Source of information: http://csrc.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/20050110.pdf
Today, many organizations maintain a variety of systems and databases in a complex ad-hoc
architecture that does not seem to fulfill the needs for company-wide unstructured information
management in business processes, business functions, and the extended enterprise. We describe a
framework to implement Enterprise Content Management (ECM) in order to address this problem.
ECM refers to the technologies, tools, and methods used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and
deliver content (e.g. documents, graphics, drawings, web pages) across an enterprise. The framework
helps to select content objects that can be brought under ECM to create business value and guide the
IT investments needed to realize ECM. The framework was tested in a large high tech organization.
Keywords: content management; document management; content strategy; ECM.
Most organizations today generate information at such a rate that the challenge is putting this
information in a format and in a place and where it can be found again, when needed. The Gartner
Group estimates that most of the data (75%-80%) in organizations is unstructured and not in such a
format that it can be found, when needed. Today, many organizations maintain a variety of systems
and databases in a complex ad-hoc architecture that does not seem to fulfil the needs for companywide
unstructured information in business processes, business functions, and the extended enterprise.
ERP systems and other systems do not exchange workflow information easily, and as a result a lot of
the unstructured data is re-keyed manually leading to errors, inaccuracies and duplications [Oesterle,
2000; Weill et al, 2002].
A key challenge for organizations is to decide which unstructured data should be put under some kind
of management control and which part can be left unstructured and unmanaged [Gupta et al, 2001].
The problem really has two facets: business issues, and technology issues. The business issues involve
the analysis of the information and content needs in different organizational units and deciding on
which content will be managed and how it will be managed. The technology issues involve the
analysis of the existing systems providing content management solutions and their potential
interconnection in an overall architecture to satisfactorily address the content management needs. This
paper tackles the above problems from a business and a technology perspective and provides a
framework to develop content management strategies and the underlying architectures.
We first define ECM (section 2), develop our framework and methodology (section 3), test the
framework and methodology in a large high tech manufacturing organization (section 4), and provide
conclusions and directions for further work (sections 5 and 6).
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has emerged as the convergence of two earlier technologies or solutions for managing unstructured information in organisations: Document Management (DM), and Content Management (CM). These terms and their differences are explained below.