Drowning in paper work costs time and money for your business. Even if your philosophy is of the "organized chaos" variety.
We're lucky enough to have an AIIM Enterprise Content Management Certified staffer, so we challenged
him to create this "ECM Beginner's Guide", a reference guide outlining
how practices for the largest companies can be scaled down for use by
almost anyone, including the smallest e-bay reseller.
What is Enterprise Content Management (ECM)?
- It's a process of capturing, preserving, managing and delivering documents.
- ECM is not just one simple solution, but a fabric of solutions that
help you access data contained within your documents being organized.
- Data within an ECM might be used to provide content for Web sites,
help you manage architectural drawings, be used for versioning, storage
and retrieval of video surveillance footage or to affect live searches
on traditional paper business records.
Is ECM right for your business?
Before embracing ECM, you must consider how information will be
captured, stored, managed and delivered. It is also helpful to consider
factors like the knowledge and skills of workers, available budget,
sharing requirements, accessibility and/or limiting access of the
information and knowledge that will be managed.
This will ensure that the scope of the project is both reasonable
and in keeping with government regulations, business practices and in
keeping with the protection of business assets. By way of further
example, here are some things businesses often struggle with when
considering ECM solutions.
What should businesses consider before committing to ECM?
- How will email, including attachments, be managed, made searchable and easily retrieved when and if needed?
- Will more efforts be put into collecting information, or will the
information be actively managed and made useable, thereby providing
more than a backup but actual value?
- How will ECM be integrated into business practices to ensure
different groups c an access pertinent information, and/or limit
sensitive information to those not needing access?
- What resources will be required to manage the information and will
the solution/s be scalable enough to support changes in governmental
regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, the Patriot Act etc.?
- What are the key drivers behind my interests?
Regardless of the specific questions you ask yourself, you should be
honest with yourself as to why you want to keep this information as
well as what information should be kept and which discarded.
The journey to ECM nirvana has become increasingly more challenging
as companies look to save money and defer IT oriented expenses. Here
are a few ways poor information management can negatively impact your
business.
- Breaks in workflow do not allow timely access of useful information
- Lack of information or consistency during head-count reduction or turnover
- Financial hardship due to inaccurate or inaccessible records
- Compliance challenges
- Poor quality (service or product)
- Expenses born in legal matters where files are misplaced or data
like emails, voice mail, instant messaging, or email attachments are
not available
- Improper data is stored or data is not stored long enough
