Looking at the calendar, I see that it’s only about a month to the Chinese New Year (February 16). According to the Chinese 12-year animal zodiac cycle (known as Sheng Xiao), the Chinese year beginning in 2018 is the Year of the Dog. Each Chinese zodiac year begins on Chinese New Year's Day. Just for reference, the 12 animal signs in the cycle are the rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog and pig.
So, if it’s not too late for a New Year’s celebration, in the spirit of Sheng Xiao, it’s not too late for my New Year’s content management predictions.
2018: The Year of the Cloud
The Cloud is a big deal. It’s here to stay, and 2018 will be the year it irrevocably moves to center stage in enterprise IT strategies. Today, mission-critical applications like CRM, ERP, HCM, project management and document management are readily available via the cloud. By shifting their IT infrastructure to cloud-based solutions, organizations can now transform their processes to what their business really needs. The result is not just efficiency—it’s daily productivity, employee efficiency, and operational agility. It’s a whole new pace of business.
2018: The Year of Applications, not Technology
Leading suppliers are moving away from a monolithic view of ECM capabilities and the need for users to buy everything to get some subset of content capabilities. We’ve tended to assume in the world of “ECM” that you need to buy a full suite of content capabilities as a platform, even if you only needed some portion of those functions in a particular process. Being an agile enterprise means that technology change must occur dynamically and in small increments. This means that the tools and platforms upon which process innovation occurs must be accessible to the business and easily usable by the business with a minimum of IT intervention.
2018: The Year of the CFO as Transformation Leader
The CFO has moved into a critical role in driving process transformation efforts in your organization – not just within the finance department, but across the organization. Here are 4 facts the savvy CFO must know about business process transformation:
- The wide variation in the effectiveness in financial processes provides a rich opportunity for cost savings.
- Most organizations are reaching the conclusion that offshoring helps—but does not resolve the cost disadvantage created by manual processes.
- Manual financial processes and information ultimately have a negative impact on other core processes.
- Guaranteeing the security and privacy of information and the auditability of financial processes is an increasingly vital role for the CFO.
2018: The Year of Information Privacy and Security
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a new set of European rules and standards related to privacy and data protection, has set a mad compliance and security scramble in motion not only for European companies, but also for any company doing business in Europe or with European customers. The regulation is designed to harmonize privacy across the EU. It will codify more rigorous privacy rights and strike a balance between privacy and security. The GDPR will create an explicit obligation for both data controllers and processors to demonstrate compliance. The clock is ticking – the regulation goes into effect on May 25, 2018, and the potential penalties for non-compliance are significant (organizations found to be in breach of GDPR may be fined up to 4% of annual revenues or 20 million Euro, whichever is the greater).
2018: The Year of Mobility
Your world is no longer just one office. Some team members might be remote, or an acquisition introduces a complementary office, or an executive on the road requires precise information within seconds. You must equip your organization to operate beyond the four traditional walls of the office. A core lesson in all this is that committing to a cloud-centric, flexible, and agile approach to where and how employees work is not just good for employees. A results-driven rather than attendance-driven strategy is good for the business as well, whatever your degree of “virtualness.” And a modern information and process infrastructure is critical to making it all work.
2018: The Year of NOW
When I ask end users the question, “What content management solution are you considering?” I often get three or four standard answers, including DocuWare. Consider these answers a) through d). So far, so good. But far too often, there is a fifth answer, option e) – “Not Now.” It’s easy to put off making a content management decision. A decade ago, making a content management software decision could be risky – document management was often complex, required lots of “specialists,” and was difficult to use. Now, though, content management software is easy to implement and use, and the risky decision is to do nothing.
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