Understanding Enterprise Content Management

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) International, the worldwide association for enterprise content management, defines ECM this way: “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”

ECM encompasses areas such as document management, records management, web content management, electronic forms management, workflow management, search, and collaboration. Primarily, ECM is focused on managing the life cycle of content from its birth to death. Yes, regardless of its type or category, content does have a life cycle, which includes content creation, storage and archival, and eventual disposition based on certain business rules and workflows.

In this age of information overload, ECM becomes even more important with the increasing need to better organize information with improved efficiency, better control, and reduced costs. Although there is no limit to content arriving from various sources, such as documents, emails, audio and video, meeting notes and records, discussion forums, and unstructured data from social networking sites, there is certainly a limit to the amount of data that an organization can store and archive and retain for longer durations. This definitely calls for adequate content disposal and archival policies. Further accurate categorization and classification of content is equally important so that it can be consumed and analyzed using a business intelligence system that can help organizations use the available information to guide business decisions.

Even digitization has impacted the way ECM systems operate. For example, many organizations now store archived expense reports filed by their employees, along with related bills/receipts, within ECM systems instead of the older method of keeping physical documents in storage warehouses. In older systems (when digital storage was expensive and storage capacity was limited) each document was assigned a unique ID, and depending on the content retention policies as the document’s ID moved to the archival stage in digital storage of ECM, the associated physical document was handpicked and put in archived storage manually. With the reduced costs of digital storage and document scanning devices, the physical documents are done away with even sooner while the digital records can be retained perhaps forever.

Now that you understand the role of an ECM system in enterprise content management, you can proceed further and explore various content management features available in SharePoint.