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Box CEO: Why Organizations Need A Single Content System

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Box CEO & co-founder Aaron-Levie: content should be right up there with ERP and CRM

Co-founder and CEO of Box Aaron Levie is usually one of the most upbeat, affable and altogether gregarious industry spokespeople imaginable. It seems like there’s only one thing that riles him up though -- the fragmentation and disintegration that companies in every vertical display when it comes to their approach to content.

Levie tabled the following assertion at a media roundtable recently, “Let me ask you a question, how many Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems does the average company have? It’s one, right? How many Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRM) does a company have? It’s one, right? So [in a world where there is email, disaggregated file sharing and all manner of content streams from video to voice and so on] why don’t firms have just one content system?”

Pinch of saltiness

He’s right of course, largely speaking. But then this is the opinion of a man who acts as the CEO of a content management, collaboration and file sharing access organization. So take that loaded sharp angled close with just the tiniest pinch of salt.

Levie’s proclamation reflects the thinking of many modern information theorists who champion the need for content itself to become a first class citizen in the business.

The theory goes something like this: “The more people trust in each other and the content they produce and share (where trust has been quantified and validated) the faster a business moves towards differential points of innovation."

The caveat to that statement is that inevitably, process bureaucracy can still get in the way, but it's a nice theory either way.

Content goes 3D

Levie’s plans for content as a business driver are unrestrained. He explains the use of ‘sharing graphs’ as a kind of spatial representation of what has been shared and collaborated upon throughout the organisation.

Today Box is capable of seeing this graph, but only as a 2D snapshot as a single moment in time. Ultimately a 3D model could be built to show what is happening at all times, in relation to all content, for all stakeholders in all locations. This is the kind of thing that a dedicated content platform could and should be capable of in the near future, conceptually at least anyway.

Levie was doing the media rounds (when isn’t he?) in connection with news of his firm’s union with IBM . The two firms have collaborated on a new set of solutions intended to power enterprise content management and collaboration. What that really means is, software that essentially crunches down on tasks as described by these four key factors:

  • advanced collaboration,
  • data classification,
  • enterprise search and,
  • enhanced analytics across content and digital business processes.

“Enterprise content management has long been a business critical technology, but its promise has been unfulfilled in a modern workplace that is dominated by mobile devices, cloud applications, and all new ways of working,” said Whitney Bouck, senior VP and GM of Enterprise at Box.

In terms of actual products, IBM Content Navigator with Box helps search, access and share content as an interface and development platform. IBM StoredIQ with Box helps companies make more informed business decisions by providing them with an in-depth assessment of unstructured data across Box and on-premise environments. IBM Case Manager with Box helps enable sharing content on the Box platform with external participants in the flow of business process. IBM Datacap with Box helps businesses capture documents across multiple sources, extract key information from them and store them to Box.

IBM’s welcome to the family message

“Organizations in every industry have an unprecedented opportunity to transform the way they connect with customers, collaborate with partners and engage with their colleagues and employees by gaining control over their data,” said Rich Howarth, VP of Enterprise Content Management products and strategy, IBM. “Together IBM and Box are bringing the best cloud collaboration and content management solutions to bear to help our clients turn their data into a resource that they can call on to drive growth.”

So we know ERP and we know CRM, but we don’t know ECM as a standard industry acronym with quite as much instinctual recognition. Ask a journalist whether content has come of age and they’ll say yes.

Ask a businessperson whether Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has come of age and, increasingly, they might just start to say yes as well.

 

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