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Government Data Management, Technology

Enterprise Content Management – Is it for you?

24 March 2010

Enterprise Content Management is fast becoming a vital strategic tool for organisations wanting to stay on top of the ever growing sea of information that is being churned by the minute. Business information is highly diverse; it can exist in the form of a text document, a spreadsheet, websites, audio and video files, customer records, reports and real-time transactions, among others. Given the exponential growth of digital information and a dependence on content in business activities, organisations are finding that by deploying ECM solutions and technology into their enterprise-wide IT architectures, revenue goals can be achieved while keeping costs down.

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• GOVERNMENT DATA MANAGEMENT
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From this Section

• SPOTLIGHT

There are four main causes for the increased interest in ECM solutions and each of these drivers brings with it a different degree of urgency. They are:

1. Return on investment (ROI)
The major benefit that ECM systems can bring to your overall knowledge management is an improvement in the reliability of search results. Based on our experience and research, employees can spend up to 40 percent of a workday searching for content and untangling issues with versioning, ownership, and reformatting. As a result, too much valuable content goes underused or must be recreated.

Thus, when performing a search against ECM managed content versus non-managed content, employees are able to establish and identify quicker than before, the correct version or the official version, from a reliable source. This is because ECM systems dramatically improve the quality and consistency of the metadata – which provides the details and history – that is stored with content.

2. Compliance
With the focus on governance and transparency regulations, compliance has become an important driver. In fact, it is in the personal interest of the CEO and CFO that the company is compliant as they both face litigation if they are not complying with the regulations. ECM mitigates security and compliance risks for managed content to ensure that enterprise content is complete, authentic, and protected from internal and external threats to be readily accessible to auditors and regulators in a timely fashion.

ECM solutions can also continue to control content after it has been delivered to its audience. Take for example tracing content that was available on your website at a particular point in time, or what content customers received by email on a certain date. This can help organisations resolve disagreements with customers, and demonstrate what happened to external authorities. Thus, without ECM to help manage the content within the organisation, content is allowed to be a liability.

3. Consolidation
It is the CIO who is concerned with delivering the highest possible service at the lowest possible price point by leveraging on current technology solutions. ECM reduces costs for content-rich transactional processes by automating business processes and providing immediate access to all relevant supporting documents and information. Such consolidation of business assets would ensure lower running costs and manageability, leading to overall cost efficiency for long-term retention and archival.

4. Collaboration
The CEO wants to improve the efficiency of the business, the adoption rate of new products, and the responsiveness of the supply chain. Business process management and collaboration technology help to achieve these goals.

Another benefit is that ECM solutions can help organisations break down the silos between departments that slow down the development of content by facilitating access to content across the organisation. In today’s business environment, speed is crucial to stay ahead of the competition, and employees and business partners need to share information across departmental boundaries to produce the best results in the shortest time possible.

An organisation must approach ECM as a integrated business strategy to leveraging information to increase its key customer relationships. ECM is not a something that the IT organisation can drive as a short term project. It should involve the key business stakeholders in the business units to implement an effective ECM strategy. The long terms benefits and value however will be of tremendous payoff to the organisation.

Conclusion
The value of information is dependent on its accessibility, usability and context. ECM helps organisations organise the information that flows throughout the entity and deliver it in a manner that enhances the business process and productivity. An effective ECM implementation would be a unified environment for capturing, storing, accessing, organising, controlling, retrieving, and archiving unstructured data, and supporting the resources for managing that content across the enterprise and on the World Wide Web, such as the EMC Documentum, which provides the scalability and security to manage content end-to-end in solving various business issues.

Given the increasing amount of content within our organisations, and our dependency for business operations, the case for ECM is difficult to argue against.