Enterprise Content Management: What You Need to Know

Citation

Soy, S.K. (2005), "Enterprise Content Management: What You Need to Know", Information Technology & People, Vol. 18 No. 3, pp. 303-304. https://doi.org/10.1108/09593840510615905

Jenkins, CEO of Open Text Corporation, broadens our understanding of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) by introducing the topic with an optimistic tone that permeates each of the fully illustrated 16 chapters of the book Enterprise Content Management: What You Need to Know. Jenkins adds context to our understanding of what is purported to be an emerging multi‐billion dollar market of technologies that help capture, store, manage, preserve, deliver and reuse creative products of the global workforce. Although obviously enthusiastic about the new technologies that enable ECM, Jenkins also points to the continuing value of microfilm, paper, and other time‐tested low‐technology alternatives and is mindful of the fact that people drive technology within the enterprise.

While the roots of ECM are intertwined with familiar document management and records management systems, ECM is further aided by today's useful search technologies. As more content types (such as e‐mail and multimedia resources) rich with unstructured information grow to dominate greater portions of our work, new technologies are also emerging to support the increasingly sophisticated needs of organizations. ECM is one such technology available for coping with requirements to reliably manage content and thus, allow the enterprise to quickly respond to complex information requests that reference vast and increasing quantities of unstructured data.

According to Jenkins, ECM technologies group into two categories:

1. 1.

   collaboration elements including teams, portals, rich media, and messaging; and

2. 2.

   content elements including web content management, document lifecycle management, and document management.

The amalgamation of technologies that support all elements ultimately connects people to people and connects people to information. While Jenkins treats these elements discretely chapter by chapter, he emphasizes that ECM is the way to integrate and use all aspects seamlessly across the enterprise. He also predicts that ECM enhancements will be driven by the trends toward online mobility, the online marketplace, increased bandwidth, and increased attention to security concerns and legislation. Like Jenkins, Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) President John Mancini believes that ECM is a core piece of the information infrastructure that is “critical to compliance and cost reduction” (Association for Information and Image Management, 2005). AIIM's biannual survey of users and potential users of ECM technologies reports that it is still difficult to gain board approval to invest in ECM and to implement the organizational changes needed to deploy ECM.

Jenkins uses nearly 60 very brief one‐page case studies to illustrate the ways complex organizations are fusing collaboration and content in a productive fashion. The book, while primarily illustrating examples appropriate in the global marketplace, encourages all to seek the funding and governance approvals necessary to establish this form of information and intellectual capital management. Establishing ECM will help organizations remain competitive in today's environment with its exacting standards for applying solid security controls, compliance with data retention and disposal requirements, and keeping information that is authentic, reliable and accessible, and therefore more valuable because it can be re‐used.

Open Text Corporation, the publisher of this book, has an established record of participation in industry‐related conferences and contributions to overall understanding of leading‐edge technologies available to capture, manage, store, deliver, and preserve content in the information industry. For other views on this topic, readers may want to reference an earlier work, Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley, Pamela Kostur, and Steve Manning (Rockley et al., 2002). Enterprise Content Management: What You Need to Know is easy to read and attractively packaged. A full index, glossary, bibliographies referencing literature sources and web sites referencing case studies arm the reader with convenient sources to use in exploring ECM topics of interest in greater depth.