Over the years, the ECM (enterprise content management) landscape has become rife with maturity frameworks created by organizations, analysts, consultants, and ECM vendors. For example, Laserfiche has made a few valuable models for public sector organizations and higher education. Today, I’m not so sure that the rigid structure of the maturity model works for our rapidly evolving, cloud or hybrid, content-choked, work from anywhere, etc., organizations. Nimbleness is needed, so we’ll need to rethink our approach. Also, “we’re digital” no longer means we scan everything into Laserfiche. Much like organizational approaches to compliance, digitization needs to be baked into strategic goals and objectives. Consequently, yesterday’s framework for benchmarking has become today’s must-have capabilities which include:
Foresight and planning- Organizations who practice evidence-based strategic planning and ideating will have an advantage when they begin their digitization efforts. A vision can be oriented around optimizing service, creating operational excellence, or driving growth — but the direction needs to be clear, prioritized, and create excitement to inspire action. Alignment is vital from the top down.
Laserfiche, upskilling, and experience- Digital products such as Laserfiche should be insight-driven, and the data produced should be used in an agile fashion to iterate the digital experience continuously. An organization at this level should use data captured from Laserfiche to push processes into business systems. The organization should work closely with their Laserfiche Partner to align goals with what they need from the product. Staff should be well trained in Laserfiche and other systems. We’ve seen many successful Laserfiche implementations driven by an employee who just liked the product and developed a knack for building workflows that significantly improved productivity.
Customer engagement- Extraordinary customer engagement is responsive to customer needs and reacts immediately to changes in customer behavior, delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time. Engagement delivers continuous value to the customer and, in turn, provides value to the company.
Technology and data- Of course, digital efforts require the appropriate tech and data to reinforce it. A strong tech and data platform is the underlying engine that drives value creation. ECM (in our case, Laserfiche) should be scalable with the ability to exist in the cloud, on-premise, or hybrid environments. Metadata strategies should be carefully planned and compliance and regulatory issues integrated with information management. Reporting continues to be invaluable to inform predictive decision-making.
Business operations- As the mechanism for delivering business value, automating processes allows the organization to leverage staff for strategic duties, reduce the need for intervention, reduce costs, and speed up productivity. Laserfiche Workflows can be abstracted, constructed, and made repeatable across department disciplines. In addition, processes should be documented for auditing and compliance purposes.
The most successful organizations center digitization with tools like Laserfiche, mature strategies, and well-trained staff. If you are interested in learning more, read our Florida Marine Transport interview.
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