The ECM Association ,AIIM, defines ECM as: "...the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists."
The focus of the definition above is on tools and technologies. AIIM itself emphasizes that while tools are important, it is the way that they are used that is important. Content must be managed in a way that furthers the organization's goals.
According to AIIM, the four primary areas in which ECM helps organization are: Compliance, Collaboration, Cost and Continuity.
In each of the areas, you must have clear strategies and policies before you start using ECM tools. Strategies and policies are derived from organizational goals and your particular environment.
COMPLIANCE
Compliance with regulatory requirements involves costs. The variety of regulations, and the ongoing legislation of new regulations and requirements, adds to the costs. Only a proactive strategy developed with the involvement of legal, technology and administrative personnel can help minimize these costs. This kind of a proactive approach will bring out possibilities for using ECM tools to ensure compliance with applicable regulations at a maximum of convenience and minimum of costs.
COLLABORATION
Collaboration helps people with different expertise to contribute to the overall business results. Overall business results are helped by finding faster ways to get your product or service to the market, reducing your operational costs and completing activities and processes quicker and in a more streamlined fashion.
ECM provides tools like instant messaging, emails, online meetings and whiteboards to facilitate collaborative working. These tools make it possible to participate instantly, or at a time of your convenience. You can review the up-to-date status of a problem or solution, ask queries, make suggestions or presentations and get feedback. All these allow you to get involved and contribute meaningfully.
COSTS
When you start thinking of how ECM can help with costs, the first thing you might notice will be the cost of the ECM system itself - an addition to cost rather than a reduction. However, if you have a proper strategy in place, even tentatively, you will also be able to evaluate how ECM can help you achieve larger-scale business results at lower costs.
The key is clarifying your objectives and their implications. Don't let existing information processing technology constraints limit your expectations in these matters. With ECM, information can be made available on tap by all those who need it (and are authorized to access it). This would include not only employees in your organization, but also suppliers, customers, and governments outside it.
You won't have to spend most of your time actively contacting everybody and conveying your requirements or meeting theirs. The result will be not only savings in time, but also better quality results in all areas. You will soon begin to see how ECM can help you operate on a much higher scale and at much less relative costs.
CONTINUITY
Keeping your business going 24/7/365 is critical in today's global corporations, and even many smaller organizations. Natural or man-made disasters must not be allowed to disrupt operations too seriously.
Achieving this objective will first involve developing clear strategies and policies. You will determine which content is business critical, how quickly each type of content must be restored, how such restoration is to be arranged for, and all the other incidentals involved.
ECM, with its comprehensive range of capabilities, will then help you implement the strategies and policies.
CONCLUSION
ECM provides a great set of tools and technologies. It can help achieve great business results through increasing speed of marketing and other operations, mainly through faster access to relevant information.
However, you need to sit down with your people and develop clear strategies and policies, un-constrained by present information system limitations, before you start implementing Enterprise Content Management Systems.
In addition to repositories, the "storage" component includes library services and storage technologies. Library services provide access to the content in the repositories, and storage technologies determine the kind of media used.
What Are Repositories?
Repositories are simply places where data are stored. These could be scaled to different levels, as indicated below.
"File systems" are temporary in nature, and include caches for input and output.
"Content Management Systems" use databases or other specialized storage systems as the current "operating" repository.
"Databases" help administer the stored content, in addition to storing it. Querying and access-control facilities, for example, are provided by the databases.
"Data Warehouses" are complex systems based on databases, and store all kinds of content.
Library Services
Library services manage access to the data stored in online (allowing direct access to data) or offline (data are on a medium that has been removed from the system) storage media.
Library services also maintain an audit trail providing logs of content accesses and edits.
Storage Technologies
Magnetic hard drives organized as RAID, SAN, and NAS devices provide online access to content.
Magnetic tapes are used more for backing up and storing content offline, to provide for restoration in case online content is damaged or lost.
Compact discs, DVDs and other removable media are used both for storage and distribution of content.
Preservation of Content
Preservation involves safe storage of content for a longer term. In addition to storage media, this component can also involve conversion and migration tools, and special viewers.
WORM - Write Once Read Many - is a technology used with long-term storage media. There are WORM optical disks, tapes, and hard disks. These media are protected against overwriting, erasure, and editing either through hardware (CD-R) or special software.
In addition to electronic media, microfilm is still a viable option for such long-term storage of content that is not subject to further change. Microfilm and paper are still used for long-term storage of unchanging content, and paper has the advantage that it can be read without any special aids.
To be effective, the preservation component of Enterprise Content Management must be planned in advance, and migration of content to the long-term storage must be done regularly.
Standards must be decided upon for interfaces, metadata, data structures, and object formats to ensure safe migration and continued readability of the migrated content. Migration schedules must be developed and adhered to.
In the course of migrating current content to long-term media, content that is no more needed for any purpose can be deleted. Clear criteria and procedures must be in place to identify the content that can be deleted. Otherwise, needed content might also be deleted.
Conclusion
While "storage" means keeping content in current repositories, along with "library services" to access it conveniently, "preservation" involves migrating it to longer-term, possibly read-only, media.
Proper strategies must be developed and appropriate technologies must be used to ensure that storage and preservation are done easily and conveniently, and meet intended purposes.