Enterprise Content Management (or ECM among friends) – the name alone can make many set their eyes on infinity and curse the day they started in the IT industry. Because what does the term cover? Something nebulous that has to do with documents in the company? File drives, folder structures and archiving. All dusty and boring.
However, this is wrong for at least 2 reasons, which I will come back to. But first and foremost: What exactly is ECM?
It’s not wrong that ECM has to do with documents, but the term covers more than that. ECM is the processes related to the lifecycle of corporate knowledge.
Content is the company’s knowledge, whether it’s in documents, emails, mail or anything else. In other words, the knowledge that we cannot immediately squeeze into a database table, at least not without some massage.
Management: The ECM concept also covers how content is born and dies, and how to process it along the way, including getting value from it. In other words, the processes around knowledge management. In Denmark, we have had EDRM standards for many years, and the pros and cons of this standard could fill many blog posts.
An ECM solution typically offers the following functionalities:
- Searchability
- Safety and security
- Versioning
- Possibility of journaling and handling related legal requirements
- Interfaces for integrations
- Transformation of files (e.g. for preview or web publishing)
- Classification
- Audit logging
- Opportunities for collaboration
With that in mind, what exactly makes ECM interesting, both for businesses and as a challenge to suppliers?
Firstly, recent years have seen a shift in what you can do with unstructured content:
- Search engine technology is within reach
- Entity extraction can find commonalities among documents and be used to provide context and context
- Autotagging and classification has matured (with the help of machine learning, among other things) and helps different professional groups see and organize information in the way that makes sense to them
Secondly, there is a growing awareness that many tasks can (and should) be done by machine.
- Decision support. How do you avoid having to manually search through file drives, record systems and intranets so that the information you need is available when the customer or citizen contacts you?
- How can you avoid employees having to log into multiple systems to do their job?
- And how can you learn from the use of IT in your business?
In short, we need to start treating documents as data and get systems to take over the tasks that could just as easily be handled by them. This way, we can extract useful knowledge from content that has been inaccessible until now, while saving effort on manual and time-consuming processes.
aety can help you define your ECM project so you focus on the most value-adding activities. If it’s about making better use of your existing platform, we can help with that, and if you’re looking for an ECM platform, we are Alfresco partners. Alfresco is a modern, open platform that is a great starting point for successfully implementing your ECM strategy. We can do this because we are a team that covers a lot of ground.
