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
