How Agile Content is the key to unlocking your productivity potential

Unlocking agile enterprise content with an ECM and Content Care

It often goes overlooked, but digital content is an investment your organization makes every single day.

This investment goes under the radar because it’s so closely tied to our everyday business activities. But every email we send and spreadsheet we create becomes part of the organization’s ‘working memory’: enterprise content.

Enterprise content covers a wide range of data and files: from images and video to presentations, templates, email threads, and meeting notes. All these play an important role in the proper functioning of your organization - so you want to have access to the right content when you need it.

What is agile content?

Agile enterprise content can deliver more value because it can ‘jump’ effortlessly to where it’s needed, enabling it to deliver value in more ways. As data volumes continue to grow and the rate of content creation accelerates, the need for a proper system for managing and accessing content is very clear. Without it, you can’t find the right data, and inaccurate content stays in circulation.

This growing need is why top-level Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become a survival trait for modern business. It’s also one of the reasons why we’re seeing an ongoing shift from traditional, ‘static’ on-premise ECM solutions towards more dynamic cloud-based and ‘headless’ solutions like SharePoint Embedded, which enable content to become agile. 

Using SharePoint Online or SharePoint Embedded, enterprise content can be managed more effectively, shared securely across multiple applications, and it can adapt to new requirements too. They prevent digital assets from being lost and eliminate the inefficiencies of creating duplicate content - as well as the confusion when people have access to different versions of the ‘same content’.

Furthermore, as we’ll see in this blog, enabling truly agile content with a modern ECM (and an ongoing strategy) is the key to unlocking far greater productivity today, and in the future.

What is ECM and how is it the key to enhanced productivity?

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a solution that combines a strategic approach with selected software tools to enable efficient capture, management, storage, and distribution of content.

ECM should always ensure that content is only accessible by authorized people, and in a secure way. It should also align with and support your organization’s compliance and data governance policies. With a well-configured ECM in place, people in your organization can always access the right file or conversation when they look for it.

Furthermore, ECM can make it possible for software to find and handle enterprise content. With a well-organized system based on Microsoft 365, AI supported tools like Microsoft Copilot can wield your enterprise content to the maximum advantage. Copilot can use your agile content to instantly create draft proposals, write summaries of meetings, or craft draft emails. With the right system in place, your content becomes liberated.

Agile content can generate impressive gains in productivity. The days of creating duplicate content are over, and your colleagues can be confident they have the most up-to-date figures, templates, or sales decks at their fingertips.

How does agile content drive greater efficiency?

Enterprise content is at the heart of business today. Every organization uses and creates digital content, and often in very large volumes. The problem is that many are still using ‘traditional’ on-premise ECM setups that aren’t optimized, and make it hard to use content in new ways.

By optimizing how your content is organized, stored, and accessed with a modern cloud-based ECM solution your organization can easily tap into clear streams of accurate data. This can help drive efficiency by helping to optimize things like commercial supply chains, manage client relationships, streamline workflows with automations, and enhance visibility over the whole organization.

Having a capable ECM solution is especially important when your organization is highly complex, or works in a sector where compliance is an issue. In these situations, you need to have a well-configured solution. Without it, you can’t collaborate effectively with cross-functional teams and it’s harder to remain compliant.

Many of the most important business tools rely on access to enterprise content, including Office 365, Teams, SharePoint Online and Power Automate. Microsoft Copilot is another thing to consider, as this tool can massively accelerate processes – but only when it has access to well-organized enterprise content.

To deliver the expected value, an ECM must be:

• Well structured
• Properly configured
• Efficient (the ability to support critical business processes and tasks through automated support of tasks)
• Accompanied by a long-term strategy for the future

This last point is especially important, as without a strategy for content care, your well-configured ECM will start to become less effective.