6 Keys to Digital Transformation Success

Editor's Notes

1. The past 6 years have introduced some amazing and innovative technologies that can be a catalyst for the digital transformation journey. In this overview, I will give you the key factors to consider in transforming your organization, and map those to Ephesoft’s technology, and the impact it can have on an organization
2. If you aren’t familiar with Ephesoft, we are a core transformation technology that consists of an intelligent document capture platform called Ephesoft Transact, and a document analytics tool called Ephesoft Insight. We focused on unstructured content, and extracting meaning from documents. A little more on us later…lets talk about digital transformation.
3. The demands on CIOs and CTOs have drastically changed over the past decade, and large, legacy enterprises are struggling to adjust and align to the new expectations of customers. The instant on/ instant gratification expectation has been proliferated by the disruption of tried an true industries. To meet demand, and build new infrastructure and services, technology executives have outlined core transformation keys to achieve their goals.
4. Here is a summary of the new core keys to digital transformation: -Open and modular software is now required in many organizations. Long gone are the days where you can have a closed, proprietary system that requires specialized manufacturer assets to customize. -Organizations are looking to reduce cots through consolidation, and the reduction of redundant functionality. In our space, this means a focus on repository reduction, and finding technology that can span systems, not just service on a one by one basis. -Subscriptions and cloud offerings are becoming the preferred subscription model -Technologists have never been satisfied with a solution that provides 70% of the required functionality. Organizations are rethinking this, and building a culture of customizing only when absolutely necessary. -The ability to have resources at the ready for rapid scaling is now possible with cloud services like Azure and AWS without massive hardware costs. -Finally, instant on, with short deployment times and a rapid return are becoming the norm. So let’s touch briefly on each of these topics.
5. Long gone are the days of proprietary software and system that required an army of vendor consultants for installation, configuration and design. There has been a technical revolution of sorts that is driving an open and modular standard in the industry. With integration being one of the most costly enterprise IT focus areas, organizations are now taking a deep look at system APIs and modularity to insure open interfaces and accessibility.
6. The rise of open platforms have leveled the playing field. No longer do only large organizations with large budgets have exclusive access to vendors leading the pack from an innovation perspective. Today, any size company can have quick access to innovative technology to improve their business operations and drive efficiency. New initiatives are no longer tied to long, extensive budget cycles. Now projects can be started at little to no cost. Supporting this concept is the modularity open systems provide access to only required features and functions.
7. The move towards modularity is driven by the mentality that you only use what you need, and you only pay for what you use. How many organizations out there only use a small percentage of features and functions, but pay for the whole boat? This new mindset provides simplicity when adding and taking away modules, and allows the simple customization of solutions tailored specifically to the business unit, with easy adaptation and change.
8. The existence of duplicate systems with like functionality is a major expense for most organizations. These systems can be legacy entities that just wont die, duplicate systems created through business activities like mergers and acquisitions, or just software features used in specific line of business systems.
9. If we just take a look at the content spectrum, organizations are plagued with the existence of multiple repositories. It is not rare for large, growing companies to have 10+ repositories. This puts an immense burden on IT and business units that struggle through upgrades, growing support requirements and the cost of administration. Most of these organizations state a top priority is a consolidation of content systems, and a unified repository.
10. Having departments that interact with each other, create shared content and documents, and leverage different repositories creates issues in all sorts of areas, including: security, standardization, records management, capturing metadata and backup and disaster recovery.
11. Consolidation brings a host of benefits, including broad cost savings. The ability to control and implement security on centralized content, ease of use for end users which results in improved efficiency and productivity.
12. Subscriptions today are not just scene as a licensing option to consider for finance purposes. They are now core to any digital transformation effort for a wide variety of reasons.
13. If you tie together the cloud, and the subscription license model, IT groups can provide agile solutions that can free up expensive resources and remove burden from overworked staff by providing ease of administration, automated backups and management of core software. For the end users, a single cloud platform provides compatibility, ease of collaboration and anywhere access.
14. In this day and age, many IT departments have become custom software development houses, having to build teams of high paid developer resources to meet internal customer demands.
15. There is now a change in attitude, and a deeper due diligence that is occurring to prevent the 100% syndrome we see here.
16. New age systems solve the age old problem of over engineering, and now enable elastic and dynamic systems that respond to changing business needs.
17. Many of these features have been driving by the cloud, and its focused architecture. In the past, providing any type of dynamic system was costly, and required additional hardware that typically was in a standby state. IT staff, wanting to make sure customers were serviced and systems performed typically overbuilt systems, and purchased expensive hardware and software solutions to automatically scale.
18. With the advent of cloud services, like Microsoft Azure, with a few clicks of the mouse, you can build complex,, auto scaling systems. These systems can be deployed in short order, and provide scale up and scale down abilities to provide performance when required, and save cycles during low demand.
19. As we wrap up these keys to digital transformation, the final key is focused on a change in timeframe and how quickly systems can now be provisioned.
20. In the past, companies would have to identify and order hardware. Gin access to software, and then go through a labor intensive build process from operating system to database to software to updates. Today, with the cloud, systems can be provisioned in minutes instead of weeks. Service and server options grow every day, and organizations can even build their own templates and share them in or out of their walls.
21. In addition, the ability to spin up complex architectures now takes a fraction of the time, with ease of maintenance and automation as a key transformation focus. In addition, the complexities of Disaster Recovery and High availability are now minimized through cloud based services and offerings.
22. So, today, when looking for software solutions, intelligent buyers now look for systems that can take away customization burden. On the forefront is systems that can configure themselves. Machine learning can provide massive time savings, as administrators and end users configure the system through basic use. Many software companies are focusing on providing off the shelf capabilities to meet high need business requirements, rather than requiring complex customization. All of this provides a faster time to market, and an ease of integration
23. Here is a summary of the digital transformation imperatives: -Open and modular software is now required in many organizations. Long gone are the days where you can have a closed, proprietary system that requires specialized manufacturer assets to customize. -Organizations are looking to reduce cost through consolidation, and the reduction of redundant functionality -Subscriptions and cloud offerings are becoming the preferred subscription model TO ENSURE VENDORS CONTINUE TO INNOVATE AND JUSTIFY INVESTMENT. -building a culture of customizing only when absolutely necessary. -rapid scaling is now possible with cloud services like Azure and AWS without massive hardware costs. -Finally, instant on, with short deployment and adjusting to changing needs. So let’s touch briefly on each of these topics.
24. So, now that we know the keys…where does Ephesoft’s digital transformation platform fit in? How can we dovetail into providing a seamless match for your needs.
25. At the surface, Ephesoft is an intelligent capture platform that can take documents from a wide variety of sources, and using its patented analytics technology and machine learning, automate the classification and extraction of data.
26. We provide a digital transformation layer that solves a key problem. The typical enterprise is extremely complex, and bounddaries are created by hybrid architectures, departments, devices, systems and people. The benefit of Ephesoft is in combining our web application and web services, and we really become an enterprise document transport layer, linking departments, systems and people, and creating a standardized and repeatable flow of content that removes tranditional barriers.
27. Having departments that interact with each other, create shared content and documents, and leverage different repositories creates issues in all sorts of areas, including: security, standardization, records management, capturing metadata and backup and disaster recovery.
28. Ephesoft takes a modern approach. Allowing you to keep what works, and embedding advanced document capture and content extraction within your systems of record. As you add capabilities…again whether on premise or in the cloud, Ephesoft can adapt to your environment
29. From an open and modular perspective, Ephesoft was founded as an open source document automation and analytics platform. These roots have persevered in the many versions and iterations of the Product platform, and its modular and open architecture provide ease of integration and customization. All of its application and platform features can be accessed through its open web services layer, providing capture on demand from any application.
30. Our licensing is adaptable to any enterprise plan, and you can have it on premise, spread your investment out over time, or take advantage of our cloud-based services to gain maximum agility, flexibility and access.
31. Our core technology focuses on a patented analytics technology that streamlines configuration, provides machine learning, reduces erros through increased accuracy and maximizes the impact of automation.
32. In our industry, there is a misconception that cloud is just a hosted server with regular software installed. With Ephesoft, our platform was built from the ground up as web-based, and what we call cloud adaptive. This means that our architecture can take advantage of all the cloud infrastructure has to offer, including auto-scaling and enhanced performance.
33. In summary, Ephesoft is a catalyst for digital transformation that meets the modern requirements demanded by today’s organizations: Advanced capture with open source at our core and Web service APIs Licensing models to meet customer cultures Leverage existing ERP and LOB applications, not a ground up approach Patented Machine learning Multi-tenant web services in our DNA