Moving to a modern workplace model takes work. At the very least you will need a formal project. Why is it worth the effort?

First, we should define a modern workplace. A modern workplace is an environment where everyone can complete their work more easily and with less friction, regardless of where the person is located, or what device they use. It is an environment in which employees and partners can enjoy secure, highly reliable platforms for exchanging ideas, having conversations, collaborating, and doing their best work.

A modern workplace such as Office 365, Google G Suite or Box is a system of engagement . It provides all the information end users need to perform their jobs, delivered at the right time, and in the right context.

Security and compliance are achieved in a modern workplace by combining a system of record with the systems of engagement . A system of record enhances the ability to see patterns, ensure compliance and apply policy across all Systems of Engagement. A modern system of record makes it easier to catch and resolve problems related to security and compliance before they impact the business.

When we combine a one or more systems of engagement with a modern system of record a compliant modern workplace is the result. The compliant modern workplace combines the flexibility of the modern workplace with the assurance of compliance and active policy management.

Let’s look at these benefits of the compliant modern workplace in more detail.

Reason #1: Increased Information Reuse

In legacy ECM systems information reuse has traditionally been a very manual process. End users need to tag or categorize content or move it to a knowledge management system. They even might need to remember the best content for reuse. They must remember where it is located and navigate to it for reuse.

If end users can find information, it is more likely to be reused. Modern workplace tools allow us to do this. Information is presented in a modern workplace alongside data from other modern systems. The user interface is focused on the business process. It presents the right information, at the right time, to the right person.

Reason #2: Consolidation of Multiple Platforms

A content platform costs time and money to run. There are hard costs related to licensing. Storage of duplicate content also drives up costs. You must pay salaries to perform maintenance duties. There are also soft costs and productivity impacts from end users searching many repositories for information. performing content classification tasks also wastes their time.

The past few years have seen a revolution in the features available in modern workplace systems. It is very likely that older systems now have redundant functionality. Reduce costs by looking at consolidating onto fewer platforms.

Reason #3: Increased Security and Auditing

When users perform their daily work in a modern workplace we can collect analytics about content and how it used. We then can mash it up with other data points to draw more meaningful conclusions.

For example, we know who reports to a certain manager. Let’s say documents in a site are only shared with members of that team. One day a document is shared with someone outside the team. The system can flag that security event for closer examination.

This approach also works with auditing. Let’s say someone outside the team views a document. The system knows that usually only people within the team view it. We can flag that audit event for closer examination. It is possible there was human error with setting permissions.

Reason #4: Increased Information Discovery

We’ve all been there. Someone mentions information in an email, meeting, or hallway conversation and you need to find it now. In the past, we’ve focused on increasing the findability and discovery of information. We put it in the right site, library, and folder. We had customized search to have more content refiners.

In the modern workplace, this is a thing of the past. A modern workplace knows what content was presented in a meeting. You can search on keywords from the content or the name of the person that presented. The system will use that information to rank the search results.

Reason #5: Elimination of Information Silos

Finance might work in one legacy ECM system while HR works in another. Marketing keeps their documents in a file share, while sales keeps it in a SharePoint site. This is fine until these teams need to work with another department. It is difficult to know what system contains the information you need. There is a lot of red tape to get access to some information and not others.

In a modern workplace, we provide access to information dynamically, across many systems of engagement. You can search in one location and get results from many systems. This eliminates information silos. It eliminates having to change user behaviour to accommodate a one-off exception.

Reason #6: Increased Reporting Capability

In the legacy ECM system world, we must configure reporting in every single repository. If we want to get reporting across many repositories we need to normalize the data, so it can be compared which is not a small effort. We then must maintain this reporting environment.

The modern workplace allows you to have visibility across all systems of engagement. This means you can report on them as well. There isn’t a limit on what can be reported. For example, you could look at the risk profile of content and decide in what system it should live. You can scan all content for sensitive data and flag it with a usage policy. The sky is the limit.

Reason #7: Enable External Sharing

Almost every organization has a need to collaborate with people outside of their organizations. The quest is how to do so in a compliant manner and reduce your security risks. In the past this has meant setting up a separate extranet environment, another silo, and another system to maintain.

The modern workplace allows for secure and compliant external collaboration. Policies can be set globally around what systems of engagement allow external sharing. We can also specify what content can be shared. End users are empowered to collaborate with external parties as needed. They do not need to resort to using consumer tools as a workaround.

Reason #8: Decrease Duplicate Content

How many times have you found the same file in many folders? Have you saved a file with different names for each version? This creates duplicate files. Duplicate files cause confusion, take up space, and create overhead if the files qualify as records.

The modern workplace allows us to have a view across all files. We can use Artificial Intelligence to look at each document and determine if it is a duplicate of another file.

Reason #9: Increased End User Adoption

People do not adopt systems that are difficult to use, unintuitive, or that take extra time to use. Legacy ECM systems have often fallen prey to these fallacies. People must use a prescribed, unintuitive information architecture. They also need to tag and classify the document, which takes too much time.

In a modern workplace, the classification of content can happen in the background. It does not need end user involvement. People can work in the way that makes the most sense to them and can put content where it fits in their workflow. A modern workplace supports the end user, instead of getting in their way. This leads to increased end user adoption.

Reason #10: Single Source of the Truth

The modern workplace leads to having high confidence in your organization’s information. You know that your data is the latest version. The appropriate people have access as a common basis for making decisions. This empowers people work together as a team. They can drive decisions and business processes to meet the organization’s mission.

Ready to Move to the Modern Workplace? To make the journey to the compliant modern workplace easier, RecordPoint has developed a new offering – Compliant Migration as a Service .

This offering addresses the common migration challenges , frees content from legacy ECM systems and ensures ongoing compliance post migration. The result for your organization is the flexibility of the modern workplace combined with the security and assurance of ongoing compliance and policy management. We do this on a fixed price, fixed outcome migration basis.

Contact us to learn more or schedule a demo.