What if your content management platform could do the work for you? Intelligent content management isn’t just about AI—it’s about putting information to work through automation, integration, and governance. Introducing intelligence to content management can be a springboard to new heights of productivity and efficiency. The instinct may be to jump in feet first to reap the benefits of a smarter, more connected workspace, but as the saying goes, you need to walk before you can run.

To drive the most value from content management solutions, it’s critical to have a strong foundation in place. Taking a beat to confirm the validity of existing content, the effectiveness of existing processes, and most importantly, the pain points of knowledge workers using the content, will help you get to the good stuff faster, improving the return on your platform investment.

To help you take content management solutions to the next level, here are four considerations to turn secure information management into an operational advantage to make productivity soar.

Is your data ready for intelligent content management?

Content management is a strategic driver of innovation, agility, and growth. But content management systems are only as effective as the information within. We often use the expression “garbage in, garbage out” to stress the importance of prioritizing data quality. Meaning, if the data isn’t reliable, accessible, and secure, the results from introducing process automation and GenAI will suffer.

Before you evolve to intelligent content management, it’s critical to ensure current data is accurate and verified. Conduct an audit of existing data assets, identifying the sources, formats, and quality of data that will feed processes and AI learning models. In addition, maintaining robust data governance and proven integration processes—syncing data across CRM, ERP, and other business platforms—will help maximize trustworthy data.

How does process automation impact intelligent content management?  

Automating critical business processes is a key element of intelligent content management. One opportunity that can be missed when embracing process automation is assessing current processes and working out the kinks, rather than assuming what’s being done today is good enough to be automated. The same “garbage in, garbage out” concept applies.

It's also important for process automation to be collaborative, bringing the business and technical sides together to intimately understand the process before automating. Technical people can shadow users to see what’s being done with documents today, which can be an eye-opening exercise for both sides, as current work methods may not be the most effective or efficient. In addition, take a look at how well processes are documented and if users are actually using documentation (or are operational manuals collecting dust?), which is vital to fully understand where bottlenecks reside and for compliance.

Are you making the most of system integrations?

When we talk about getting data ready for intelligent content management, there’s information that exists well beyond content management systems, residing within other business platforms and applications. So how do you ensure all information is accurate and in sync, and that the data being referenced by the content management system is trusted and verified?

With trusted content integrations, organizations can manage content in context, with information pulled directly from the system of record to support business processes and workflows. This eliminates the risk of information being mis-keyed or out of date, with changes to data within ERP, CRM, and other systems immediately reflected within content management systems.

And to reduce the tendency to duplicate and copy data from location to location, you need to be able to integrate data across diverse and multi-cloud environments. At OpenText, we enable organizations to take a zero-copy data approach, connecting clouds without moving data. As a result, organizations benefit from integrated content experiences across business applications and various cloud and on-prem infrastructures, maintaining a single system of record and source of truth.

Where can you gain quick automation wins?

When it comes to intelligent content management, leveraging process automation and intelligent document processing (IDP) can deliver big opportunities and quick wins, particularly for processes where documents require any type of approval or review. For example, in the case of accounts payable, if vendor invoices are emailed to a general mailbox, who is monitoring, and how long are invoices sitting unopened? With IDP at the starting line, you could actively monitor the email inbox, pull in attachments, classify the email, add metadata to the invoice, and then kick off three-way matching processes and posting to SAP.

One of the biggest issues of document delays is due to documents sitting idle and not yet residing in the content management system. By marrying process automation and IDP, documents can be brought into the content management system faster, and tasks associated with the document can be completed faster, such as invoices getting paid.

Plus, IDP ensures the information captured from the documents is accurate, reducing the risk of human error. Because even the most efficient process, which could take merely milliseconds to complete, isn’t worth its weight in gold if powered by unreliable data.

The evolution of intelligent content management

The beauty of adding intelligence and automation to content is that it’s just the start of productivity possibilities and far from a one-and-done step. Content management is constantly evolving, spurred by best practices to assess your organization’s friction points, measure process improvements, and identify opportunities to better integrate, automate, and re-engineer business processes.

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