Rethink Content with a Cloud First Approach

As organizations chart a post-pandemic recovery that’s both uncertain and uneven, we talked to Stephen Ludlow, SVP of Product Management at OpenText, about how enterprises must rethink content management and accelerate digital transformation.

What information challenges are organizations facing right now?

The information sprawl that organizations face comes from documents being stored in many different places – shared drives, hard drives, in a public cloud, in an on-premises data center – and the increasing number of applications in use. But the pandemic has seen information sprawl become more complex because information is now also scattered across personal devices, often located far outside the corporate network.

How can organizations tackle this information sprawl?

Technology makes business possible even when circumstances make it seem challenging. And a big part of succeeding is having up-to-date, cloud-based tools to manage your organization’s content.

We are seeing a lot of organizations using the crisis as the driver for digital transformation, making manual processes more automated and integrated with the business. However organizations manage content, it’s critical to include cloud as part of the strategy, as that’s what users and customers expect. Your business – and its content – must live in the cloud.

The shift to cloud has been happening for some years, so why the new urgency?

Businesses must now switch from a gradual, multi-year, cloud-first approach to a much more rapid “cloud now” mindset if they are to overcome the information sprawl and security challenges they now face. Even existing applications must be moved to the cloud more rapidly than previously planned. Not in the next three or four years, but more likely in the next three or four quarters.

How is the cloud helping organizations find better ways to manage content?

One organization that has embraced the cloud in this way is engineering company ABB. It needed a better solution to manage the complexity of its documentation. Engineering document control was costly and located in an on-premises environment. To solve this problem, ABB has quickly made cloud the preferred infrastructure for its engineering content management.

Cloud solutions provide the scalability, availability, and operational simplicity necessary for optimizing content management.

ABB migrated its core information management platform, used for construction projects and industrial customers, to OpenText™ Content Suite with the OpenText Managed Services Cloud. As a result, the company can now better manage its huge volume of documents – currently 30 terabytes, with millions of user requests per day. This functionality is critical, because ABB’s project contracts often involve fines for non-compliance when documents are missing or don’t accurately reflect the project.

What are the benefits of rethinking how to manage content?

Take the example of South Africa’s Department of Social Development (DSD), which provides social services and handles appeals for people whose social security grant applications have been denied. Inefficient, paper-based processes had been holding back the organization, resulting in the DSD taking more than 90 days to complete half of its appeal cases.

By using OpenText solutions, the department has been able to resolve more than 98 percent of appeals within its target of 90 working days, compared to less than 50 percent previously. This has also saved the agency around R50 million ($3 million) over four years. The agency is now looking to make even more use of cloud capabilities, to automate ever more processes so clients can apply for services online instead of having to visit a physical office.

How is OpenText innovating to help organizations continue to tackle these content and information challenges?

The OpenText Content Cloud, announced at OpenText World 2020, delivers key innovations to OpenText Extended ECM, OpenText Content Suite, OpenText Ecosystems Applications, OpenText Documentum, OpenText File Intelligence and the OpenText Core line of products. These provide a digital backbone for information and content and give organizations the ability to innovate and digitize their businesses more easily.