Does your organization use a legacy ECM?
Legacy ECM offers legacy UX, features, and functionality. which sounds obvious, but do we need to type in “HTTP:/…….” to pull up a website? Do we need to call or send an email to check on a tardy order from Amazon? Of course not; most customers use Chat.
Organizations leave legacy platforms for a reason. Originally, Laserfiche’s Founder Nien-Ling Wacker (who practically invented ECM), devised Laserfiche as a sort of “auxiliary brain.” so that the client could find the information they needed in their records. In the ‘90s, document management served to help organizations digitize and reduce paper use by turning documents into electronic files and images.
In that day and age and under the formerly mentioned conditions, document management served its purpose. Now, however, the business world has embraced technology in ways that legacy ECM systems were never architected to accommodate. Organizations used ECM to scan documents and then manually added metadata and assigned templates and other taxonomies. Sometimes you’ll hear this use called a “digital filing cabinet.” We use that name because even though the media type is different, it’s being used just like an old, three-drawer filing cabinet.”
The main function of these systems was filing and finding information. The trouble is the user often needed to know a fair amount about the document in order to find it. The content was limited to documents and audio/video files, not metadata from other systems because most organizations weren’t integrating their document systems with their business systems. OCR in legacy ECM wasn’t great, and if you OCRed all of your documents the search slowed to a crawl.
Hold on, we're still not done. Furthermore, legacy ECM wasn’t easy for your IT team to support and maintain and required extra hardware, and was licensed inflexibly, Also, the system was also not interoperable (although many systems then were black boxes)–meaning limited collaboration and workflow.
“Fine” is no longer fine
Many organizations have held on to these painfully antiquated systems because they satisfy a basic set of needs, they run “fine” and because the stakeholders have considerable investment. Regardless, organizations also need to consider the opportunity cost of legacy ECM’s limitations and total lack of integration with the business.
Modern ECM, like Laserfiche, isn't just owned and managed by a few IT people. More often it is common to give select users administrative rights such as accessing and updating profiles, the ability to build workflows and audit them to ensure they work. Legacy ECM disempowered the user. YOUR user.
Staff wants the flexibility to find whatever information is relevant to their needs, no matter the media type. They are accustomed to googling and the power of true ‘findability’. For them, typing a search query, finding new information, and searching within the results, intuitively fitting the rhythm of how they work. Legacy ECM can’t do that. But today’s Laserfiche can.
Laserfiche can scale to fit your enterprise, integrate seamlessly with both internal and customer-facing applications, and manage both content and data in the same way. Updates and enhancements are transparent to the user and involve little downtime. And workflow! We frequently write and talk about workflow on this blog, so, yes, you get that too!
Delivered as a platform rather than as a product, modern ECM systems require minimal implementation time. Service providers (like CPS) take the maintenance burden and are highly skilled in ECM adjacent tech like migrations, app development, customizations, and integrations.
I can’t think of a better time than now to revisit changing your legacy system for a robust, enterprise-class, extensible, interoperable ECM like Laserfiche.
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