Johannesburg, 01 Dec 2005
"Although enterprise content management (ECM) has been around for some time, there is still some mystification around the concept and in general an absence of a strategic approach towards ECM within organisations," says Bennie Kotze, Senior Consultant, ECM strategy development at NokusaEI.
"An Internet search for the definition of ECM provides for interesting reading - after studying many variations, the only thing that one can say for sure is that ECM really boils down to different strokes for different folks. For some it`s a set of tools, for others, processes, for some integration and for most just applying technology."
According to Kotze, "with ECM (as incidentally the case with knowledge management), it is rather puzzling that we want to `manage` things without really knowing exactly what we are trying to manage and why we want to manage it".
"Perhaps the best definition of ECM is that of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), which defines it as `the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes` (www.aiim.org).
"The matter gets worse since ECM should be seen as part of information management and to that can be added more concepts like information lifecycle management, strategic information management and a long list of others. We can then continue, flirt with knowledge management and redefine ECM in that context."
According to Kotze, what is needed is a specific organisational-centric view on ECM and therefore, he proposes a change to the AIIM definition to include a business frame of reference and suggest ECM as "the philosophy, processes and technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes".
He says this frame of reference would allow the organisation to answer four important questions:
* What do we have as `content` in the organisation?
* What types of content do we have?
* Why do we want to manage content? (Is our major driver compliance? do we want to improve information support of business processes or do we really want to take information to another dimension and transform our business processes?)
By answering these questions, the organisation can establish what it has and why it wants to manage it. Then and only then can we return to the grey world of ECM definitions and ask what the elements of ECM are and what should be used to manage, store, preserve and deliver them? Again the list is long and opinions vary but the main elements of ECM can be identified as:
* Document management
* Compliance management (including records management)
* Search and retrieval tools (retrieval management)
* Workflow
* Scanning and imaging
* Content, document and information collaboration
* Web content management
* E-mail management
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