It’s the month of love. Everyone is looking to establish a relationship or keep the spark alive in their existing one. But when it comes to business relationships, it might be time to break up, particularly if the partnership doesn’t improve efficiencies, ensure business success or assist your organisation to achieve its goals.
By Monique Williams, Hyland Southern Africa regional manager
If your current technology solutions can’t support your vision for the future, are struggling with workarounds to get systems to share information, or are investing more time and energy in maintenance than what you’re getting in functionality, it could be time to re-evaluate the relationship you have with content services. With the pace that technology evolves, relying on ‘old faithful’ solutions that are past their use-by date nearly always results in less efficient processes and impacts productivity.
There are a few signs that your content services relationship love story has reached its final chapter. If you experience any of the following scenarios it could be time to stop settling and move on.
“I don’t see a future with you”
In keeping up with modernisation, your organisation needs to evolve to meet new service expectations and operational standards. If you’re still relying on a content services system that doesn’t provide the features your organisation needs, or can’t develop them, your business processes can’t evolve to create new efficiencies. Without continual product improvements, your legacy solution will require time-consuming workarounds, adding to your system’s mounting total cost of ownership (TCO).
Conversion is an opportunity to gain new functionality like workflow management, intelligent capture, records management, or integration with email systems or mobile devices – all of which greatly improve access to information as well as your processes.
“We don’t talk anymore”
You’ve invested in a core system to manage key data and day-to-day operations. But you also have critical related content, from documents and forms to notes and emails, that this system can’t incorporate.
If your content services solution runs on an outdated platform that doesn’t easily connect with other core business systems, you risk leaving your employees without easy access to all the information required to make decisions, manage processes, and provide excellent customer service.
So many services and solutions now work hand-in-hand that a relationship between two disparate services might have a huge impact on the business today, whereas even five years ago it might not have registered as important at all.
“You take more than you give”
The cost to go live with a software solution is only a fraction of the lifetime TCO. Often, the system you’ve relied on for years grows too costly or too complex to maintain. Whether it’s heavy administrative overhead, third-party services, or custom development, maintaining an outdated system that no longer serves your needs drives up your TCO.
If your legacy content services solution continues to add costs without continuing to add value, conversion should be considered.
Finding your soulmate
Reducing costs, aligning technology investments, gaining efficiencies, mitigating risk – there are multiple reasons why you might want to replace your content services solution. Doing so will give you the opportunity to find a solution that better fits the needs of your organisation today, helps you plan for the future, and will evolve with you as your organisation grows.
Replacing legacy systems is a task that goes far beyond replacing an existing system with a more modern one. When you’re ready to evaluate new options, make sure your new solution comes from an experienced vendor with an uncompromised focus on product development, as well as an expert in-house database conversion team with a proven toolset and methodology. Otherwise, you could end up broken-hearted.
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