
The “orchestration” and “migration” options of digital documents, in reality, are not alternatives, but part of a progressive evolutionary path fully in line with the urgencies of digital transformation.
At this point, the choice of the Enterprise-class software platform, conceived on innovative paradigms able to guarantee an effective implementation and a long term vision, becomes crucial…