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Moving From Inefficient, Dead-End Archives to Workplace Intelligence

A lot has changed in the world of digital communication since the first email was sent in 1971. Today, workplaces rely on voice chats, messaging apps, work-based chat platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack, and more, all documenting daily decisions. To achieve compliance in areas such as financial services, companies must pull information from where it is stored and make it available at a moment’s notice.

That means going far beyond an ingest-and-store model in which old messages are put into the digital equivalent of an unsorted box. While this kind of storage is certainly better than no storage, it’s definitely not an optimal solution if there’s a slight chance that you or your company will need to access older conversations in a time-sensitive manner. (Spoiler: There’s a good chance that you will.)

Fortunately, due to the digital nature of modern communication, it’s now possible to take the retention and searchability of these important documents to the next level, thereby transforming compliance capabilities. This cutting-edge approach, which Shield’s solution utilizes, is what we call “Workplace Intelligence”. Here is why I think the old guard of archiving solutions should be in the past and Workplace intelligence is the future.

Costs

Old approach: Archiving solutions can be expensive. In the 1990s, communications compliance software purchases came with a big upfront purchase fee. More recently, in the 2010s, the world moved to perpetual licenses. Those are good in theory, but often extremely costly in practice — and, worse, full of hidden charges. These solutions, built around private data centers, frequently charged (and, where they’re still used, continue to charge) for features like exporting user data, fees per mailbox (instead of per user), and leavers. In many cases, bundles were utilized with caveats, complex terms, and hundreds or even thousands of line items. All of these create an Inflexible service that costs an arm and a leg.

New approach: Connected cloud-based solutions with simple pricing models, as an annual recurring purchase. And the flexibility, affordability, and scalability you need.

Interoperability

Old approach: Legacy vendors that leave you with multiple layers of different technologies which don’t interact with each other. Companies were encouraged to invest in different solutions to handle, for instance, emails, voice, and chat communications. The result is a patchwork of systems that are not joined up. In some cases, you may not be able to choose the vendor you want for a particular key requirement because you have a bundle that you’re tied to an existing archiving vendor. This might mean you have to use a subpar solution rather than getting exactly what you need.

New approach: Flexibility is the name of the game, as is interoperability. Shield’s solution offers a comprehensive solution that covers all of these types of communication but not only that, it can also link up to multiple forms of communication and create a “big picture”—for example, it can link voice and email communications with trades. Shield’s monitoring system comes with 80+ easy-to-use, out-of-the-box integrations.

Comprehensive communication

Old approach: An email archiving system is used for… email archiving. However, when it comes to compliance monitoring, communication channels to be monitored today include far more than just email inboxes. Voice comms, Zoom, Microsoft Teams chat, WhatsApp, and WeChat: all of these (and more) have joined emails as the myriad ways colleagues communicate with one another in the modern world. For this reason, archiving solutions need to work overtime to cover everything they need to monitor. Traditional solutions simply don’t.

New approach: Shield’s solution has the capability to capture audio, email, video, messaging app chats, voice, files, and other unstructured data types, all of that on top of functioning as an email archiving platform.

Data search

Old approach: Your archiving solution allowed you to search for data, but this was a largely manual process. This problem becomes even more dominant when faced with countless pages of communication, being asked to manually inspect them may result in things slipping through the gaps.

New approach: Shield’s solution utilizes machine learning to reduce the need for manual processes and provides more accurate and smarter results. Its performance in this space is second to none. While some legacy software will claim to provide smart data search, but none of them reach high enough to compare to the dream-like results that Shield is making possible. Platforms that can leverage Machine Learning and AI effectively, can reduce risk while also delivering savings for those who rely on them. In addition, they can be utilized by teams ranging from HR to legal or management, all of whom will have their own needs and requirements when it comes to the data they need to search and analyze.

Conclusion: A new era of archiving

What unites all these areas is the shift they represent from inefficient and costly dead-end archiving solutions to the more flexible, intuitive, and comprehensive world of Workplace Intelligence. Organizations Should not settle and demand next-generation archiving tools. Not only can they greatly improve compliance, but they can reduce risk and cost, and better service the organization as a whole.

For those who are already using it, the transformation is changing how they work and carry out reporting. For those yet to get on board, it’s a paradigm shift that simply cannot be created fast enough.

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