As technology evolves, businesses have no choice but to follow. Digital transformations are inevitable in order to keep customers and employees satisfied.
Years ago, you used pen and paper to record information, then stored it in a file cabinet or desk drawer. If you lost a document, it was gone for good. If you wanted to share an idea -- or a document -- you needed to do it in writing, face to face or over the phone. Many technological advancements later, everything is on its way to becoming digital.
Here are some key digital transformation terms to understand how this shift can benefit your business:
Enterprise content management: Enterprise content management (ECM) systems enable companies to manage critical information for employees, business stakeholders and customers within the office. Using ECM, businesses can convert and organize electronic documents, back up information into folders where users can access and edit files and store infrequently changing information for long-term storage.
One of the benefits of an effective ECM system is an increase in productivity in the workplace. If a business has a lot of content to manage, ECM is necessary to streamline processes.
Content services platform: A content services platform (CSP) is a digital transformation term that refers to a platform through which users can collaborate on all types of content. Sometimes people use the terms CSP and ECM interchangeably, but they are different.
Technology is rapidly evolving and businesses need to follow suit.
Because CSPs are cloud-based SaaS, employees can access files both inside and outside the office, which they weren't able to do with traditional ECM. CSPs expand the range of ECM systems in how they can manage more diverse forms of data, rather than just documents, and make day-to-day data sharing easier for employees. CSPs also have automatic versioning so users can access the most recent version of a document or other data, but also have access to previous versions.
File sharing: File sharing enables multiple people across a network to access the same content, giving them the ability to view, modify, copy and print. However, there are various levels of access privilege, meaning that not all users have the same access to all files. Typically, there is at least one administrator for a file-sharing system.
Collaboration: Collaboration is a digital transformation term referring to the combined effort of two or more people or work groups to complete a task. Businesses rely on collaboration platforms, enterprise social networking tools, corporate intranet and the public internet for everyday use.
Businesses use collaboration tools to enable employees to work together on documents and projects both inside and outside of the office. Cloud content collaboration platforms are types of business software that incorporate social networking into certain processes, while file sharing is simply the sharing of files within a network. By digitalizing collaboration, users can easily work on documents at different times, without being in constant communication.
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