About Enterprise Content Management, its Purpose, Need & Benefits

Enterprise Content Management can be defined as solutions that the organizations use to unite teams, content and associated business processes. To be more precise, Enterprise Content Management guides the people in an organization through all the stages of work, from the initial discussion and planning, design, production, marketing, sales, service, and corporate administration by providing an integrated set of content, compliance, and collaboration solutions.

Enterprise Content Management enables you to collaboratively create, manage, deliver, and archive information that drives business operations. Organizations can deploy an Enterprise Content Management solution to distribute the content in multiple languages, across external and internal systems, applications, and user communities.

An Enterprise Content Management solution manages information from the time of creation to disposal or archival. Information in an organization necessarily passes through four stages which include creation, management, delivery, and archival. Creation includes entry of information into your organization due to documents that are captured through scanning, reports that are captured from different applications, and original content created as text files, spreadsheets, photographs, digital video, etc. Management includes automation of business processes, library services, content security, and collaboration services. The core of an Enterprise Content Management platform has these functions.

The Enterprise Content Management platform promptly delivers the information to the desired destination which may include a corporate marketing website, a mobile application for sales managers, a printed brochure, or an electronic newsletter. In addition, the Enterprise Content Management solutions automate the process of archiving content which may be critical to your business needs.

Some of the advantages of using an Enterprise Content Management solution include greater efficiency across your organization, abides by industry requirements, reduces the risk of non-compliance with government regulations, ensures effective marketing through all channels, cuts operating expenses, and enhances customer relationships. The reasons for which companies employ an Enterprise Content Management solution include compliance with the standards, improved efficiency by providing the right content to the right people, consistency, better customer service, and automated archival of content.

There are many enterprise content management systems available in the market, which organizations can deploy to create/capture, manage/secure, store/retain/destroy, publish/distribute, search, personalize, and present/view/print any digital content such as pictures, images, text, reports, video, audio, transactional data, catalog, code, etc. The primary focus of enterprise content management systems are on the capture, storage, retrieval, and dissemination of digital files for enterprise use and the management of the digital files from the time of creation to disposal.

The enterprise content management market is expected to reach a figure of $2.3 billion in software and $7 billion in services by the year 2007. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 15% in the field of content management. It is estimated that by the end of the year 2006, approximately 60% of global 2000 companies will standardize on a strategic enterprise content management framework. It is expected that the global 2000 companies will still maintain existing investments in tactical or line-of-business content deployments. The enterprise content management systems are usually tactical and non-discretionary expenditures for any organization. But now organizations have started viewing the enterprise content management systems as strategic core investments, as they deal with accelerating business velocities, consolidation of redundant content management systems, exponential growth of content, and compliance issues.

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