Big Data and Enterprise Content management sounds like be a great combination if done carefully. Â Here’s why:
Big Data is a broad used to describe the exponential growth of data (structured and unstructured) in the form of blogs, social media, videos, audios, electronic files, paper-based content and office documents.
Traditionally, Big Data has several dimensions where the exponential growth happens, that are usually referred to as the 3 Vs of Big Data: Volume, Velocity, and Variety. These metrics explain the high complexity of these data sets which in turn makes traditional data processing applications inadequate. Having more data us thus a double-edged sword: on one hand, it is more difficult to manage and analyse, but on the other hand more data lead to more accurate analyses that improve decision-making.
This article will go in depth to understand how ECM – or BI (Business Intelligence) – solutions might hold the key to leverage Big Data, while benefiting from it at the same time.
ECM: Managing Big Data
Gartner predicts that the amount of data stored in companies will increase by 800% by 2018, 80% of which would include unstructured data that are harder to tame and manage. The biggest challenges for companies will include: collecting, managing, storing, searching and archiving this content. An increased number of concerns also include compliance with legal requirements (transparency of data and retention standards for instance).
And this is where ECM comes into play: there is a great opportunity for the ECM industry to boom with the Big Data growth if the cards are well played. Indeed, ECM solutions address all these concerns and as you know, managing content efficiently is the first step to extract value from it.
If managing is the first step, the second one is to analyse the data. And the Big Data circumstance has created an advantageous scenario for the ECM providers that offer integrated analytics with their solution and thus answer that need created by the Big Data effect. The potential of the market is massive when we look at the data growth predictions and the fact that less than 1% of organizations across the world have an end-to-end ECM solution deployed across their departments and verticals.
As a matter of fact, forecasts predicts that the ECM market will be worth $12.32 Billion by 2019, which represents a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.7% from 2014 to 2019, and Big Data is listed as one of the main drivers accountable for this growth (along with enterprise mobility, social media management, digital rights, etc).
Big Data: Transforming ECM
We already explained how Big Data is going to drive the growth of the ECM market, as well as its transformation. Let’s elaborate on that latter.
Indeed, ECM will benefit from Big Data, its growth will also come with changes in term of architecture to support Big Data, as well as in term of offering by mixing data management, process management (BPM) and analytics tools.
From that point of view, Big Data offers the chance to transform the ECM industry, not only because ECM is changing in order to answer the specific needs of Big Data, but also because thanks to Big Data analytics, further understanding and improvements of the ECM solutions are made possible. Basically, the interaction between Big Data and ECM can be described as a Two-Way Causal Influence.
When Big Data is well managed and effectively analysed, its analytics have the potential to be transformative. Big Data offers the opportunity to improve automated workflows, smart ECM and BPM applications (such as case management) and any content-intensive decisioning applications in general. Indeed, Big Data analytics provide organizations with the insights that help automate, optimize and smarten-up these processes and applications by uncovering knowledge that were not available before.
In short, Big Data can make ECM systems smarter and more cost-effective by making them not only a content repository platform, but also an optimized decision-making solution based on advanced analytics. And this is the reason why experts consider that ECM solutions are bound to shift to Business Intelligence (BI) hub solutions.
