Page 16 - FCW, July 2017

MOBILITY
TACKLE CONTENT CHAOS
Employees need easy, secure access to documents to truly collaborate t.
in a mobile environmenCONTENT DOESN’T EXIST without process, and process doesn’t exist
whatever mobile device they already own and have that information seamlessly uploaded into a business process.
Government isn’t just lagging behind
the commercial sector in creating mobile applications. It’s largely sitting on its hands. It’s unwilling to accept the risks of extending productivity outside the firewall, despite overwhelming evidence it can be done safely. Even in 2017, most application modernization RFPs make no mention of mobile.
A Modern Platform
A modern platform like Alfresco can deliver an experience built for both mobile and desktop environments at the same time. Furthermore, those same agencies issue RFPs for one application at a time instead
of designing a strategy to build numerous solutions on a shared platform. Using a common platform for numerous applications can drastically drive down acquisition and development time. Why are single agencies supporting dozens of applications that have the same basic functions—collaborating on content, automating processes, and providing analytics and reporting?
The kind of disruption I’m describing, done at the scale of millions of employees and trillions of documents, is only possible in an affordable way when the government starts to lean more heavily on open-source vendors that natively support the flexibility, scalability, and agility found in the cloud.
Companies like Alfresco that work to expand the government’s adoption of open- source software and drive innovation through open standards are critical to bringing down the total cost of IT and bringing genuine digital transformation to life.
Austin Adams is Vice President of Public Sector at Alfresco.
SPONSORED CONTENT
AUSTIN ADAMS
VICE PRESIDENT
OF PUBLIC SECTOR, ALFRESCO
on them, and passing them through a business process for approval. Despite billions of dollars and decades of failed attempts, the government still either passes physical paper or sends emails in order to get the job done.
Everyone in government experiences varying levels of this content chaos. They know if they dig around long enough, they might eventually find what they’re looking for, but will have little confidence that what they found represents the newest, most recently approved, or shareable version of that document. The loss of productivity across government as a result is staggering.
When a government agency does not have access to an easy-to-use, centralized platform to process content; the staff wastes otherwise valuable time. Once a document is dropped into a legacy content system, it is probably going there to die. They won’t be able to find it again. And even if they did, they wouldn’t know if they could trust it anymore.
Envision instead a place where they can easily create a business process to support the document’s lifecycle within the organization, giving them 100 percent clarity on its status. From there, whenever they need the most current, approved, and shareable version,
it’s easy to find and easy to share. They
won’t need to dig through thousands of transactional emails or slowly filter through
a cemetery of dead content for the one document they actually need.
Government employees, and the citizens they serve, are demanding vastly improved access to their content and services. They want to be able to take pictures, record video, add notes, and approve an action item on
without content. Most government employees’ days are filled with developing documents, collaborating
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