The world of document management has undergone a massive transformation in recent years, along three main megatrends:
- The volume, scale and nature of document work is evolving at an accelerated pace, as we have more documents that start digital, and as document work has expanded to include more stakeholders across an ever-increasing set of use cases. As a result, the business processes surrounding document work are more robust and complex.
- New automation and intelligence technologies are emerging that allow teams and organizations to more fully automate all aspects of their document-dependent work, across more teams and use cases, without the need for software development skills.
- Security, compliance and governance have increased in importance, both due to an evolving threat landscape and to increased value in the data and documents being managed digitally.
Responding to these three megatrends is driving an evolution in the document management software (DMS) category. Legacy, traditional DMS solutions that focus on offering cloud storage and simple workflows like routing for approval come up short in unlocking the productivity and efficiency gains teams and organizations need in today’s economic climate.
It’s our view that a new solution category is emerging that builds on the foundation of DMS, but is able to unleash dramatically more productivity and efficiency through the application of automation and intelligence across every stage of the document work lifecycle, from creating and managing storage through complex business process automation through automated governance and retention.
We’ve labeled this emerging category “document-dependent work.” And based on our experience serving thousands of customers of every size across a wide variety of industries, powering and automating document-dependent work has the potential to deliver productivity and efficiency gains that can help organizations thrive and prosper in any economic environment by giving teams back vital capacity to focus on human-centric work to grow their businesses.
Our perspective is that solutions that power and automate document-dependent work differ from legacy document management systems across five key areas:
- A static design focused on where documents are physically stored vs. a dynamic hub that unites all documents, stakeholders and business process automation together to get work done.
- A limited approach to automation (maybe simple workflows like routing for approval and simple data extraction), vs. a comprehensive approach that both automates and integrates every single stage of the document work lifecycle, including: storage, file processes, security, collaboration, complex business processes, data extraction, governance and compliance.
- Security and compliance features that are manually configured afterthoughts vs. a design that integrates security, compliance and governance into every feature with full automation.
- A storage-centric user experience focused on organizing folders, subfolders and files, vs. Work-centric design that integrates intuitive connections to and insights about documents with all of the tools needed to accelerate work, including tasks, workflows, upcoming actions, recent actions, missing actions, etc.
- A lack of insight and analytics vs. robust instrumentation, analytics and dashboards on the work being done across the platform.
Fully powering and automating document-dependent work offers a wide-range of benefits over legacy document management products, including:
- Powering better work, by helping knowledge workers follow best practices, execute and automate repeatable, predictable and scalable business processes, adhere to compliance and governance policies, and get to work that simply wasn’t getting done before.
- Driving positive business outcomes and real business growth that come from dramatically improved efficiency and accelerated cycle times; improved security, compliance and governance; and giving teams back vital capacity to focus on human-centric work to grow their businesses.
- Putting your documents to work for you, transforming your documents from a storage, tracking and compliance nightmare to a source of insight, value and potential for your organization.
In short, while documents are merely stored and “managed” in legacy DMS offerings, solutions that power and automate all of your document-dependent work transforms this document work from a burdensome task to a powerful source of growth and positive impact for organizations of all sizes and across a broad range of industries.
If you’re ready to start automating your document dependent work, discover Revver today.
