November 22, 2022
With the ever-increasing amount of compliance and regulation requirements, it is a continual challenge for organizations to have proper compliance strategies, processes, and systems in place. What adds to the challenge is the constant explosion of new data and records, leading to data sitting in fragmented silos across disparate databases and systems, buried within many archives, and being duplicated. All of these introduce additional complex challenges for compliance with the laws.
While enterprises use robust enterprise content management (ECM) systems to manage their content and data, business data don't just reside on one system. Organizations operate multiple separate but integrated or interconnected enterprise systems, so whenever there is a need to find and access content for vendors, consumers, or staff, it proves to be an operational and technical challenge. The fact is that with content and data distributed across many different systems and even multiple repositories within the same systems, it is critical to ensure they can access and retrieve the complete and up-to-date version of the data they have.
Fortunately for consumers, compliance with data privacy laws and other regulations is mandatory. Enterprises need both processes and proper systems in place so that they can remain compliant and mitigate any risks of heavy fines. As regulatory compliance is a continuous process and not a one-off event, understanding the main challenges of using ECM to stay compliant is essential.
Organizations operate and run multiple systems, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Document Management (DM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Enterprise Content Management (ECM), and several more. While these systems are crucial for operations, they also add layers of complexities to data management.
Enterprises will find their content and data stored across all the systems they use. Different aspects and portions that would make up to form a complete content object could be found across ERP, ECM, and CRM systems. Even when these systems are integrated--and chances are many, enterprises don't have full integrations between all the disparate systems they run on--it is still a challenge to make sure compliance teams have consistent access to all systems to search, retrieve and access contents they need.
A complex and cumbersome search process compounds the complexity of the content being stored across different systems to retrieve content across all these systems equally. Since searching across systems is challenging, retrieving information becomes time-consuming and puts compliance teams at a critical disadvantage. In parallel, searching across repositories within a particular system is still problematic.
This is where our proprietary and purpose-built software platform, MARS, shines. MARS can find, collate, and combine all your data across all data sources, including archived ones or even "dark data," which are forgotten assets. It has connectors to over 45 data sources and can read just about any filetype. Using MARS can completely eliminate your issues with inconsistent access or woes with incompatible search and retrieval.
While all the ECM systems can help with compliance processes, compliance teams full of humans still need to conduct manual processes. Since manual processes are error-prone and time-consuming, they introduce lag in the compliance process. In most cases, the compliance team is required to search, identify, locate, and secure all the relevant information across many disparate systems.
To mitigate this risk, the automation of manual processes and workflows through workflows automation tools is critical. However, automation introduces another set of challenges, such as lower data quality and the inability to deal with partial or complete failures.
On the surface, this may not seem like a problem. However, complying with data privacy laws doesn't come with an unlimited timeframe. For example, if a consumer submits a request for their "right to be forgotten," then the timeframe to respond is one month. Now, this may seem like a sufficient amount of time, but multiply the amount of work it takes to comply with hundreds or thousands of requests, then you get an idea of the real scope of this challenge.
This is another area where MARS shines. DataMining Studio (DMS), a module of our software platform, can extract data across any filetypes and sources and use business automation rules and workflows to apply any rules and transformations. This effectively reduces a lot of manual processes for compliance teams.
Disconnected systems impact users' ability to pull required information as and when they need it, which limits their ability to conduct comprehensive reports for compliance purposes. Since these systems are disconnected, the process of scouring data tends to be a patchwork process.
Not to keep tooting our own horn, yet this is another classic area where Helix International's MARS software platform can save your organization from costly mistakes and risks of fines. MARS can not just collate all data and content you have across all enterprise systems; it can also link fragmented documents. You can also eliminate fragmented data silos and redundancy by using MARS to condense and organize content with shared metadata automatically. With MARS, you will never run the risk of incomplete reporting or having to do a patchwork process ever.
Massive Archival Retrieval System (MARS) is our purpose-built platform for anything related to taking control of your enterprise data and business processes. Through a simple UI or using microservices, you will have complete unimaginable control over all your data, making data chaos a thing of the past and compliance processes more manageable than before.
Choose Helix International--the leading ECM and data migration service provider and IBM partner of choice--and you will save yourself a lot of trouble with non-compliance.
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