When you work in a specific industry, you get immune to the abbreviations and various terms that are shorthand for the activities and capabilities of your business. Just ask a new employee at Konica Minolta how we bat around acronyms such as MIT, Op, PP, GCE, SSE, ECM, RPA, BPO, FM and MX. Well, our team is going to add one more acronym to the mix – IIM – which stands for Intelligent Information Management and how the practice will be referred to moving forward. IIM will replace the former term used to refer to the practice, ECM, or Enterprise Content Management. However, content management will still be one of the core solutions we provide to our customers.
Over time, managing documents and the data (keywords) residing in those documents became valuable for organizations of all sizes. Being able to search for a certain field on a document to locate the specific information is a time-saving ‘content-management’ function for small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMB) and enterprise clients. Launching automated workflows and integrating processes into the business applications that employees use every day further enhanced the value of having that digital content that could be ingested into those applications.
The main focus was on organizing structured and unstructured data – and giving employees easy access to information by digitizing it into a centrally stored location – as of late moving to the cloud – and making it available on mobile devices and, more recently, while working remotely from home.
What has transformed our business is how we manage information. As the first name implied, ECM focused on the distinction between document management and content management. It was primarily of interest to organizations at the enterprise level because the solutions that existed during the nascent period were targeted for very large organizations that had a variety of challenges.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are also driving a whole new set of mechanics for how software should manage our information. This trend will not only continue, but it will rise exponentially as more innovations are made, and more applications leverage those innovations.
AIIM, the Association for Intelligent Information Management, nailed this future trend in 2017, and by the start of 2018, they promptly changed their name from the Association for Information and Image Management. Incorporating the term “intelligence” represents the fact that we are doing more than just managing content.
As the ECM industry has evolved in recent years, Konica Minolta has kept pace by expanding its capabilities beyond standard automated workflow, offering business process automation, robotic process automation, analytics and more. By rebranding and creating a dedicated practice, Konica Minolta aims to accelerate its digital transformation (DX) efforts and expand its capabilities in the area of professional services coupled with valued-added software-as-a-service offerings.
As IIM, our practice will be more in sync with how our industry has evolved so that who we are and what we do is better represented, and our vision to make intelligence the centerpiece of our practice is realized. IIM serves as an all-encompassing term for our content, process and analytics services in support of the digital workforce.
Konica Minolta has also refined the pillars within its new IIM practice, with all solutions scalable to serve customers of all sizes. These pillars include:
● Workflow Process Collaboration and Management
● Content and Case Management
● Business Process Outsourcing
● Intelligent Automation and Robotic Process Automation
● Business Process Automation and Analytics
● Business Process Management
We will still focus on data, documents, automated workflows and analytics, but we also provide intelligent automation, process improvement, and a path to Hyperautomation, defined as end-to-end automation accomplished by harnessing the power of multiple technologies. It is a combination of content services, process services, and analytics services – the applications and tools any size business needs to digitally transform.
At Konica Minolta, we have similarly unveiled our focus on intelligence with the Intelligent Connected Workplace, guiding businesses toward the more efficient, more automated, more intelligent workspace – wherever employees may be.
It is a very exciting time in our IIM industry as the path to Hyperautomation continues to unfold and offer applications we cannot even dream about yet. But, with our practice centered on intelligence, we are well positioned to be right where we need to be for the near and distant future.
For more information on our IIM practice, please visit us online.
