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There are some pundits who believe Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is just a warmed-over version of technology that has been available for years. I would argue ECM is a blend of proven technologies with newer, innovative capabilities that are solving a whole new range of content and process-centric problems. To that end, ECM delivers real-world ROI that is just the ticket in today’s tough economic environment.

ECM is the merging of content, process and connectivity technologies into a single, integrated solution that enables organisations to leverage their business content and automate and optimise the business processes that rely on that content. While content, process and connectivity tools have been in existence for over 20 years, it is the recent integration of these technologies that is so powerful and can bring significant benefits to users – allowing them to make better decisions faster.

ECM is about helping businesses make informed choices and reduce their exposure to risk by leveraging the unification of business content, processes and connectivity to exchange information, heighten response to business or transaction events, and speed critical decision-making to help an organisation achieve a real-time enterprise.

When a business harnesses the power of content, processes and connectivity, they can activate content and business processes by creating relationships between documents, web pages, folders and the processes and business systems that are critical to operations. This in turn has a positive impact on the response time, cycle-time goals, ability to meet return on investments (ROI), and financial health of the business. Customer service, collaboration and knowledge exchange is also improved.

It is this focus on improved decision-making that is generating vital ROI and providing competitive advantage for customers in a wide variety of industries, including energy, financial services, government, insurance, manufacturing, and oil and gas.

A Brief History of ECM: Evolution and Paradigm Shift

The evolution of ECM technology can be traced to document management and workflow, which began to be adopted earnestly in the late 80s. These early software systems focused on capturing, archiving and retrieving documents — the nirvana of which was the “paperless office”. ROI was delivered in the form of less paper and storage costs, and improved productivity. These departmental solutions, while serving their purpose, did not offer the compelling ROI to make companies view them as strategic investments across the enterprise.

In the 90s, the US saw a wave of re-engineering and many organisations responded with a “rip and replace” technology investment strategy, deploying more IT systems and applications to support and manage data. In fact, worldwide information and communication technology spending nearly doubled between 1993 and 2001, reaching US.42 trillion [1].

The legacy of this growth in technology investment was content spread throughout the enterprise on websites, document management and line of business systems. As a result, supporting even the most basic business was a management nightmare.

In response, and as the economic environment became tougher, organisations concentrated on the core processes that guide how companies buy, build and deliver those products. They also focused on the opportunity at hand to automate, integrate and optimise these processes to wring out costs and inefficiencies. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Process Management (BPM) technologies arrived on the scene to unite disparate applications and processes, and connect people more effectively.

Up to this point in time, the genesis of content management and related technology purchases was tactical, aimed at solving specific business problems – web content management solutions, for example. In 2003, customers began to approach ECM as a strategic investment, with a significant increase in enterprise-wide deployments aimed at improving the decision-making process and, consequently, organisational efficiency, revenues and customer service. With the economy and IT spending starting to grow again, this trend seems to be increasing. Additionally, the need for ECM is being fuelled by a number of key business drivers.  

Business Drivers for ECM

Currently, there are three main business drivers for ECM. These include the need for:

1) Continuous process improvement to reduce costs, improve efficiency and quality of service;

2) Improved corporate accountability, risk reduction and regulatory compliance through content control and process visibility; and

3) Knowledge management and collaboration to support innovation and product development.

Better, Faster, Cheaper

In every organisation, business processes represent an opportunity for improvement. In today’s competitive market, organisations must make eliminate all waste that the customer will either not pay for or does not value through continuous process improvement.

When companies automate processes, they reduce the need for human intervention in routine or low-risk decisions. This improves quality and eliminates both the cost and potential for errors associated with human-based workflow. Companies can therefore apply expert human resources when and where they add the most value to the decision-making process and re-align their resources to focus on higher revenue-generating activities.

Automating processes also helps reduce cycle time. The faster you can process a business transaction, the more transactions you process, and hence the more revenue you generate. Faster decision-making also reduces handling costs – and ultimately increases profitability.

No matter how well designed a process may be, there will always be exceptions to the norm. How organisations handle exceptions is a major determinant of overall quality service delivered to business partners and customers. By being exceptional at handling exceptions, companies can further differentiate themselves from their competition.

But it is process optimisation, which incorporates analysis and simulation that provides an unprecedented level of operational insight needed to maximise the effectiveness of business processes. While evaluating past performance is valuable, the ability to assess the impact of future events can make the difference between success and failure. Analytics and simulation enable enterprises to test-drive “what if” constraints and scenarios to determine the best processes to deploy as business conditions change. This allows organisations to keep processes tuned at an optimal level on a continuous basis to stay one step ahead of the competition.

What: Me Worry About Compliance?

Following such debacles as Enron and WorldCom, there is a heightened need for visibility and accountability at all levels of the organisation, from the “shop floor to the top floor”.

ECM helps deliver operational visibility into how the business is performing. This enables businesses to track, monitor, measure and optimise processes in real-time. It also provides the control, visibility and agility required to respond to changing regulations and market conditions, thus minimising corporate risk exposure.

By linking processes with the creation, management and delivery of content, ECM enables businesses to accelerate information exchange to more quickly respond to business or transaction events. The right information is aggregated and delivered to the right people or systems at “crucial moment” when a decision must be made. This accelerates decision-making and helps companies manage exposure to risk, first by enabling the right decision, and next by capturing how and why that decision is made.

Companies are looking to ECM in response to a raft of new regulations aimed at compliance. In today’s highly regulatory environment, just one misstep can subject your business to potential shutdowns, non-compliance fines, even devastating legal action that can put your company out of business. To this end, ECM has moved to center stage as enterprises strive for improved accountability and risk reduction.

ECM ensures that content is kept for the appropriate amount of time and then destroyed in accordance with corporate policy. ECM is an important foundation for records management and compliance initiatives because content must first be properly identified before it can be managed throughout its lifecycle. Additionally, ECM ensures business processes are automated and integrated into the fabric of the organisation to ensure compliance policies and retention schedules are enforced. Without systemic enforcement, your records management program can be severely compromised.

Share and Share Alike

Industry analyst firm Gartner recently conducted a survey to gauge which technologies companies plan to invest in the coming years to support collaborative work processes and knowledge management, and what they aim to achieve in deploying such technologies.

Their findings indicate companies are looking to ECM and related technologies to improve productivity and processes, and improve coordination and collaboration among organisational units and partners. These collaborative applications allow geographically dispersed project teams to centralise, organise and store project-specific content, and introduce ad hoc workflow and tasks, involving team members both inside and outside the enterprise with varying levels of interaction.

ECM is uniquely suited for collaboration applications because collaboration entails content, process and connectivity.  Industry analyst firm IDC offers two reasons why coupling content with collaboration makes sense. “First, content is the subject and object on which collaborative work is done. Second, collaboration generates new content that should be managed with other content for future access. When the two are supported by different systems that do not talk to one another, the result can be inefficient and ineffective content management and collaboration, particularly in day-to-day content-focused processes” [2].

Business Process Management (BPM), a core capability of ECM, provides a common framework for collaboration to guide interactions among all parties. BPM also offers control of external access to internal systems, as many businesses want to collaborate with partners, yet need to protect vital intellectual property.

The Role of Content

Everyday, businesses see a multitude of content flowing in and out of their organisation; content in the form of electronic, scanned, and compound documents, XML files, images, audio and video files, forms and emails.

We are also seeing a need for more content to be produced, more quickly, and customised for different customers. Within an organisation, content is churned out at amazing speed by multiple content creators and modifiers for purposes of exchanging information inside and outside of the organisation to relay branding, business objectives and plans, marketing plans, and corporate and marketing messages.

This huge amount of content needs to be managed for optimal productivity and this is a challenge for companies as they are facing decreasing resources, time and budget.

When content is managed effectively, the advantages are seen when it is proactively delivered to accelerate decisions throughout the organisation, when it is enabled to react to business or transactional events, and when it can launch business processes or updates to enterprise business applications.

There are numerous content management systems in the market that businesses can take advantage. They include web content management, transactional content management, integrated document management, public-oriented content management and learning content management. To fully reap the advantages of content management, organisations need to deploy a unified content strategy.

Creating Unified Content Strategy

To make effective content, a unified content strategy is required. It is a repeatable method of identifying all content requirements upfront, creating consistently structured content for reuse, managing that content in a definitive source, and assembling content on-demand to meet organisational and customer needs.

When an organisation has in place a unified content strategy, it provides its internal staff, customers and other channels with consistent messaging, branding and accuracy, encompassing the whole organisation from its corporate policies and procedures to its customer relationship management, product training and support, and even corporate website.

Take for example, when a business receives a request to update a loan application. This query would create a new request to the lender which leads to an automated or human review and approval or rejection. In this case, the query represents an event to the lender that creates the need to use, create and manage content related to this particular application.

This event then triggers a requirement to identify, locate and extract specific content related to the loan status, which requires the business decision of approving or rejecting the loan. The loan process data and content might lie in various systems and applications and this is where connectivity comes into play.

Connectivity is needed for aggregating, integrating and updating this broad range of content that exists in different locations across the enterprise. With this convergence of content, process and connectivity, the organisation can service customer queries more efficiently and cost effectively.

Fig. 1: An example of a financial services firm using automatic processing, automated decision-making, integration of decision-makers into business processes and forging links with business partners.

So how do organisations implement a unified content strategy?

To do so, they need to look into their internal and external processes and ways they communicate with their audiences and develop:

·    A thorough analysis of information throughout the whole organisation, its audiences, and processes,

·    A consistent approach to structuring information based on information types and audiences’ needs,

·    Information models that form project roadmaps indicating what each information element should contain and where it can be reused,

·    A sound metadata strategy allowing for classification, identification, retrieval and tracking of all information “bits” within a content management system,

·    A strategy to produce dynamic content to provide the right information to the right people at the right time,

·    New roles and processes to support a new way of analysing and producing information,

·    Automated workflows for new processes to run smoothly, and development and reuse of content to be tracked, and

·    The right technology to support the organisation’s goal.

Activating Content

Once an organisation’s unified content strategy is ready, it must activate content throughout the entire company.

Organisations can do so through extending the capabilities of an ECM system by enabling Active Content. This is done by intelligently linking information contained within individual business documents with triggering events that launch or modify business.

Fig. 2: Eight characteristics of Active Content

A supporting platform or architecture is needed for content to reside on and be effectively activated. This platform should be enabled to activate enterprise content on an event-driven architecture, combining the full spectrum of capabilities for comprehensive content management, business process management and enterprise connectivity.

Organisations should therefore seek an ECM architecture that would allow them to acquire, manage, store and distribute content. Additionally, it should also recombine and transform content into multiple formats and syndicate collections to third-parties on-demand and integrate with ERP, CRM and other legacy systems. The platform should incorporate comprehensive editorial workflow capabilities for managing the review, approval and distribution of individual business documents, covering both traditional electronic document management as well as web content management.

One such standards-based architecture is FileNet P8, developed by ECM solutions provider FileNet.

Benefits of ECM

The increasing business and regulatory requirements of individual companies across industries make very different demands upon the functionality, security, and scalability of ECM solutions.

How businesses apply ECM to a particular application or industry is as essential as the quality of the technology that supports it. The true value of ECM only emerges when it has been optimised to the industry, business processes, and company’s technology infrastructure.

Organisations achieve a faster time-to-market through shorter content creation and maintenance cycles with an ECM system. Furthermore, resources are optimised as repetitive creation and maintenance processes are reduced. Quality of content also improves as it can now be modelled for consistent structure, thereby increasing its readability and usability.

With this comes better and quicker decision-making as employees are provided with timely access to information, and substantial improvements to their responsiveness to customer requests. The overall effect is increased productivity and reduced costs.

ECM can therefore help organisations achieve their business goals and bring control and consistency to business processes through realising their competitive edge, automating and streamlining their business processes, and simplifying important everyday decision-making.

ECM in 2005 and Beyond  

Ultimately, talk is cheap, and ROI is everything. It is no fluke that ECM has taken its place as a strategic investment. The reason is simple: ECM enables businesses to leverage their most important assets (content and human resources) while driving out inefficiencies and costs from processes.

More and more businesses across different industries are adopting ECM today to tackle issues of continuous process improvement, compliance, and collaboration initiatives. To address the growing vertical markets, we now see vendors broadening their offerings in the market.

Among vendors including EMC and IBM, FileNet’s integration of content management with its business process management capability is a differentiator that enables its solutions to focus on business-centred content management processes.

We also see message archiving becoming a big part of ECM and storage. Forrester Research predicted that the worldwide email message archiving market will grow from US million in 2003 to a peak in 2006 of US million.

Presently, the message archiving market is on a path of transition from standalone solutions to integrated message archiving and records management products. It will come to a point where a single solution is used to manage all forms of records such as documents, transactions and messages.

Other new capabilities on the way to meet the expanding content needs of enterprises include eForms and team collaboration. These capabilities round out the product suite which will drive new sales.

Conclusion

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a comprehensive approach to doing business that can be applied to specific processes to help businesses survive and sustain their competitiveness.

By deploying an effective ECM solution and establishing a unified content strategy, organisations can harness the power of content, processes and connectivity, thus allowing them to optimise their performance.

The advantages an ECM system provides organisations are numerous, chief among them are improved overall productivity, reduced costs and minimised business risks.

Many organisations are now realising the importance and economic advantages of having ECM technology. The market is expanding rapidly and vertically, and new capabilities such as message archiving, record management, eForms and team collaboration are emerging.

Paul Krueger is a FileNet Enterprise Content Management Specialist and Marketing Director for the Asia Pacific region. He works directly with customers and partners to educate key constituencies on the value of implementing core process improvement technologies. In addition, Paul also oversees and directs all Corporate and Product Marketing initiatives across all industry verticals.

Mike Powell is Technical Services Director, FileNet Asia Pacific. He has over 15 years of experience in software implementation and project management. Mike is responsible for Sales Consulting, Professional Services, and Learning Services for FileNet customers in the region.

Links & Literature

[1] “Background Paper on the World Trade Organisation’s Negotiations and Issues Regarding Information and Communications Technology (ICT)”, World Information Technology and Services Association (December 2002)

[2] IDC, Documentum Acquires eRoom: Content Management and Collaboration Team Up for Customer Benefit, Mark Levitt, Roberts P. Mahowald, Joshua Duhl, October 2003