Taming the information explosion with enterprise content management.

AuthorHullavarad, Shiva
PositionRIM FUNDAMENTALS

Information is among every organization's most valuable business assets, regardless of its size or business. As the fuel that powers their unique business processes--from product development, to sales and marketing, product/service delivery, and business management--information must be captured, processed, accessed, measureed, integrated, and stored efficiently and effectively.

For most, this is an ongoing challenge; implementing enterprise content management (ECM), which is broadly defined as the strategies, tools, processes, and skills needed to manage all information assets over their life cycle, can be a good solution.

Implementing an ECM system, which is a single, decentralized system that can serve multiple systems and business areas, offers robust functionality for systematically controlling and analyzing an organization's increasingly complex and voluminous information, whether it is in a structured format (e.g., in databases), unstructured format (e.g., e-mail, word processed, spreadsheet, image, audio, video), or hard copy.

ECM Functionalities

As shown in Figure 1, an ECM solution typically consists of four essential functionalities:

1) User interface--The user interface brings information (digital or non-digital) into an ECM system. This is accomplished, for example, by scanning hard-copy documents to convert them into electronic images, by uploading a born-digital document such as a Google doc word processing file, or being fed from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system the organization uses to collect information from many business activities.

2) Information governance--This key functionality is what separates ECM solutions from other digital archival systems. For example, the information governance functionality assigns incoming information-specific retention rules that ensure it is kept for the required time and automatically deleted after the retention requirement is fulfilled.

3) Features/Attributes--An ECM system is equipped with features meant to achieve specific business purposes. For example:

* Data archival provides a systematic approach for archiving and retrieving information using select keywords.

* Intelligent data capture converts image-based information to a computer readable format by using optical character recognition.

* Workflow provides an automated process for information flowing through different stages; this is based on a pre-configured logic.

* Integration/Data processing is a built-in information management functionality for connecting different data streams.

* Information disposal affixes a post-dated time to information that will be automatically applied to delete it in compliance with its retention requirements.

4) Repository--ECM systems provide a secure approach to storing information for on-demand access. A variety of information storage protocols allow information to be stored on arrayed disks to allow for enhanced data security. The repositories can be onsite or in the cloud.

ECM Implementation Goals

The main goal of an ECM implementation is to provide transparent content sharing by making different and incongruent applications (for example, web content management and records management) interoperable.

With a complete suite of product options, an ECM system can manage and integrate data systems, automate document handling, reduce workload by streamlining tasks, provide traceability and version control, reduce duplication, and improve search and retrieval for information across platforms. This reduces costs and the burden on IT...

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