Electronic Records Management is an important initiative undertaken by any organization and has been a priority for both public and private sector organizations for a long time. But, despite well established operating procedures and several options available in the market, organizations are still struggling to outline an effective electronic records management strategy that can sustain for at least a decade and ensure successful implementation of an Electronic Records Management system (EDRMS).
Well, there is no easy answer to this problem. However, if one understands business needs and creates a records management strategy taking future requirements into consideration, it can lead to a successful record management initiative that would serve an organization for a longer period of time.
So with my experience of implementing and overseeing large and complex records management implementations, here are some insights and key suggestions that can help you overcome major roadblocks.
See the Bigger Picture
Record Management Systems, sometimes, are implemented as an initiative of a local team trying to solve their departmental problems. In such cases, organizations misses an opportunity to lay a strong foundation for an organization-wide record management implementation and limits itself merely to a local system which does not suffice in the long run. Such system soon becomes inadequate and obsolete. So, don’t let too much focus on your current pain areas result in an inadequate blueprint. The bigger picture blueprint should include:
Centralized Records management policies -This is the heart of a robust RMS and system should offer support for- defining taxonomies, record numbering schemes, retention & disposition policies, off-lining policies, data transfer schemes to National Archive etc.
End-to-end content management – The focus of your strategy should be on managing complete lifecycle from capture, processing to archival of all content types such as – paper records, emails, scanned copies, social media content etc.
Integration with other enterprise & workgroup systems (especially email)
To ensure that you are on the right track, you can use certain certification guidelines such as DOD 5015.2, VERS and MOREQ. Out of these, DOD 5015.2 is the most comprehensive and dependable. Also, certified RMS software products available in market, greatly de-risks your implementation by providing comprehensive and compliant features.
What to opt for – bespoke or force-fit system?
As a part of your implementation strategy, going for detailed customization is not an option. There is no point, indulging in some complex software development when good options are readily available for use. The question is how to implement a good product effectively. Depending on varying business needs, specific customizations may be required in the system. So while implementing, one should look out for:
Storage Management – A good RMS product should offer a customizable framework and options for physical record management as per organization warehouse layout (if physical records are managed in-house).
Scalability – system should be scalable to any other unique process in the organization
Bar-Code/RFID integration
The key point here is that your RMS strategy should be a good blend of – a robust product with customizable framework, so that it’s a perfect fit for your business needs.
Managing complexity v/s ease-of-use tradeoff
With all due-diligence and consideration of the above points, it may still lead to low adoption as solution is expected to be a complex one. An easy-to-use records management system and comprehensive records management system are considered as two separate ends of a spectrum, as regulatory compliances demand a lot of sophisticated and complex rules/options to be setup. Most of the organizations take it as a training and hand-holding issue and believe that over a period of time users will get used to working on a complex screen. Well, this is a lethal mistake to make instead managing this trade-off should be part of your strategy
Some suggestions to make a comprehensive and easy-to-use records management system a success:
Have a separate desktop for day-to-day operations & policy/record administration – Setting up policies and administering them needs complex and detailed features such as – configuring taxonomy, retention rules, managing disposition etc. But these activities are periodic in nature and end users may not even need to access such complex functionality. What an end user requires is a desktop with common functionalities like searching a record, digitally using it, requesting hard copy etc. Even Record Managers, can perform operations like filing, managing request and notifications on much simpler interface. With a separate system, you also ensure more security as full policy desktop would be owned by Record Administrator only.
Use case based mobile app – Mobility is set to disrupt some traditional ways of record management. Record capture and quick filing through mobile, quick access and action on a request and stock tracking though mobile using barcodes are some examples that will set the pace for implementation and offer convenience to users.
Intelligent filing suggestions – Auto-suggestions based on context information available within a document would simplify record filing.
Planning for more use cases Look for more such options in your use case.
Strategize for riding technology led changes
We have witnessed the email era; when email took over business communications and it demanded our record systems to change. Record management systems struggled to adapt and manage the new and different kind of content format with attachment, body, index and threaded communication. It took a long time for vendors to cope with this new advent and many locally developed system could not match the speed, hence, vanished.
Today, Social Media content poses the same threat. It is again a different format type that government organizations need to track and record in their Record Management System. This new content type has emerged as both an opportunity and threat to record management and should be a key parameter to be considered for your RMS strategy. So, while choosing your preferred vendor, add this parameter to your checklist.
Concluding
With this quick guide, we aim to help you create a fool-proof records management strategy and adopt the right system addressing your business needs. We have tried to highlight and address some important issues, if these handled well, it can really make a big difference in creating a long lasting and efficient records management strategy. As efficient records management system will serve as the basis for effective service delivery and public accountability.
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Manage content lifecycle. Ensure anytime anywhere access to content
Embrace digital by automating content lifecycle management for all types of content across the organization. Derive real-time outcomes through automated ingestion and processing of documents and digital media in content-centric processes.
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Climate change continues to pose an existential threat to the global economy. While the impact is felt across different industries, financial institutions are at the forefront of being the change agents. With the world waking up and moving towards low carbon emissions, banks have a major role in enabling this change.
Sustainability for modern financial institutions is not just limited to going paperless or becoming carbon neutral. It incorporates Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) into traditional banking aimed at achieving Sustainable Development Goals3 (SDGs).
Enabling, Accelerating Digital and Sustainable Banking with a Modern Content Services Platform
A key aspect of a purposeful organization is authenticity, with ESG at its core. In this blog, let’s explore how viable modern content services platforms facilitate sustainability priorities in banking, including net-zero emissions, paperless banking, energy efficiency, social goodwill, and brand strengthening—enabling financial institutions to digitally transform and be future-ready.
Paperless Banking: Digital Loan Origination
Traditionally, the customer lending origination process is paper-intensive. It requires application forms and document submission for the pre-qualification process, including copies of identity documents, employment proof, salary slip, bank statement, and previous loan statement. That’s a whole lot of documents from a single applicant. Imagine how many papers are daily printed and submitted to the banks with millions of borrowers globally!
Here’s exactly where the modern content service platform comes into the picture. The platform enables banks to eliminate the traditional ways of managing documents with capabilities to scan, extract, classify, and intelligently upload, share, and store documents. It facilitates banks to transit to paperless banking without compromising their service offerings to reach net-zero emission targets. Once the financial institution embarks on this journey towards paperless banking, emissions from paper production, transportation, physical storage facilities, and electricity will undoubtedly be reduced.
Digital Customer Onboarding
COVID-19 has accelerated the pace and, more importantly, the acceptance and adoption of digital technologies. Account opening can be done paperless by visiting the bank’s website or mobile app and keying in account opening information, such as personal details, scanning or clicking your documents using a mobile camera, and uploading your picture and e-signature. A modern content services platform can organize this data and make it accessible to backend business processes. Having the right platform helps users securely maintain their information over time, allowing them to correct documents, read them on various devices, annotate or collaborate in an electronically-driven environment. This saves a lot of paper, which otherwise gets wasted due to errors, misprints, or multiple copies, and creates a seamless customer experience. Furthermore, it saves the transportation costs from not needing to send the paper waste for recycling and equips an organization to ensure on-demand audit-readiness of documents.
Customer Digital Lifecycle Journey
Traditionally, several phases and sub-phases of a customer lifecycle involve paper-based processes, including data collection of an applicant, document analysis, data enrichment, KYC case review, ongoing customer services, and customer-off boarding. The cycle continues if you succeed in up-sell or cross-sell any new product to customers in between. The modern content services platform can overcome this manual handling process and transform the digital customer lifecycle into a paperless one. The platform helps digitize documents, classify information, extract data, collaborate, and electronically store while significantly minimizing paper usage and costs. Features like e-forms, e-signatures, video KYC, and conversational interfaces can reduce paper trails and help in delivering a superior customer experience.
Energy Efficiency: Green IT through Cloud
On-premise infrastructure must be operational irrespective of the transactional load consuming considerable energy in computing, lighting, and cooling the data centers. Cloud is at the heart of energy savings. Today’s modern content services platforms leverage the cloud effortlessly, enabling business leaders to offer optimized and effective services to banks while consuming considerably fewer resources.
Energy Efficiency through Compression Techniques
Raconteur estimates that by 2025, nearly 463 exabytes of data will be created each day globally.5 Banks are responsible for a sizable chunk of this data, consuming computer resources and energy. Modern content services platforms employ efficient compression techniques to reduce data size, saving computing storage and electricity. The energy savings will compound exponentially with data growth.
Social Goodwill and Brand Strengthening: Financial Inclusion
A modern content services platform and other digital technologies are crucial in taking banking to remote places. Today, a field agent can take a portable device to remote areas and collect customer information, signature, and identity proofs – all paperless, effortlessly bringing them into the banking system. Financial products like account opening, loan origination, payments, and card statements are offered digitally with this platform.
Green Banking
Apart from reducing operational emissions, banks encourage their customers to go paperless as an initiator of change. Banks provide loans for sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, or any other environment-based projects at a reduced lending rate. A truly digital bank can also help its customers and vendors go paperless by substituting paper-based documents with digital ones. In doing so, banks extend their commitment towards ‘net-zero’ in their operations, suppliers, customers, and the entire supply chain.
Brand Strengthening through ESG Data Analytics
A modern content services platform coupled with data, analytics, and System of Record (SoR) drives ESG metrics measurement and insights. The content services platform can extract data from sources and databases like customers’, suppliers’, social, satellite imagery, HR and government reports, etc., to feed into the analytics platforms to gain powerful insights. An example could be measuring agricultural and green energy loans annually to determine the contribution to CO2 emission reduction. Intersecting this data with country-wide CO2 emissions can help banks measure their ESG impact per year for a country or region.
The Way Forward
A modern content service platform paves the way for the contemporary approach to bringing sustainability to banks. The platform not only enables banks and financial institutions to protect the environment but also extends a helping hand with financial inclusion.
Traditional ways of managing content are now passe. The burgeoning amount of content being generated today is forcing enterprises to look beyond traditional ECM systems. Enterprises are now looking towards pervasive utilization of content. And this has spurred the need for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) based technologies in-built into content services platforms. With the pace at which the content services space is evolving, AI/ML and other modern technologies have long shifted from being “areas of interest” to the actual “roadmap items.”
Decoding Intelligent Content Services
Intelligent content services are about utilizing modern technologies to help analyze, organize, and deliver content at a larger scale. It provides opportunities like automated categorization and classification of documents, extraction of data, sentiment analysis, identification of sensitive content, and more.
Modern technologies like advanced OCR, NLP, AI/ML, and others have transformed the way content is handled. Enterprises now expect data to lead them in the right direction. For example, visual recognition services can now detect a missing signature on a contract seconds after it is uploaded, rather than waiting for days for a human to inspect its quality.
Intelligent Content Services Capabilities That You Can Leverage
Automated categorization and indexing of documents for eliminating redundant tasks
Identification of sensitive content and masking it for meeting compliance and governance goals
Extraction of entities from content for providing insights and automating business processes
Execution of sentiment analysis on customer communications for quick identification and solution of customer requirements and more
All the above capabilities can help your employees by making them more productive, more effective, and more compliant. This ultimately translates to delivering the best customer experience possible.
And There’s More…
While intelligent content services have a host of advantages which can help employees in a multitude of ways, its benefits can percolate and amaze your end customers too! For instance, through self-service web portals, your customers can verify their identity and documents through intelligent video recognition capabilities. Another very real and tangible benefit would be prompting your customers at a document collection portal to ensure that the correct set of documents are uploaded.
With intelligent content services, the opportunities are endless! Newgen’s contextual content services platform has comprehensive intelligent content services capabilities that can help you boost your employee productivity and offer a superior customer experience. Recently our content services platform has received the highest possible rating for its intelligent content services in Forrester Wave: Content Platforms, Q2 2021. Read the complete report for detailed insights.
Your enterprise content—structured and unstructured—is the most important resource in the organization. And content without context has limited business value. With the explosion of data volume in recent times, it has become a necessity to have a holistic content management strategy to better leverage, manage, and harness the information residing in multiple systems. And metadata lies at the core of content management strategy.
A metadata-driven approach to managing enterprise content has game-changing potential. It allows organizations to add context to their content, which further helps in making insightful decisions and driving meaningful engagements with customers, partners, and all stakeholders.
In simple terms, metadata describes data and enriches the content with information. This makes it easier to discover, use, and manage enterprise-wide content. It is the essential glue that helps bridge content silos across multiple lines of business, drives processes, enables meaningful content associations, and ensures faster access to precise content sprawled across repositories.
Why Do You Need to Rethink Your Metadata Strategy?
Metadata is the building block of any content management system. With the content management market moving towards decoupled content services, the use of metadata is also gaining prominence
Enterprise content without context doesn’t hold any business value. Metadata classifies, organizes, labels, tags, and understands your data. This makes information consumption by users much easier
Enterprises, like yours, are looking towards metadata services that can be system-generated, user-defined, or intelligently extracted from the content. They want their metadata models to help drive processes, content lifecycles, and other policies and business rules
Metadata can help to secure your data by intelligently extracting critical information from documents and restricting access to it based on the metadata value. For instance, in the HR department, only members of the HR team can view employee files; in government offices, only security-cleared employees can read and respond to incoming citizen correspondence
Almost every business process is based on or around content. To achieve complete automation, content must behave as an enabler rather than an inhibitor. This can only be done through metadata, which provides context and acts as a driver for your content-based enterprise applications
File analytics—one of the most sought-after capabilities these days—needs the help of metadata to uncover hidden insights and identify dark data
There are innumerable use-cases and benefits of metadata. And enterprises can realize its full potential through a structured approach.
Newgen can help you realize the full potential of your content by transforming your metadata usage through our contextual content services platform. Newgen’s platform has received the highest possible rating for its metadata services in Forrester Wave: Content Platforms, Q2 2021. Read the complete report for detailed insights.
According to Forrester – “Employees know the content exists but are unsure where to find it.”
Enterprises are consuming content generated from multiple sources and in various forms. It is no longer limited to documents. It now includes audio, video, social, e-mails, and much more. With this huge amount of data, it has become difficult to find the right information at the right time. When employees need to stop, think, and look for content in disparate systems, productivity takes an inevitable plunge.
Don’t let your employees get lost in the content deluge. In an age where your enterprise users are accustomed to a ‘Google-like’ experience when searching for information online, you need to take a step back and assess how you can empower them with effortless content discoverability.
A powerful enterprise search capability built into your content management system can enable efficient content discovery by enabling users to intuitively locate and access content quickly, regardless of the type of file, its format, or storage location.
Enterprise Search Capability Has Evolved by Leaps and Bounds. Are You Leveraging It?
Traditionally, content management systems used to have a basic search capability for the documents stored in their repository. But with time, enterprise search has become more specific and extensive.
Today one can search content by tags, words, phrases, wildcards, thesauruses, and more. A single search query can provide you relevant results from the entire enterprise content spread across multiple repositories and applications. This capability of searching across repositories is known as “federated search”.
Essentially, search works on the principle of leveraging metadata of files to scan through huge volumes of content quickly. However, this doesn’t imply that if the information is buried deep inside the content and not present in the metadata it is not searchable. Some of the top content management vendors have built search capabilities that can traverse through the content of each document and provide relevant results. This is known as “full-text search”.
The Future of Enterprise Search Capability
With artificial intelligence and machine learning venturing into every domain, enterprise search is not far behind. Some of the common examples of such use-cases are:
More search term suggestions based on current search
Suggested documents and files which might be related to a particular document being viewed
Today, having a great enterprise search capability that is built into your content management system can give you a tremendous competitive advantage.
Newgen’s contextual content services platform has a comprehensive, intuitive search capability that can help you increase your employee productivity by transforming their search experience. The content services platform has received the highest possible rating for its search services in Forrester Wave: Content Platforms, Q2 2021. Read the complete report for detailed insights.
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