Why do digital transformation projects fail? Research by content capture and data discovery vendor Ephesoft suggests it is because knowledge workers are forced into being data detectives at each step of the business process, having to create their own links to contextual data as if leading a criminal investigation.

We are all familiar with the typical crime board used by investigators to tie together disparate data such as crime photos, index cards, maps and media reports. As a document flows through a business process it can require time-consuming investigation at each step along the way to link an application, claim or correspondence to related data.

Over the past 12 months Ephesoft has developed a solution it believes will shortcut the detective work in everyday business by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to assist decision-making.

The approach is known as Context Driven Productivity (CDP). Ephesoft’s first cloud platform called Semantik will use CDP to identify unstructured content that is related to a document or workflow and then present it via a dashboard. It also provides a means to share the contextualised data with others via a multi-dimensional knowledge graph held on a secure cloud platform.

Ike Kavas, founder and CEO of Ephesoft, said, “Document capture has always been a small part of digital transformation, and I have watched many of those projects fail. McKinsey tells us the percentage of failed projects in digital transformation is as high as 70%.

“Ephesoft has spent a year researching why this figure is so high and we believe it’s because knowledge workers are dealing with flat data without any context. Even if Ephesoft extracts data from a document and delivers it to business process automation, knowledge workers still must have multiple screens or tabs on their browsers to do their job.

“Once we realised that, we knew that that we needed to give humans or bots the bigger picture in a single view to accelerate decision-making and help with the digital transformation process.

“Our vision is to rid the enterprise of these flat data practices by providing new Context Driven Productivity (CDP) solutions needed to acquire, enrich and amplify semantic data that fuels automation processes and helps companies get the most productivity out of their automation investments.”

Invoice processing is the first area to be targeted with a SaaS application called Semantik Invoice.  

Ephesoft selected invoicing for its first Semantik Platform solution use case because the task is industry agnostic, paper-and-process intensive, and because Ephesoft has extensive experience in the accounts payable and accounts receivable spaces. Other industries and use cases identified as ideal targets for next-generation CDP solutions include mortgage origination, healthcare patient records, employee onboarding, tax form and insurance claims processing.

Semantik Invoice will be available to the Americas market in Q2 and is targeting a worldwide release later this year. Semantik Invoice not only extracts data from a particular invoice but it also captures the contextual information to connect it with other related data sources and content in the process—such as purchase orders, shipping manifests and other vendor related data. It ultimately presents this data and their relationships in enterprise knowledge graphs to fuel process automation and decision-making.

Ephesoft capture kicks off the workflow and then Ephesoft can provide connecters to applications and other data sources with additional capture capabilities on these sources as required.

When a document is viewed in context, the amount of linked data can be extensive, relating to a person or a vehicle or an address or other entity. Under the premise of CDP, Ephesoft’s Semantik Platform enables a means to share that data via a knowledge graph that connects all of the disparate data.

“As this document progresses in a workflow the web of information will likely grow bigger, so you need a multi-dimensional dashboard that allows you to navigate through different levels of information at speed,” said Kavas

 “Many workflows are kicked off by documents but there are many other data points that our customers need and these can be structured or unstructured content, databases or ERP systems. Our goal is to bring in whatever data they need and have it viewable in a single pane of glass to assist our customers in a successful digital transformation initative.”

“We used to be a document capture company. We are now a data management company,” said Kavas.

To learn more about Context Driven Productivity or Semantik Invoice, visit ephesoft.com/context-driven-productivity.