Knowledge and Documents Management Trends in 2016
- Organisation culture and engagement
We all know that solutions don’t succeed just based on best of breed technology selection rather its the people and culture that make them usable & useful.
Knowledge and Document Management solutions requires an ongoing commitment from senior management team as well as the end users. Based on industry best practices, one of the key investments organisations should can in establishing a Knowledge Management initiative is the identification, selection, development and retention of Communities of Practice (CoP’s).
Change and Benefits management will continue to be a critical area of focus and improvement this year.
- Cloud computing
Cloud will only get bigger and denser. Organisations have been transitioning to cloud and this trend will only increase. Hybrid cloud will be a winner for most.
With better data regulations, security privacy* and control, organisations will be more confident to move/build Document & Knowledge Management solutions on the cloud. There are both pros and cons while considering Cloud platform for a DMS application. On- premise technology will continue to be essential for content management systems.
*Office 365 has been assessed against the ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 standards, making it one of the first major cloud services to be compliant against these standards.
- Mobility & sharing information across devices
Anytime-Anywhere access to information and documents will be a must to have requirement for many. Organisations will have to cater for array of devices and allow end users to browse, search and retrieve information on the go.
Document and information security will be one of the critical factors to consider along with Offline access and data synchronization.
Apps like Microsoft Delve provide contextual information from various data sources like SharePoint Repositories, OneDrive for Business and personal Emails providing a snapshot of information personalised to the user.
- Social sharing
In person communication and relationship based information sharing has always been on the top of the list when it comes to active collaboration. Informal Social Networks always existed but were usually hidden and independent of technology. Increase in remote working and distributed workforce calls for use of technology based social tools to timely share information.
Year 2016 will see increased appetite for Enterprise Social Network (ESN) tools to better leverage the internal knowledge and so as to support collaborative working and Knowledge Management initiatives.
Microsoft has released Office 2016 putting emphasis on Social mobility. This along with SharePoint, Office 365 productivity tools (including Yammer), Skype for Buisness and various third party products will be creating a massive improvement in the Knowledge Management initiatives.
Here are some more details in one of my earlier posts – Facilitate Knowledge Management with Enterprise Social.
- Knowledge – Internal and External
While organization’s internal business information will still have higher weightage, there will be greater focus on capturing external information this year. This will include information exchanged with external clients, partners, vendors and suppliers. Building/Enhancing CRM system will be a top priority for many. With robust BI & analytical tools in the market we will be using this data for predictive analysis and accurate forecasts.
Document & Knowledge management systems will need to tightly integrate with the CRM systems to provide their end users a single snapshot of information around –emails communications, client information, analytical information, documents and related metadata.
Salesforce and Microsoft announced the Files Connect app that allows information and documents from SharePoint to be available within your Salesforce environment. That makes it easy to attach, say, a sales report or a slide deck to an item in your CRM system and make it viewable to your team, group or organization. And as a nice side-benefit, the files can be searched and viewed from the Salesforce1 mobile app just as easily as on a desktop.
- Workflow & automation
A well thought out Document Management solution works in accordance with organisation’s business processes.
Workflows and automation will be a key to successful Knowledge Management solution supporting optimisation of business processes. Rather than relying on an administrator to ‘push’ the process manually with email and phone reminders, an efficient DMS can drive this process freeing up staff time for more valuable activities.
- E-discovery
Rise of powerful consumers has placed Digital Transformation as the highest priority agenda for most organisations. With unprecedented amounts of data that we are creating there is a pressing need for organisations to better understand and effectively manage their digital data.
Document and Knowledge Management systems will have to better support e-discovery mechanisms by providing better search mechanisms and protecting & securing subsets of data.
Both SharePoint on premise and Office 365 provide various tools to support e-discovery requirements via an eDiscovery Centre. Typically eDiscovery requires searching for documents, websites, and email messages spread across laptops, email servers, file servers, and other sources, and collecting and acting on content that meets the criteria for a legal case. Following content can be discovered-
- Exchange items, such as messages, site and individual mailboxes, calendar items, and tasks that are indexed by Exchange search
- Lync conversations that have been archived in Exchange
- Documents, newsfeed posts, and other SharePoint content
- Content on file shares that has been indexed by SharePoint search (SharePoint Server 2013 only)
- Content on OneDrive for Business that has been indexed by SharePoint search
About Prometix: At Prometix, we have delivered several successful Knowledge & Documents Management solutions (using Microsoft technologies) that have made a difference for our clients. We work with our clients to establish a structure that makes information easier to create, store, find and share with others. We’ve worked hard to understand how people want to access and share information.
For more information on our success stories please feel free to call us on (02) 8072 0666 or email enquiries@prometix.com.au
