Your business runs on content for decision-making, cross-functional education, team management, market analytics and insight, designing product and service offerings, and managing processes from sales to finance to technical support. They may differ in technologies, behaviors, expectations, and contribution to the business, but they all have one thing in common: content.
The way you manage content can have a tremendous impact on each of the teams working across the enterprise.
Content Matters to Everyone
Imagine you manage a global team that supports an e-commerce audience. People visit your website to research software and technology tools, for example, to share games and videos with friends, or manage transactions, or create content of their own. You provide critically important, up-to-date details regarding your products that must be immediately available on your own website and other sales channels.
You need to know: Is your content up to date? Are the answers you provide customers accurate and reliable? The answers they get about your products must be the same no matter where they find it, whether from your own team or from your partners. This requires a fast and manageable enterprise content management platform, built to support your processes and your business needs.
In our imagined e-commerce scenario, there are several other departments, beyond sales and service, with a stake in accessing the right information:
- Your finance team determines the price and revenue impact of each transaction, with a valuation decay for every minute the customer spends deciding whether to buy, or experiencing a setback in use of the product.
- Your legal team provides the terms of each purchase and service package, which will haunt your business later if details are inaccurate.
- Marketing is busy using customer data for algorithms that will provide offers and content to keep customers engaged long-term.
Making sure all of this content is in sync with data from various other repositories matters a great deal to the growth of your business. Plus, every business is different, even in the same industries in similar markets. Some firms will consolidate operations for multiple departments within their IT management structure, while others will allow each team to manage their own operations functions. This can easily lead to variation in the technology platforms that each team relies on for its basic workflow.
Consolidation vs. Integration
To truly manage content and data to benefit the entire enterprise, it isn’t necessary to consolidate platforms, if the firm can integrate an enterprise content framework that works with all of them. The behaviors of each workflow may be different, but the search protocols and display experience can be delivered in a consistent technology panel used by the majority of teams across the business.
The benefits to the business as a whole include:
- Improved productivity – teams have speedier access to content that will help them answer customer questions, provide product details, and track revenue impact.
- Reduced cost – storing multiple versions of content and data in several locations, to allow different teams to have access, takes more time for teams to ensure version integrity, and also requires additional server space.
- Lower risk – the potential for data inconsistencies is reduced with an integrated content framework, limiting workflow inefficiencies, as well as regulatory and compliance risks from inaccurate data.
For these reasons, instead of migrating all of your data, you can keep it hosted where your teams already access it.
Intellective Unity allows you to link all the repositories your company uses into one interface. This can cut search time for users in every department, and help meet the criteria explained above.