InSight Digital Experience Platform transforms the information experience

Executive summary

Every CIO today is focusing on Digital Transformation.

As data privacy and regulatory compliance concerns increase, companies are moving towards digital solutions. However, to fully benefit from this digital shift, they need a holistic solution that caters to all aspects of their business. Businesses need the ability to deliver a differentiated customer experience that leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to turn disparate information stores into the knowledge that drives a deeper level of customer engagement. The Iron Mountain InSight® Digital Experience Platform achieves this goal, enabling the management and access of both physical and digital information throughout its entire lifecycle from a single location.

With Iron Mountain Digital Experience Platform, you can:

• Transition physical information to digital and continue to manage the digital information lifecycle
• Manage information consistently across channels via a single web-based portal
• Reduce time, effort, and costs to maintain compliance

InSight Digital Experience Platform transforms the information experience

A changing market demands a more comprehensive solution

Markets are more dynamic than ever before, and organizations need to be able to respond faster, with more efficiency, providing an enhanced customer experience. In today’s world, information is king, and the ability to utilize an organization’s data to drive decision making and accelerate responses is critical. Digital transformation is the key to unlocking the value of an organization’s data, which is why 90% of companies have engaged in digital transformation initiatives or at a minimum developed some type of digital transformation strategy.

In digital transformation there is a distinct need for intelligent document processing (IDP) to feed the systems that will drive the insights. IDP requires the ability to handle not only digital documents, but also physical (i.e., paper) documents to deliver a complete repository of information that can be integrated into applications and workflows. But IDP is only a single component of an overall digital transformation strategy. Another key element to leverage these massive information collections is a workflow automation platform that can seamlessly integrate the information directly into the workflow, empowering employees to drive faster resolution, boosting the overall customer experience.

To address this need in the market, Iron Mountain developed the InSight Digital Experience Platform (DXP). Iron Mountain InSight DXP is a scalable, low-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that ingests and processes unstructured content and can integrate with key business processes, workflows and systems through standard application programming interfaces (APIs). As a modular platform, InSight DXP integrates the key components that digital transformation demands – physical and digital content management, intelligent document processing, workflow automation, and information governance.

While most of the data being created today is digital, the key concern for most organizations is still the physical asset management of their information as the processes and policies around paper documents create an unacceptable blind spot in relation to retention and regulatory concerns. Any platform that addresses digital transformation must tackle the more difficult job – physical information – along with the requisite handling of digital information.

InSight DXP delivers an automated and intelligent ability to digitize physical documents (through high-speed scanning support), enabling it to be integrated into information repositories, along with the vast amount of digital information that is being generated daily by organizations. Regardless of the format or system, InSight DXP can be customized to an organization’s exact needs, enabling process transparency, insightful dashboards, and customizable workflows and reporting to match an organization’s specific needs.

With compliance being a major concern across all organizations in both the public and private sectors, InSight DXP delivers the capability to systematically manage and enforce defensible records retention rules and privacy obligations for relevant content through integration with the Iron Mountain Policy Center solution.

InSight DXP use cases

As nearly every business or organization is collecting data today, the next step to embracing digital transformation is achieved through the enablement of a digital platform that enables the business to integrate their massively scaling data stores directly into their workflows and processes. InSight DXP is built around the complete asset lifecycle and businesses today are utilizing this flexible technology to drive their objectives, creating greater efficiencies for their workflows.

Here are a few examples of the benefits that InSight DXP can deliver:

Digital mailroom

For years, businesses sent and received documents via both physical mail and electronic mail, and these two worlds rarely ever met. Maintaining a consistent – and most importantly, unified – record of correspondence with individual customers or organizations was difficult, if not impossible.

A digital mailroom is the automation of both physical and electronic communications, encompassing the incoming and outgoing message streams. With a Platform like InSight DXP, organizations can not only bring all these disparate sources together, but also apply the proper governance based on the document contents, audiences, and other important considerations. Document retention moves from a cumbersome and disjointed process into an easily defensible strategy that reduces risk in the same way that it reduces cost.

Digital pathology

The primary goal of pathology is to identify and understand the causes and effects of diseases or injuries. Digital pathology is a specialized branch of the overall pathology discipline that focuses on the use of electronic (digital) files to accelerate the processing of samples. With a heavy emphasis on digitized specimen slides, there is a tremendous opportunity to accelerate findings and drive to root causes of existing diseases or maladies, potentially even identifying novel afflictions in the process.

Digital pathology can lean into AI and machine learning to help identify and classify these digital images, but there is so much more patient information collected outside of the actual digital image being examined that will need to a part of the overall analysis. With InSight DXP, the ability to marry the patient information and demographics with the actual sample slides gives researchers powerful tools to connect the dots more broadly, at a much more rapid pace. The low-code environment of InSight DXP removes the need for specialists to create large, complex models that may miss critical pieces of data that may potentially delay the journey to the root cause.

HR contracts

Human Resources (HR) management is growing rapidly in complexity. The costs and risks associated with non-compliance are driving organizations towards HR automation, but this automation is complex and requires very complex information sets. Today, HR organizations spend too much time in the collection and reporting of data and less time helping organizations grow and adapt to the latest organizational challenges. This equation needs to be flipped.

There is an ever-increasing amount of data about individuals that is required to be both collected and securely stored. With a digital platform like InSight DXP, the physical and electronic documents associated with organizations and employees can be collected, managed and retained, integrating key information into the overall HR workflows to drive better efficiency and employee satisfaction. The comprehensive integration of many types of data helps to minimize risk and ensure compliance in today’s complex and litigious environments.

But InSight DXP is not just limited to just these areas. Any organization dealing with information, be it digital or even physical, can take advantage of the platform. Deployed as a low-code/no-code platform in either an on-premises manner or as a cloud (software-as-a-service) solution, InSight DXP can be deployed quickly and scale with your organization and its unique needs.

Major DXP components

Within the Iron Mountain InSight DXP platform is a complete set of components that are crucial to enable the effective management of data throughout its full lifecycle.

The complete InSight DXP ecosystem encompasses the sources of data, customers, workflows, processes and all the components that drive a complete, automated document lifecycle.

The first step of the process is Digitization, the conversion of physical documents into the system (electronic assets are brought in through a content management component.) Iron Mountain has a long history as a leader in information management; our comprehensive services include a massive fleet of secure trucks for document transport along with state-of-the-art scanning centers located in practically every geography around the world. Our services offering delivers a full chain of custody to ensure that information stays secure, addressing both privacy and compliance concerns resulting in a fully defensible process. Physical assets such as paper, tapes, reels, microfiche, or microfilm can be brought into the system where they are classified and defined, extracting metadata through optical character recognition. Digitization can occur at either the customer location or through any of the Iron Mountain high speed scanning centers.

The second component in the platform is Content Management. Iron Mountain InSight Content Management System allows you to consolidate and manage all your documents in one place. This includes physical documents that have been digitized, as well as electronic documents from various sources such as S3, FTP, among others. This unified pool of documents can then be easily managed and utilized as needed. The ingestion of this high volume of information can be scheduled and handled simultaneously from multiple sources, maintaining a full audit history throughout the entire process. This highly scalable content model is flexible and can scale up or down as needs demand, all searchable via a NoSQL database and a highly available search engine. Users can search, view, edit, share, download, and group assets, utilizing a pluggable document viewer or integrating the content directly into their existing workflow tools through standard APIs.

The headless content management design separates the user interface from the repository, enabling a custom low-code / no-code user interface that can be easily aligned to the organization’s lexicon and workflows with the ability to build components in one location and then deploy them globally. Managed through a “single pane of glass”, administrators have a view into both physical and electronic assets along with the workflow processes and user interactions. The addition of GenAI extends the low-code environment bringing the latest applications for intelligent document search, summarization, risk identification and classification based solely on the customers’ specific documents.

Workflows can be enhanced with rules-based automated document routing, a custom low-code forms designer, case management that can vary by industry or even customer, as well as an automated process for exception handling and validation. Our Human in the Loop technology enables companies to insert the right human elements into the right spots in the workflow to help ensure the highest levels of consistency and quality in the process.

With all the documents now being brought into the system from the workflows, Intelligent Document Processing takes place. Iron Mountain Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) is designed to classify documents and extract their information utilizing AI. With a full library of pre-trained models as well as the ability to build custom models, organizations can lean into the established structures of their industry or innovate off those standards to create models that more directly reflect their specific workflows and processes. Through a self-service model that features a low-code/no-code development methodology, document processing can be customized by the people most familiar with the workflows and data requirements, there is no need for expensive data scientists to build out rigid and complex processing models. Through support of large language models (LLMs), Iron Mountain IDP enables organizations to train their data, building custom prompts that leverage the power of AI to automate the document processing tasks. Once built, these models can be used independently within IDP or as part of a larger content services platform or other content management program.

The collection and processing of documents brings inherent risks to organizations; as their repositories scale up, their exposure increases exponentially. This is where Information Governance comes into play, providing a systematic and auditable system for ensuring that the entire document lifecycle is protected, minimizing the risk to both the company and its customers. Information governance enables the organization to manage and apply the appropriate retention rules, helping to ensure that privacy and compliance obligations are being properly addressed. As rules and regulations change over time, especially with respect to individual geographic regions, Iron Mountain’s global research database can help ensure that customers are kept abreast of all the latest developments and requirements, minimizing their potential exposure through defensible retention rules. Shared taxonomy across the system enables the automatic enforcement of retention rules and a full audit history is available indicating any interaction at the document, application, group, or even user level.

Now, with all these pieces in place the final component, the Low-code Solution Designer / Packaged Solutions provides the crucial linkage, enabling the organization to fully integrate document lifecycle management into their enterprise environment. The solutions enable both user interface and workflow design to be easily developed through intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces that remove the need for expensive resources to build complex, custom code to handle these functions. Solution templates for many industries already exist, enabling an out-of-the-box opportunity for immediate productivity gains or to act as the basis for simple modifications that bring the models in line with an organization’s exact needs. The self-service model includes metadata document types, customer onboarding, and dashboards, enabling an organization to immediately take advantage of the system. Case management is flexible and each of the industry models can be optimized to the specific needs for the data and workflows of the organization. All these different capabilities enable organizations to automate the ingestion of data into the system as well as the workflows where it can then be categorized, organized and begin its lifecycle within the company.