In recent years organizations of any type or industry produce large amounts of information. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a concept that involves the techniques and tools that are used to efficiently manage that information and content generated by organizations.
Enterprise Content Management includes the process of controlling the life cycle of documents from their creation to their disposal. Business content is knowledge and therefore a good ECM strategy in an organization supports the process of knowledge management.
In the Information age, the amount of information generated by organizations is increasing. However, much of the information is neither structured nor administered and therefore access to information is difficult, and in some cases, makes it impossible for employees to access relevant information. Here are the top 4 challenges or issues that come up while managing content:
1. Access to information
- A large amount of business information is found in the computer of each employee. They are information assets for companies, but this information can easily be lost when an employee leaves the organization.
- Even if the data resides in a backup, email, shared repository or in the cloud (services like OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox), the information is unstructured and it is difficult to access it.
- Much of this unstructured information can be duplicated, stored in multiple locations, and it is usually difficult to identify the latest version of each piece of information.
- The re-use of information by persons other than the author is quite limited. Content generation could be inefficient.
- Inability to protect confidential information.
2. Processes in organizations
- A lot of manual processes on paper or via e-mail.
- Poor or nonexistent documentary cycle, it is difficult to know who is involved in the process of creating a document, where it must be stored and what is the disposal process.
- Generates risks of not meeting standards or regulations.
3. Multiple information channels
- Information resides in many sites and applications. It is common to find processes in organizations where users are forced to replicate business information across multiple systems. This information is not necessarily connected or related.
- When there are no tools to publish information across the enterprise or users have technical impediments to publish their documents, it is possible that the users look for alternatives for their internal and external publications. This generates information islands within organizations.
- Difficulty in sharing knowledge: The content is neither updated nor managed, this generates a poor visibility of information.
4. Enterprise Collaboration
- Collaboration in business environments is an important challenge today: the amount of information we receive, the different flavors of online communications and sometimes the distance among the team members make the synchronization between co-workers a challenging task.
- People, equipment, information and applications are not related and it is difficult to find or relate them.
- Often employees misuse resources and tools in their daily tasks. Some examples are – Excessive use of e-mail for simple and instant communications. – Emailing many versions of the same file to many accounts, this causes the same file to be replicated in many mailboxes and perhaps in the users hard drive of who receive it. – The use of chat or IM to send confidential or sensitive information.
ECM solutions in the industry provide answers to these kinds of problems, however, it is necessary to plan an ECM strategy, determine how it integrates with other business applications, simplify access to information and easily automate business collaboration.
My future posts on this topic will provide more detail and offer recommendations on how to implement an efficient ECM solution.
Related Topic: ECM Tools Breakdown and Comparison
