April 19, 2023

ECM and migration are inseparable. IT system landscapes are subject to constant change, and so are the requirements that are imposed on them. In addition, there are new or changed requirements due to company growth, reorganizations and mergers of companies. Changes in the system landscape usually result in the migration of large document inventories from one system to another. Those inventories are usually managed by document management systems (DMS) or enterprise content management (ECM) systems.

Migrations are almost always associated with changes in data schemas, metadata and formats, which requires the conversion of existing data. This process should ideally also correct errors that have crept in over the years. At this point, AI/ML technologies promise significant efficiency and quality benefits for migration projects. With intelligent data pipelines, these conversion and correction processes can be performed automatically. Automatic categorization and extraction of structured information to enrich or correct and harmonize metadata, harmonization of vocabulary in texts to establish IDMP compliance, and document comparisons to eliminate redundancy are just three important examples of the use of AI in this context.

If the migration is aimed at switching to component-based work (structured content management, SCM), more far-reaching procedures are necessary to keep the manual workload low. In SCM, structured content, i.e., sections as units of information, is managed instead of documents. Deep learning techniques are able to evaluate not only structural but also semantic information of texts to find similar documents or document sections. These methods can be used to detect reused sections across many documents and thus extract components from document collections in a redundancy-free manner and transfer them to an SCM system. 

Inconsult not only offers services in the area of design, configuration, customizing as well as migration of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems from leading manufacturers, but also supports you in making migrations of these systems as efficient as possible with AI support. Contact us, our experts Stefan Hoferer (Head of ECM) and Dr. Matthias Rüdiger (Head of AI) are at your disposal.