BPM Braces for Yet Another Major Analytics Impact

Document and business process management frameworks have become increasingly intertwined in the era of digitization, while workflows have also needed to evolve quickly to match the capabilities of modern technology. One of the most important and transcendent trends in document management, BPM and workflow modernization has been analytics, which is already becoming a mandatory capability for companies that want to compete at the highest levels.

Should firms not have completely digitized and healthily automated BPM, document management and workflow protocols in place, analytics solutions are simply not going to add much value to the firm, and could even end up causing wasteful spend. A new report showed that the next stages of intelligence technology are underway, and firms must prepare their current policies, platforms and strategies to embrace the solutions and gain a competitive advantage from them.

Content’s new best friend

International Data Corporation recently predicted spending on cognitive systems to reach $31.3 billion globally by 2019, which represents massive growth given that fact that these technologies are still relatively young in the marketplace. The analysts define cognitive systems as solutions that have the functionality of analytics platforms, advanced document management tools and more, with features ranging from hypothesis generation and enterprise search to visualization and machine learning.

Suffice it to say that these technologies are likely to streamline and centralize what has thus far been relatively disparate system management, with firms using analytics platforms alongside separate document management tools. According to the researchers, banking, retail and healthcare will be investing the most in these technologies in the coming years, with the former already possessing one-fifth of the share of total global spend today.

“Unstructured and semi-structured data is fueling a renaissance in the handling and analysis of information, resulting in a new generation of tools and capabilities that promise to offer intelligent assistance, advice, and recommendations to consumers and knowledge workers around the world,” IDC Cognitive Systems and Content Analytics Research Director David Schubmehl explained. “These cognitively enabled solutions are being developed and implemented on cognitive software platforms that offer the tools and capabilities to extract and build knowledge bases and knowledge graphs from unstructured and semi-structured information as well as provide predictions, recommendations, and intelligent assistance through the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and deep learning.”

Opportunities will be plentiful for firms with strong internal processes and performances ahead of cognitive system deployment.

Bracing for impact

Intelligence solutions have become far more widely used in the past few years, helping to improve decision-making, derive the most value from stored information and bolster the transparency of enterprise operations. At the same time, modern document management technologies – especially those based in the cloud – are enhancing their interoperability and functionality, presenting firms with opportunities to step into the modern age of information governance and BPM.

By first leveraging the support of a trusted managed services firm to digitize, automate and modernize BPM, workflows and document management, companies will be strongly positioned to capitalize on the next generations of analytics.