Intelligent Information Management: Why IIM Is The Next Step Forward

Electronic content management has never been an easy task, but with companies today storing content electronically in multiple locations, orthodox search mechanisms often struggle to find what is being looked for as quickly as people wish. But the latest evolution in content management – Intelligent Information Management – can provide the answer.

The modern company creates and maintains a huge amount of data, from employee and client details and proposal documents to whitepapers and recorded information, like video and audio files. In fact, the rate of growth globally of the volume of electronically stored data is staggering – doubling in size every two years. By 2020, some 44 zettabytes (44 trillion gigabytes) of data is expected to be created annually.

Several storage strategies, including hyper-convergence and automated tiering, have been developed purporting to offer the best solution. But because content is often stored in multiple repositories, traditional management solutions have become too slow.

In a global survey carried out by intelligent information management experts M-Files, some 48% of respondents admitted to struggling with managing information silos, while 67% said navigating through different systems and locations to find the most current versions of documents or files negatively affected their productivity.

‘What’ Versus ‘Where’

The key reason behind inefficient content management is the fact that company documents and files are scattered across the Cloud, on on-premises systems and on mobile devices. So, when it comes to finding a specific one, the first challenge is to correctly identify where that document actually is. It’s case of knowing ‘Where’.

But not every employee is going to agree on which location a particular document should be in. For example, how should you archive a business contract? In a ‘Contracts’ folder? In a folder in the client’s or project’s name? By the project date? When colleagues are inconsistent in their choices, search times will be severely lengthened.

Intelligent Information Management focuses instead on the ‘What’, which means that searches seek the contract wanted through the most relevant signature information rather than a location the contracts may be stored.

A.I. Driven Information Management

The secret behind this new approach is the use of metadata, which allows documents and files to be found almost immediately, no matter where it is stored. In effect, it means searching for vital documents in much the same way you search for information on the internet.

In December last year, M-Files announced the launch of their newest information management product (M-Files 2018), and highlighted the inclusion of an Intelligent Metadata Layer (IML), which uses artificial intelligence to simplify the user experience and skip the now archaic information silos. What’s more, it does so without disrupting existing systems and processes.

The use of artificial intelligence offers several advantages that simplify the content management process, making it easier and faster to retrieve the documents, data, media and other information they need.

Key Benefits of Intelligent Information Management

• Automatic classification and tagging significantly reduces the time taken to manually input metadata. It uses technologies, such as text analytics, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and image analysis, to achieve this.
• Automatically generated metadata also minimizes the risk of human error in tagging and classification, thus reducing the risk of misplacing (and therefore losing) vital business information.
• Builds relationships with other systems through metadata by identifying documents that relate to a customer, project or case managed, thus enhancing discovery efficiency.
• Eliminates the need for migration projects, which are typically highly time-consuming and costly.

Click here to learn more about how Kefron’s Electronic Content Management Systems can help your business.