Enterprise Content Management: the need for a global approach

Expert opinion

by Ziad Wakim, VP Solutions,
EVER TEAM

ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is nowadays a strategic issue for businesses of all shapes and sizes and for government and administration. With a massive increase in the number of exchanges, an explosion in the number of communication channels and exponential growth in the number of corporate documents, estimated at 22% per annum by Pricewaterhouse Coopers, ECM has become a "must-have", synonymous with improved productivity and cost reduction.

So be it, but what exactly is meant by content management? We should perhaps begin with a short definition: ECM (Enterprise Content Management) is about the wholesale management of a company’s information content. It involves taking into account the 80% of information that is unstructured but required for decision-making (e-mails, scanned documents, videos, etc.), alongside the information that is already structured in databases. By way of example, AIIM estimates that, for around a third of companies, reconstituting an entire customer file could take over one month. A content management application would therefore serve to manage all the information relating to a customer file (letters, e-mails, faxes, contracts, etc.), making this information accessible in real-time within the same infrastructure. This definition makes it possible to understand the extent of the scope covered by projects linked to enterprise content management and which have a direct impact on enterprise performance and productivity. It is crucial to consider these projects as touching upon every single aspect linked to content management, and not to concentrate solely on one project facet, such as the dematerialisation of paper documents for example. An enterprise content management process needs to integrate all the aspects associated with the document life cycle: from its imaging or production to its archiving, through its processing and validation. This path is the basis of value creation.

Simple enough in theory, this observation nonetheless requires two broad complementary factors to be taken into account: the technological approach and the organisational approach. The latter plays a driving role in defining the architecture to be deployed and the process management to be configured. For example, it is fairly easy to imagine that a large decentralised group will have far more complex needs than a unified structure with fewer employees (workflow chain, document volumes to be managed and indexed, etc.). The organisational mapping of the enterprise and the integration of its business and regulatory constraints must therefore be a prerequisite to the launch of any ECM project. The AIIM study shows that underestimating the organisational and procedural challenges is the major factor in the failure of enterprise content management projects for 42% of businesses.

At the technological level, enterprise content management solutions are designed to bring into convergence the different complementary technologies in order to obtain end-to-end control over the document management process (EDM, WCM, mail management, BPM, DAM, archiving, etc.) while marrying them with the business applications already in place in the organisation. Generally speaking, this makes it possible to deploy a convergent system that is vital to the recycling of documents within the enterprise. It is these documents that constitute a business’s digital legacy.

Lastly, we should bear in mind that content changes daily, and so it is necessary to integrate into the enterprise content management chains the new spaces for exchange and for document sharing. By way of example, according to a study by MARKESS International, one of the key future challenges for content management will involve improving collaborative working or knowledge-sharing.

Bearing all these aspects in mind, it is easy to understand that an enterprise content management project involves a combination of data: technical, organisational and regulatory. Totally interlinked, these elements are the basis of the success of the deployment of any such project, enabling the acquisition, processing, management, storage, conservation and sharing of an ever-increasing digital legacy. Completely in phase with enterprise expectations, ECM initiatives need to be set out over both short and long-term as priority projects for information system managers.

by Ziad Wakim, VP Solutions, EVER TEAM