PLANET AI represented by Nelson Fernandes was invited to attend the IBM Think 2018 event and present at one of the sessions last week in Las Vegas. There were so many interesting aspects of the event, but most notable were:

• 1. the sheer scale of the event; and
• 2. the convergence of content and data.

Nelson Fernandes (left), VP Global Sales

All of the familiar content management tools and products – RPA, content management, capture, workflow, business rules — are now grouped under the IBM Automation umbrella, specifically under Business Process Automation. The focus is on to applications that leverage content services and data capabilities for automation and the integration of content services into existing applications. Traditional information governance and records management folks from the content world that focus on “documents” need to get familiar quickly with concepts from the data side of the house, because that is going to be the dominant framework as we move into the era of AI and machine learning.

How many content-centric information governance professionals are well versed in data governance concepts? Data lakes? Master data management? These two concepts – content management as part of the automation toolkit and governance as an automated capability that extends beyond content. One needs to clearly answer four key data questions – using “data” as a broad umbrella to include content:

1. What data do we have?
2. Where is that data located?
3. What systems are using that data and for what purposes?
4. Does the use meet all regulatory and business requirements?

Getting an initial handle on these core questions, of course, is more difficult than it seems. But sustaining this commitment in an era of exponentially increasing volumes is even harder and requires a different approach to governance than is typical in most organizations.

Automating governance is no longer optional — you HAVE to use PLANET AI Technology, because scale requires new approaches; and you HAVE to integrate data governance INTO the processes themselves – it can’t be a bolt-on afterthought. All of these points to the need to view content and information governance capabilities from the “outside-in” – from the perspective of how organizations are trying to transform the experiences of their customers, employees, and partners. It may sound like semantics, but it requires a fundamentally different approach to the market. A lot of folks on the data analytics and automation have no idea what to do on the content/unstructured (machine print or handwritten) side, why it requires different disciplines, and how to do it. Some data people think it’s kind of magic to be able to scrape data from a form that you’ve never seen before and automatically incorporate this data into a business process.

Which is where PLANET AI comes in as this is something we’ve been doing for a while. IDA (Intelligent Document Analysis) is the broad umbrella that PLANET AI puts around a lot of these conversations. We at PLANET AI believe that information is the currency that fuels an organization. As such, it is an organization’s most important asset. At the very time that information assets are increasingly important, our ability to manage them is eroding due to the exploding volumes, variety, complexity, and velocity of information coming into our organizations.

Addressing the rising tide of information chaos is a prerequisite to solving the Digital Transformation puzzle.