Staying ahead and on top in business is about facing challenges and tackling them head-on. Underlying an organisation’s ability to do this these days is largely founded on its ability to analyse and use its data to make the right informed decisions to secure competitive advantage.
The ability of any organisation to access, interrogate, understand and use its own data as required, and on demand, can mean the difference of staying ahead of the competition or lagging behind. This is especially true for any business predicated on transactions and driven by vast amounts of data.
Yet, just staying on top of the data – where every transaction, every new customer, business stream or product acquired or created translates into more and more data – is a major challenge of our times.
EDM platforms are designed to help businesses unlock and manage their data. Good platforms will assist to deliver the information and knowledge required to users, in a way that sits seamlessly within existing business operations.
But with a myriad of choices, how do you select the best EDM for your business?
The starting point: what do you need your EDM to do?
This largely depends on the main data challenges your business is facing:
- Accessing and reading data from different legacy and varied business systems and data sets
- Connecting different data sets and enabling coherent and consistent reading and reporting
- Keeping the data secure and fully compliant
- Managing and interrogating the data to suit your company and your existing processes and ways of reporting and conducting business
- Enabling different users across business streams and functions to access, use and manipulate the data in a way that can deliver genuine value for your organisation
Choosing the right EDM platform – what to consider
Having identified your primary data needs and challenges, there are several aspects of an EDM system that you should consider.
Flexibility and functionality
As your data mountain grows and your associated requirements change, you need a platform that is flexible and capable of adeptly adding more functionality to adapt accordingly. Many platforms are rigid; they deliver EDM in a fixed way. That might be cost-effective for now, but as your business changes, you’ll be faced with the need to spend a lot of money to get these systems to adapt. Consider all future potential indicators as to how the future could pan out, and make your decision based on this. If you can find a system which offers flexibility, robustness, and is cost efficient both now and going forward, this is ideal. It should also suit your current systems and processes. Remember – the system should adapt to suit you, not the other way around.
Business focused
Look at where you want to get to. You want an EDM platform that is designed and driven to help you achieve your business goals – one that enables you to set the required results, enables you to write the conditions and rules, and which delivers your data to suit the business and user needs.
Modular design
Source a system with a functionality that can easily scale up or scale down to suit your needs – and still be able to talk to the platform and system you have already built.
Inbuilt API capability
Does the EDM platform easily integrate with your current systems? The right one will, and it’ll save you the headache of having to source more software or applications to make that link. Such connectivity makes it easier to turn your data into a hard, tangible asset – something that can be published internally or externally, to partners, customers, prospects, other departments and more.
Your system should enable those that use it to define what they want and how they receive it, in a way that suits their needs. Better that than wasting time exporting the data into another system, or sourcing and paying for more software to enable the data to be read and manipulated.
Capacity without limits
Often, the amount of data you’re dealing with can expand beyond anything you’d ever imagined or expected. This is only natural as your business grows and your needs change, but as a result you’ll need a system that has the capability to increase capacity, without fuss and in a cost-effective manner.
Powerful analytics for informed decision-making
Strong data analysis is vital, and your EDM should have this functionality within its arsenal of tools to give you the advantage you seek. With access to clear analytics, you’ll be better placed tactically to observe and predict trends, patterns and behaviours and make better business decisions based on your findings. Not only that, but after a data governance strategy is implemented within your business, your analytics tool will give you the power to expand and scale your strategy to suit the scenario with ease.
Legacy compatible
Seek a system that can enable legacy data from a variety of systems and sources to be read, linked, and make sense in the way your business needs it to; a platform that avoids silos and has the power to find and release the 35% of data that typically is locked and unreadable within the data banks of any large corporation.
Compliant and secure
A good EDM platform should remove the headache of managing and ensuring data compliance and security – saving valuable time and money – and delivering peace of mind in the process.
Cost-effective
Just because your data mountain is growing at a phenomenal rate, it doesn’t mean that your associated costs should too. A modular and flexible platform that reduces the need to develop new proprietary software, buy additional technology, or develop APIs will invariably reduce your need to spend excessively as a result.
A powerful, well-designed EDM platform that enables you to define the solutions you require for your business, that empowers your users with the knowledge they need, is a platform that can offer genuine data advantage for your business.
Irion the all-in-one platform for understanding and managing your data. The platform offers a powerful goal orientated engine to simply and effectively manage the data needs of your business, creating data advantage for your users and your company.
Irion has helped major banks and financial institutions solve their challenges in 3 key areas: Regulatory Compliance, Data Management, Data Aggregation and Reporting.
Our technology easily adapts and delivers to your business requirements and enables you to read, manage and report as every user requires. No need for adaptation or complex definitions, our flexible and scalable platform follows the processes you already have and becomes the engine you need to drive business results
For any inquiries about the Irion EDM Platform please contact us.