Category Archives: Enterprise Content Management

AIML, Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management & Artificial Intelligence Use cases – Part 1

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  • Enterprise content management – Wikipedia – Enteprise Content Management on Wikipedia – Enterprise content management (ECM) extends the concept of content management by adding a timeline for each content item and, possibly, enforcing processes for its creation, approval, and distribution. Systems using ECM generally provide a secure repository for managed items, analog or digital. They also include one (or more) methods for importing content to bring manage new items, and several presentation methods to make items available for use. Quoted from WIKIPEDIA.
  • List of content management systems – Wikipedia – List of Enterprise Content Management systems on Wikipedia
  • Artificial intelligence – Wikipedia – Artificial Intelligence on Wikipedia

List of use cases from AI overlapping with Enterprise Content Management:

1. Document classification, automated categorization, tagging and taxonomy

2. Intelligent scanning and capture

3. Handwriting recognition

4. Process / workflow automation & intelligence

5. Recommendations from documents and content

6. Knowledge management

7. Personalization & security

8. Content / image extraction and context creation

9. Automated and intelligent lifecycle management for records, archives and content

10. Document and content analytics

11. Publishing controls

12. Content & document generation

13. Low code ECM

These and more use cases in Enterprise Content Management will get enhanced with AI over the course of next few years.

Email me: Neil@HarwaniSystems.in

Enterprise Content Management

BPM (Business Process Management) and trends

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Business process management from 1990s / 2000s in simplest terms is a set of activities (automated or manual) with breaks for events and interactions with external systems / human beings along with notifications / rules / filters / etc. Traditional BPM / Workflows included manual and automated tasks, integrations (mainly offline or asynchronous), notifications, auto-escalations, interactions with human beings.

Come to 2017 and we have plethora of new technologies / products in the ecosystem which we can use along with BPM – some are already in use and some will evolve with time.

  1. Real time analytics integration with social media and other areas
  2. IoT integration
  3. Automation, Machine Learning & Artificial intelligence
  4. Collaboration
  5. Omni channel
  6. Cloud
  7. Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation instead of BPMN
  8. Chatbots as entry points
  9. Low code business process management platform
  • Real time analytics – With all of the social media APIs in the market like Twitter / Facebook and so on we can integrate them with BPM as an entry point based on for example for many of the tasks or in other activities in integration. A positive or negative review with specific keywords can for instance trigger a specific part of or the start of workflow. Something similar was done by a bank in India recently where they had twitter based banking
  • Internet of Things has a lot of intelligence built into them from beacons, electronics kits, sensors, biometrics and so on. They could act as augmentation to the normal input provided by other systems and BPM users / admins. For instance based on a specific temperature threshold emergency systems could be activated and series of various fire mitigation steps could be activated
  • Robotic process automation, machine learning and AI have the capability to automate many of the steps of BPM / Workflows. They could for instance automate the under-writing of various insurance policies based on earlier inputs and rules
  • Collaboration and omni channel are buzz words today in marketing and horizontal portals. BPM can potentially now work with multiple channels like smartphones, APPs, SMS, calls, social media, etc. driving more productivity
  • Many companies now offer softwares in cloud as SAAS and workflows too for instance can be hosted in say AWS to connect anywhere, anytime and in multiple ways over internet
  • Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation are two new ways of modelling your workflows and business processes. They are closer to business and non technical users can use them for modelling the processes
  • Chatbots which use Natural language processing to create chats between humans and backend systems could be another potential entry activity for workflows and BPM
  • Lastly low code platforms are getting more traction as we move into world of automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. With decision model & notation and entity based modelling we are already moving in direction of low code platforms
Architecture, Enterprise Content Management

Blockchain for ECM and Digital Assets

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What is ECM ?

Enterprise Content Management is a repository of documents with workflow, scanning, digital rights management, integrations, metadata, web content management and portals weaved around it

What is BlockChain ?

Database mainly used as distributed ledger which does not allow modifications of earlier stored ‘Blocks’ in it and secured by cryptography in a way where earlier blocks’ signature is stored on the next instance resulting in immutability. If any of the earlier blocks are modified it results in a corruption of network majority

What can we do when we merge BlockChain with ECM ?

We have immutable strings in Java, we have immutable objects in programming. But to maintain immutability in Enterprise Content Management, Document Management and Digital Assets we go upto great lengths to have hashing, signatures, complex repository engines, MD5s and so on.

One thing that could help us is BlockChain. People have already started speaking of building custom ECM engines using open source products from NoSQL and Portal domain. If we add a BlockChain database to this mix, we get a serious contender for a new type of ECM repository – one that does not need complex repository logic or probably simplifies it.

Use cases:

  1. ECM – We can take a NoSQL database, Blockchain and a horizontal portal. Portal works for the workflow, presentation, rules, etc. NoSQL for the metadata and BlockChain for integrity of the repository assets like documents.
  2. Digital assets repository – All the signatures of the various repository assets in an enterprise could be stored in the BlockChain which can verify assets’ integrity just like what MD5 does

Its worth exploring. BlockChain can be so much more than just transactions’ integrity management.