The next era of information management [Q&A]

With the emergence of generative AI technology, information management is undergoing rapid transformation.

The productivity of knowledge workers is critically important to the growth and profitability of businesses, and organizations are turning to solutions that help automate mundane, time-consuming tasks. We talked to Antti Nivala, founder and CEO of M-Files, to find out more aboput this new era of information management.

BN: How has information management evolved over the past few years?

AN: With information moving to the cloud at a rapid pace, information management has evolved drastically over the last few years. Gone are the days of collections of files sitting in archaic, unorganized folder structures on a server. Instead, as the amount of data that organizations generate, process, and collect from myriad data sources grows exponentially, information management has evolved to help employees find, use, and understand content. Information management today is more than simply managing documents -- it empowers businesses to organize content and knowledge so that it can be used in the proper business context to increase productivity, drive customer satisfaction, and contribute to greater profitability. Information management helps keep pace with rapidly evolving compliance regulations, eliminate information chaos, improve process efficiency, and reduce business risk.

BN: What are the biggest frustrations facing knowledge workers today?

AN: The largest frustrations revolve around mundane, time-consuming tasks such as writing emails, ensuring legal and regulatory compliance, and organizing contracts and schematics. While they are all essential to keep projects moving forward and businesses running, it doesn't mean it’s the best use of a highly skilled employee's time.

The productivity of knowledge workers is critically important to the growth and profitability of businesses. Knowledge workers are imperative for combining convergent (fact-finding) and divergent (creative) thinking to solve unique problems. Thus, knowledge workers work best in a state of flow, where they can be creative, think freely, and problem solve. Anything that detracts from that flow state, such as creating frequently used documents from scratch or searching through old emails looking for some long-lost piece of information, creates a distraction from higher value-added work.

BN: How can automation help solve these frustrations?

AN: Knowledge work automation automates manual processes and workflows, which streamlines daily work and frees up knowledge workers to concentrate on the tasks that drive more impactful business outcomes. With knowledge work automation, the entire process from document creation and management to workflow automation, external collaboration, security, and compliance is automated, eliminating tasks that don’t make the best use of a knowledge worker’s skills.

In a perfect world, knowledge workers would spend every moment of their workday focused entirely on solving critical problems and creating the assets and results their client or employer needs. Knowledge work automation makes that scenario closer to reality, reducing the need for manual, repetitive work and optimizing resources to enable knowledge workers to focus on initiatives that matter most and improve the bottom line. By leveraging and combining new innovations such as AI and the cloud, knowledge work automation makes all aspects of knowledge work easier and smoother.

BN: How does knowledge work automation leverage AI?

AN: Knowledge work automation leverages AI to eliminate information chaos and improve process efficiency, reducing the amount of time-consuming busywork knowledge workers face daily. With the power of AI, knowledge work automation helps classify documents and extract their meaning, so that information can be used in the proper business context to provide superior business outcomes. AI handles the laborious and tedious work that wastes a knowledge worker’s expertise and energy by crawling data repositories to uncover business-critical data or sensitive content buried inside documents. A great example is that with AI, when a knowledge worker saves a document, knowledge work automation can help determine the document type and business context, obtain the access rights, and set the appropriate automated workflows.

By unlocking all the organization’s intellectual capital with AI, knowledge workers can be more productive and insightful.

BN: What are some best practices when implementing automation?

AN: As an emerging field, the biggest thing to keep in mind when implementing knowledge work automation is that you want to map your initiatives to your organization's goals and priorities. The amount of unnecessary tasks knowledge work automation can remove from employees' plates is impressive, but only when correlated to larger business needs and objectives. Don't be afraid to start small to master the ropes. Starting small enables organizations to better understand the potential benefits and define appropriate goals to ensure you are automating the correct process to provide the desired value.

In addition, it’s important to consider a holistic solution when it comes to knowledge work automation. Technology giants such as Microsoft, Google, and Adobe provide comprehensive suites of general-purpose tools and technologies. However, these systems don't form an integrated end-to-end process, which presents a challenge for knowledge workers looking to connect information across disparate systems. Instead, enterprises should turn to fully integrated knowledge work automation platforms built to facilitate the entire knowledge work process from inception and creation to reviews, approvals, sharing with clients, and beyond. These platforms offer an integrated user experience, streamlining all aspects across knowledge work.

Knowledge work automation has the power to maximize ROI, boost efficiency, and revolutionize how knowledge workers operate. It can help organizations get the most knowledge out of their information, automating tasks, processes and actions that previously required human interaction so employees can focus on what matters most -- the aspects of their jobs they get the most fulfillment out of.

Photo Credit: Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock