Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

By Bob Turner

Corporate commitments that have been made through e-mails, instant messages or other uncontrolled document forms can lead to potential misunderstandings. Business owners have often envisioned managing their entire corporate structure in a way that allows decisions to be streamlined throughout departments. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) offers a solution. Within ECM, businesses can structure documents and use controls and identifiers for a wide number of tasks including security levels, documents preservation and document destruction.

“Not every ECM is the same. A full gap analysis should be performed to determine how each will fit into your current strategy before moving forward.”

ECM manages the creation and use of content and data throughout an entire corporation. Such content can include: documents, spreadsheets, diagrams, web pages, images and other data. By providing a single means to store and retrieve this data using an ECM system, it offers a powerful platform to share data and results between departments within an organization. ECM solutions not only offer streamlined communication between departments and decision makers, but can also reduce the cost of document management systems by eliminating the storage space needed for current database structures. This cost savings has been estimated by some professionals to be $30,000.00 per Tera bite.

Large vendors such as Microsoft and IBM have been creating ECM solutions based on what they believe a typical organization might need. A large part of their focus has been on establishing a central data information repository for storing and managing access to various forms of information. These companies have developed solutions using an integrated set of technologies that store and manage diverse types of data built on a unified architecture. These products can be used to:

¨ Perform document management to large-scale enterprise document repositories
¨ Perform content archival to policy-driven records management
¨ Create Web publishing to hi-fidelity Internet sites

ECM can be a positive step towards streamlining corporate communications while providing an estimated cost savings, however, every ECM solution is not the same. A full gap analysis should be performed to determine how each will fit into your current strategy before moving forward. A variety of questions need to be answered before committing to any particular solution, not every vendor product will meet all your particular needs. The equation of time, money and quality should be examined along with the company’s expectations and return on investment. The longevity and usefulness of existing systems should be considered when determining if a full or tiered ECM solution is the right fit for your organization.