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Equipping the digital workplace for transformation

By November 21, 2016Article

Today’s increasingly dispersed, mobile and digital savvy workforce is demanding more from their IT enterprise. Gone are the days where enterprise application development and management had the old “centralized command and control” mindset. Now, driven by employee needs for more intuitive and flexible tools, digital workplace strategies are seeking to provide agile, secure tools for creating, accessing and sharing content – anywhere, anytime – regardless of departmental, geographical and corporate boundaries. For many, this is the way to achieve digital transformation. 

So what really is digital transformation and who owns it within the enterprise? While digital transformation may mean different things to different people, it’s most commonly the term used for the reinvention of an organization through the use of digital technology to improve the way it performs or serves its customers. Most would say that CIOs own the responsibility for digital transformation. But in fact, according to a recent Forbes article, the ownership of digital transformation resides with the CMO (34 percent), followed by the CEO (27 percent then CIOs and CTOs (19 percent). Marketing drives much of today’s transformative business decisions. And behind most of those marketing decisions are digital assets and content. 

Thus, it stands to reason that when equipping the digital workplace for transformation, it’s wise to start with your digital asset management and enterprise content strategy. By breaking down content boundaries and enabling the free and intelligent sharing of and access to content anytime, anywhere, the transformative organization can powerfully achieve new goals and milestones. 

Start by looking closely at the digital asset and enterprise content management solutions your organization relies on. Consider the following recommendations for modernizing these applications to truly enable the power of your digital workplace: 

  1. Stop thinking in terms of files. File management is limiting and creates boundaries that will inhibit your transformation and future goals. When you can think beyond managing and retaining just content and media files, you’ll be able to put all your digital assets to work across the organization. This will eliminate friction, drive revenue streams and create new business models. It also will prevent file-centric workflow limitations and barriers, enabling a more dynamic object data model for robust engagement across the organization. 
  2. Embrace all your digital assets. When you break free of your file-based limitations and leverage the power of all your digital assets you can more efficiently and powerfully embed them deeply within the business and its processes. This will unlock new opportunities for digital asset usage and enable their policy-based use through specific business processes that otherwise may not have had access to this valuable content. 
  3. Remain agile. Adopt a digital asset management strategy that allows you to continuously iterate, adapt and innovate. This will enable you to change at the speed of business and keep one step ahead of your employee and customer demands. By using a hyperscale digital asset platform, you’ll be able to quickly embrace new workflows, business processes or knowledge sharing that leverages valuable digital assets. 
  4. Evolve rather than replace. When adopting a digital strategy, don’t toss out the baby with the bath water. Evaluate how you can best maximize your existing IT investments and layer advanced digital asset and content intelligence on top of it. This will speed your time to digital transformation while keeping employees happy and productive while they continue to use the products they already know. 
  5. Embrace the elasticity of the cloud. The more scalable and agile your content and digital asset solution is, the more prepared you can be for the future. Build your asset management solution to support cloud-grade elasticity with the capacity for billions of objects and an unlimited number of properties and attributes. This will ensure that your solution is built for the modern cloud world with the flexibility to support any business demand you may have into the future. 

At its core, the digital workplace needs to enable workers and far-flung teams with a seamlessly integrated technology environment that unifies diverse content sources, streamlines access to content and expedites critical business workflows. It also needs to empower those work teams to collaboratively manage whatever the business day throws at them – from new digital assets to data and case/task queues. By achieving this goal, organizations can break down content collaboration barriers and achieve the true asset management that enables digital transformation.  

Eric Barroca is CEO of Nuxeo, developers of a hyperscale digital asset platform that enables organizations to unlock the full value of their assets across the organization.