What Is Enterprise Content Management And Why Is It Important?
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can best be explained as any of the strategies and technologies used in the Information Technology field. What does it do? The simple definition is, software that manages documents for Web sites. The more technical definition is, enterprise content management is the acquiring and management of structured and unstructured content that is dispersed across a number of different repositories (meaning all over the place). Enterprise content management technology is capable of also handling email, images, raw print data and other digital assets.
It's one thing to talk about managing content, but that is not enough. Companies need to go one step further and manage content so that it can be used to achieve their strategic business goals. That is where enterprise content management comes in. It can handle the lifecycle of your content from its inception to its demise.
What happens to a piece of content (a document?) Well, your document goes through four stages, and enterprise content management is a critical part of this process. The four stages are compliance, collaboration, continuity and cost. The 4 C's of enterprise content management if you will.
Enterprise content management maximizes how your content is used. Just remember, that although technology can streamline content management, the organization must have an underlying strategy first.
Compliance means integrating it into your business - not looking at it as a project to be completed and then finished. Compliance initiatives will hit many areas in your company, areas that will need to make sure the program is a sound one. Granted, compliance is not usually a technological issue. However, information technology and the rampant growth of unstructured content, exposes the corporation. Properly implemented, enterprise content management can cut the costs of compliance to your business. Working together is collaboration, and the key to this is using a set of technologies like - instant messaging, whiteboards, online meetings, email, etc. This means work can happen wherever and whenever needed. It allows those with complementary or divergent expertise to share, and come to compromises on a final product much faster. This saves time and money. A word of caution, when using collaborative tools, you need to be aware of records management, knowledge capture and compliance requirements. Definitely enterprise content management can be expensive to implement, but ask yourself this question: how much would it cost not implementing such a system? Chances are the answer would be the costs of not implementing aren't worth taking a chance on. It's simply part of the price to carry on business. Enterprise content management plays a major role in managing e-documents and because it does, it is a key player in the continuity of the company. After all, if a business doesn't have access to its critical e-documents, they're dead in the water.
Knowledge Management
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