Reimagining legacy ECM with Box: Part II
In our last blog, we covered a few of the challenges that organizations often experience with legacy ECM systems, including outdated tech, high costs, disjointed user experiences, and the inability to take advantage of new and evolving technologies such as AI. Now’s the time to reimagine your legacy ECM processes and consider modern alternatives built for how work gets done today.
Below are questions to ask when considering a replacement for your existing ECM system. They’re presented in no particular order and can be prioritized according to your organization’s biggest challenges.
Cost of ownership
In addition to the cost of software licenses and ongoing maintenance and support fees, are there any additional expenses to the platform you’re considering? You’ll need to double-click to understand costs like recurring hardware expenses and the staffing required to install, maintain, update, and manage the system. There might also be integrations required with related systems including your CRM, ERP, and line-of-business applications.
Additionally, are costly customizations needed to address product gaps? And what about hard-to-predict costs for scaling the system — additional storage? More tenants? New features?
Complexity and business risk
From an administration standpoint, what’s involved with maintaining the system on a day-to-day basis, and are special skills required? How long does a system upgrade take? Will the system’s architecture scale easily, or will increasing capacity result in undesirable scenarios like multiple content silos — which could lead to more business risk?
Maintaining a system can be time consuming and stress inducing, especially when it’s time to install software updates on a production system. And if organizations fall behind on applying software updates, they risk missing out on new features and can be exposed to security risks or version support issues.
Innovation and user experience
Is there a proven track record of innovation for this platform? What does the product’s development roadmap look like? To ensure you’re taking advantage of the latest technology, look for vendors that deliver innovations frequently — on a monthly or quarterly basis versus once or twice a year.
And if you’re looking for a modern ECM platform, focus your efforts on a true multi-tenant cloud offering rather than the single-tenant, hosted cloud or private cloud offerings offered by many legacy ECM vendors. Such offerings may involve the same amount of effort and expense as moving to another vendor with a more established, multi-tenant, cloud-native product.
“[Under the old content paradigm, there was] too much friction around the data movement, and not enough governance or ability to bring folks to the information — as opposed to bringing the information to the folks.”
— Julio Pereira, Senior IT Director, World Kinect Corporation
By transitioning to a modern approach to ECM, your organization can remove common obstacles and realize a variety of benefits, as well as taking advantage of all that new technologies like AI have to offer. Let’s take a moment and see what a reimagined ECM world looks like.
The bold new world of ECM
You’ll begin by saying goodbye to file servers, complex enterprise content management tools, system maintenance, and the need for separate systems of record and engagement. Instead, you’ll say hello to one secure, compliant, intelligent content management platform that enables you to realize more value from your unstructured data.
By consolidating your content, you’ll also be giving your workforce one place to create, edit, review, and share files, assign tasks, and seamlessly collaborate, both internally and externally. Teams across your organization will be able to automate business processes quickly with built-in workflow automation tools using pre-built templates, or create custom workflows in minutes with intuitive no-code builders — all without relying on IT.
Built-in security controls, granular permissions, and audit trails will protect the confidentiality of your sensitive information. Streamlined compliance standards will cater to specific industry requirements like FedRAMP, FINRA, and HIPAA, as well as broader regional regulations like GDPR. You’ll be able to digitally sign documents without sacrificing security or compliance, while at the same time managing the entire signing process, from authoring agreements to obtaining signatures to retaining executed agreements.
Of course, you’ll have the freedom to leverage hundreds of pre-built integrations with productivity apps like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace and business apps like Salesforce, SAP, NetSuite, Oracle, and ServiceNow, enabling your teams to work seamlessly in the apps they most often use.
And it all runs better with AI, increasing productivity and providing greater insights to help your organization make better, faster business decisions.

Now let’s go deeper and reimagine a common ECM use case: contract processing. Think about your current process for contracts and compare it to how a modern ECM platform could benefit your organization.
When a contract is uploaded into the system, AI can automatically extract important data — contracting party details, contract type, length, and amounts — and apply that as metadata, eliminating the need for OCR and making it significantly easier and faster for users to ultimately find and identify the contracts that they need.
The contract can then be viewed and managed through a custom, configurable, easy to use dashboard for maximum efficiency and productivity. When approvals are required, the contract can be automatically routed to the appropriate approver using AI-detected metadata, electronically signed and executed, and made accessible to staff through an intelligent portal.
The entire reimagined process can be built by citizen developers in an intuitive no-code environment. You can also leverage AI throughout so your staff can quickly access and query contracts and associated legal documents while maintaining enterprise-grade security, compliance, and privacy standards.
Are you ready to reimagine ECM?
In our next blog, we’ll introduce the Intelligent Content Cloud from Box — a secure, AI-enabled platform for managing content in the modern workplace. In the meantime, to learn more about reimagining ECM with Box, please join us for BoxWorks on November 12, in San Francisco or virtually. Register today!