Enterprise Content Management ( ECM ) refers to the technologies, strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to an organization and its processes. ECM tools allow the management of an enterprise level organization's information.
Definition
The official definition of enterprise content management was created by Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) International, the worldwide association for enterprise content management, in the year 2000. The abbreviation ECM has been reinterpreted and redefined many times .
In late 2005 AIIM defined ECM as follows:
In early 2006 AIIM added the following paragraph to the definition:
In early 2008 AIIM changed the original definition to:
This new term is intended to completely encompass the legacy problem domains that have traditionally been addressed by records management and document management. It also includes all of the additional problems involved in converting to and from digital content, to and from the traditional media of those problem domains (such as physical and computerized filing and retrieval systems, often involving paper and microforms). Finally ECM is a new problem domain in its own right, as it has employed the technologies and strategies of (digital) content management to address business process issues, such as records and auditing, knowledge sharing, personalization and standardization of content, and so on.
History
New product suites have arisen from the combination of capture, search and networking capabilities with technologies of the content management field, which have traditionally addressed digital archiving, document management and workflow. Generally speaking, this is when content management becomes enterprise content management . The different nomenclature is intended to encompass all of the problem areas related to the use and preservation of information within an organization, in all of its forms — not just its web-oriented face to the outside world. Therefore, most solutions focus on "business to employee" ( B2E ) systems. However, as the solutions have evolved, new components to content management have arisen. For example, as unstructured content is checked in and out of an ECM system, each use can potentially enrich the content's profile, to some extent automatically, so that the system might gradually acquire or "learn" new filtering, routing and search pathways, corporate taxonomies and semantic networks, which in turn assist in making better retention-rule decisions, determining which records or documents to keep, and which to discard, and when. Such issues become all the more important, as email and instant messaging are increasingly employed in the decision-making processes in an organization.
Thus, the term enterprise content management refers to solutions that concentrate on providing in-house information, usually using internet technologies. The solutions tend to provide intranet services to employees (B2E), but also include enterprise portals for "business to business" ( B2B ), "business to government" ( B2G ), or "government to business" ( G2B ), etc. This category includes most of the former document management groupware and workflow solutions that have not yet fully converted their architecture, but provide a web interface to their applications. Digital Asset Management (DAM) is as well a form of ECM that is concerned with content stored using digital electronic technology.
The technology components that comprise ECM today are the descendants of the electronic document management systems (EDMS) software products that were first released in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The original EDMS products were developed as stand-alone technologies, and these products provided functionality in one of four areas: imaging , workflow, document management, or COLD/ERM (see #Components of an enterprise content management system below).
For the software companies, it made sense to develop different products for each of these distinct EDMS functions. At that time, most organizations that were candidates for EDMS generally wanted a solution to address just one overriding business need or application. They were looking for stand-alone solutions to address narrow application needs, many of them at the departmental level – such as imaging for forms processing, workflow for insurance claims processing, document management for engineering documentation, or COLD/ERM for distributing and archiving monthly financial reports.
The typical "early adopter" of these new technologies was an organization that deployed a small-scale imaging and workflow system, possibly to just a single department, in order to improve the efficiency of a repetitive, paper-intensive business process and migrate towards the Paperless office. Even in these early years, when the market for these software products was still relatively immature, it was clear that each of the major technologies within EDMS offered tremendous value to specific organizational processes or applications, at a time when business processes were overwhelmingly paper-based. The primary benefits that the first stand-alone EDMS technologies brought to organizations revolved around saving time or improving accessibility to information. Among the specific benefits were the following:
- Reduction of paper handling and error-prone manual processes
- Reduction of paper storage
- Reduction of lost documents
- Faster access to information
- Online access to information that was formerly available only on paper, microfilm, or microfiche
- Improved control over documents and document-oriented processes
- Streamlining of time-consuming business processes
- Security over document access and modification
- Provide reliable and accurate audit trail
- Improved tracking and monitoring, with the ability to identify bottlenecks and modify the system to improve efficiency
Through the late 1990s, the various segments of the EDMS industry continued to grow steadily, if not spectacularly. The technologies appealed to organizations with clear problems, and which needed targeted, tactical solutions to address those problems.
As time passed, and more organizations had achieved "pockets" of productivity with the use of these technologies, it became clear that the various EDMS product categories were in fact complementary for many businesses. Organizations increasingly wanted to be able to leverage the capabilities of multiple EDMS products. Consider, for example, the needs of a customer service department, where imaging , document management, and workflow functionality could be brought together to allow agents to access any information needed to resolve a customer inquiry. Likewise, an accounting department could access supplier invoices from a COLD/ERM system, purchase orders from an imaging system, and contracts from a document management system as part of an approval workflow. And as more and more organizations established an Internet presence, they wanted to present certain portions of this information via the web, which required the capabilities to manage web content. Furthermore, organizations that had installed the software in individual departments now began to envision wider benefits, if they were to deploy it across the enterprise. Consider the fact that many business documents cross multiple departments and multiple business processes. Why not improve the management of electronic documents throughout the organization, and gain the same business benefits at an enterprise level?
Both the market and the software providers began to understand the strategic potential of software products that integrated the individual EDMS technology components into a single, integrated solution, capable of addressing an organization's complete information management needs. In fact, the movement toward integrated EDMS solutions merely reflected a common trend in the history of the software industry: the obsolescence of certain types of products and the convergence of technologies, as vendors melded them into new packages.
Consider office suites, for instance. In the 1970s and early 1980s, word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software products were standalone products. Within an organization, however, the same users were likely to need all three products. The software vendors responded, and started packaging them as integrated office suites – a strategy that also helped address consumer demand for tighter interoperability among desktop applications.
The situation was similar in the EDMS world. Just about any company that needed document management also needed imaging , workflow, web content management, and COLD/ERM. Organizations began to demand multiple EDMS services and ways to leverage them for broad-based applications. Thus, the EDMS vendors took steps to deliver on truly integrated solutions incorporating the EDMS component technologies.
The leaders tended to be those vendors that already offered multiple stand-alone EDMS technologies. For these vendors, the early steps toward consolidation were small ones. The first phase was to offer multiple systems as a single, packaged "suite." Early suites were little more than multiple products being sold together at a reduced price, and there was a perception in the market that such suites were a strategy on the part of the vendors to capture additional seats within a customer account. Not surprisingly, market acceptanc
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