Oct 1, 2002
What is enterprise content management?
It's been two years since we've had an article setting out AIIM's definition for ECM. Here's a quick refresher.

It's been nearly two years since AIIM International coined the term "enterprise content management." Since then, despite lingering confusion over the exact definition of the term, it's been adopted by most vendors in the industry-so much so that many vendors are offering ECM suites including BroadVision, Day Software, divine, Documentum, FatWire, FileNET, Gauss, Interwoven, Microsoft, and Stellent [read more about these vendors in Doculabs' article in the upcoming November/December issue. Also, turn to the last page of this issue for an introduction to the topic]. We thought it was about time to do another quick primer on AIIM's view of ECM. Enterprise content management (ECM) is both technology and strategy. On the product side, ECM is the technologies, tools, and methods used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content across an enterprise. It's also a strategy for managing an organization's unstructured information. ECM is not just Web content management-it's more complex and important than that. At the most basic level, ECM tools allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.

Times have changed since AIIM launched the term two years ago. What hasn't changed is the deluge of information that threatens to overwhelm nearly all of us on a daily basis. Something has to channel that deluge of content into a useful form-enterprise content management is the answer. And just how much content are we talking about? In AIIM's 2001 Worldwide Enterprise Applications Study, Gartner predicts that by 2004, organizations will maintain 30 times more data than in 1999. Regarding market size, Meta Group contends that the market will grow to $10 billion dollars by 2004 (combining Web content management markets and the broader ECM space).

The Tie That Binds

AIIM believes that at the core of any effective business or enterprise application is the strategic management of content. Handled strategically, content can bind together the customer-facing layer of a process (customer relationship management, e-commerce, etc.) with the back-office (ERP, legacy databases, order processing, etc.) fulfillment layer into an effective application.

An ECM strategy needs to address many issues, including:

  • How much content is there? How fast will it grow? .
  • How many types and classifications of information content are there?
  • Who manages which content?
  • Who owns the content?
  • What is the content's lifecycle? What must be saved, in what form, and for how long?
  • How does content get re-used and re-purposed? What standards should be used to ensure exchangeability?
  • How do you optimize your ECM strategies across processes so that there is consistency of approach and sharing of information?
  • How do information and document repositories interoperate with applications to provide content?
  • How do you document (with certainty) the context in which a Web transaction takes place?
  • What is the electronic content migration strategy as technologies become obsolete?

Whatever industry you are in and whatever type of work you do, you likely have more content than you know what to do with. All of that information is useless without proper management. ECM is the key to making all of your content throughout your organization useful to you.

Publication: Edoc