Information management as a success factor

Nevertheless, it is undisputed that digitalisation and information management will permanently and fundamentally change our working world and our private lives. Digitalisation rarely stands alone. Developments are accompanied by smart technologies and services, disruptive innovations and changing values, to name just a few trends. Instagram, the free online service for sharing photos and videos, which belongs to Facebook and was founded in 2010, contributed to the collapse of the business model of Kodak, a company that had been established in the photography business for many years. Kodak had to file for insolvency. Quelle, which delivered department stores' catalogues to our grandparents' homes and was unable to defend itself against Amazon because it had missed the digitalisation trend, suffered a similar fate. Our smartphones cover everything we need in our daily lives, from spirit levels, alarm clocks, maps and encyclopaedias to e-mail inboxes and Internet access. The special thing about this development is that this time it is "from the bottom up". There is hardly anyone who is not active on a social network or who does not use their smartphone to access services or get information. The drivers are therefore the high affinity of individuals for the intensive use of digital services and smartphones, which have become indispensable.

There is no doubt that digitalisation is changing our private lives and our working world.
The example of document management systems (DMS) shows very clearly how this change is reflected in practice. At the very beginning, in the mid-1980s, the aim was to use DMS to store and archive large quantities of documents. The focus was clearly on administration and revision security. It was all about capacity and the reliability of long-term storage systems. Then it was discovered that internal processes could be well supported with DMS once the documents were scanned. The "electronic files" were born. Systems and solutions grew, the functionalities were significantly expanded and approaches such as "DOMEA" were developed. For a long time, document management systems were therefore important building blocks for the effective and efficient handling of information and documents within organisations and in exchanges between companies. With information management and the digital transformation that has long since begun, the corresponding solutions are by no means obsolete, but they are no longer sufficient on their own. The boundaries for meaningful solutions simply have to be set much further today.

Today, an electronic file must be able to do much more. It must support the entire life cycle with services. This includes multi-channel input (e-mail, paper, portal, fax, specialist procedures, social media), services for capturing and processing (generating signatures, uploading and downloading documents, electronic briefcases, managing lifecycles, mobile support) or predictive analyses to forecast customer behaviour and make specific offers. The electronic file has thus arrived at the "customer". And it is the customer who is being prioritised, whether in insurance (the insured), retail (the customers) or public administration (the citizens). The eFiles have finally crossed the internal workflows and thus the boundaries of companies and organisations. This offers great potential benefits. Missing proof, for example when concluding a purchase or leasing contract, no longer has to be laboriously requested by post and then assigned to a process and a file when it arrives at the company. The customer can upload the required proof via their smartphone and a customer portal, the system checks the proof and the process can be completed quickly and easily with almost no user intervention. Of course, the legal requirements must be observed in such processes. And even today, not every document can simply be accepted as an image. But that too may yet change. This brief digression shows: Document management systems and electronic files are "out" as isolated solution fields, while information management and digital change are "in".

It will certainly be some time before solutions are available that are open enough to combine the advantages of different approaches. Until then, it is important to consider the key trends in strategy and design when developing and expanding solutions and to orientate solutions towards openness and flexibility.

Then solutions are already possible today to make information management an important success factor for companies and organisations through the efficient and effective use of information and knowledge derived from it.