Embracing the ECM Opportunity: Enterprise Content Management—More Essential Now Than Ever

One of your most valuable assets doesn't appear on the balance sheet. It's information—the lifeblood of your company— contained in your documents and business content. Enterprises are faced with rapidly expanding volumes of documents and content, from an expanding number of sources. From blogs and wikis, to email and digital images, the corporate world is overflowing with information.

Today's enterprise and its internal business processes are also in a continuous state of flux thanks to industry guidelines, governmental regulations and the drive to increase shareholder value. Global competition resulting in mergers and acquisitions, outsourcing and "rightsizing" of companies means that processes and people shift rapidly within organizations.

The financial well-being of a company may ultimately depend upon the protection of its information assets, mitigation of risk around them, and the ability to do so in a climate of change.

For all these reasons, it is imperative that enterprises gain process and cost efficiencies by taking control of information. When documents account for up to 40% of labor costs1, enterprise content management (ECM) represents an area where organizations can significantly reduce costs and increase process efficiency and productivity, while ensuring compliance.

Companies Face Two Challenges
In the past, companies considering ECM solutions have approached document and content management as one problem, when in fact, there are two distinct, but interlinked challenges: managing the day-to-day, ad hoc documents and content handled by every knowledge worker as a part of regular activities; and driving documents through mission-critical processes in a structured, repeatable manner.

Challenge 1: Bringing ECM to every knowledge worker—During an average workday, people create and process reams of ad hoc content and documents, such as marketing collateral, sales materials, interoffice emails and memos, project documents, notes, correspondence and many other types of information. Without ECM, it's difficult to manage and organize this content in an efficient way. The ability to collaborate effectively with others throughout the organization is impacted.

Challenge 2: Automating content, people and processes—While the typical knowledge worker handles a wide variety of different types of information, there are industries and departments where processing repetitive documents is central to key business transactions—for example, loan application processing, medical privacy forms, new employee enrollments and insurance applications. Automating these processes can provide significant benefits in terms of streamlined execution and overall efficiency while supporting compliance.

Together these challenges represent significant cost and risk to the enterprise. Successfully addressing both these challenges enables companies to achieve significant improvements in productivity, cost-efficiency and operational speed, while leveraging existing systems and capital investments, and, in short, doing more with less. Fortunately, addressing these challenges can also be a fast, reasonably painless process—if you choose your solution wisely.

What Do These Dual Challenges Require?
So what would the solution to meet these dual challenges look like? In a way, it needs to be two solutions, each providing a different toolset, but deployed in such a way that information can be shared and leveraged across the organization. Xerox DocuShare, for ECM, and Xerox DocuShare CPX, which provides content process automation, are good examples of two compatible products that would deliver the functionality required. Ideally, the solution would have a common technology platform to ease installation and customization, and reduce costs. It is essential that the solution work with the existing enterprise IT infrastructure, whether Windows, Solaris, Unix, Novell, Oracle or IBM, or a combination of all of these, as is likely the case in a large enterprise. For optimal usability in all areas of the organization, the solution should leverage industry standards and be Web-based. To foster end-user adoption, it must make interacting with documents and content processes a routine part of daily business activity. And it must remain flexible enough for the dynamic nature of contemporary enterprise business processes and employees' work habits.

Once these compatible solutions operating on a common platform are implemented, the enterprise can expect to see significant gains in efficiency, repeatability, speed, cost and compliance within document-centric activities and processes. Information created and handled at all points of the enterprise is more rapidly processed and shared. Knowledge workers can engage in ad hoc collaboration and basic workflow procedures within and across departments as a part of routine activities. Check-in/check-out, routing, versioning, sophisticated search mechanisms and other document management functions make it easier to manage, share and locate information. Records management and compliance initiatives can be seamlessly deployed and fully supported within the content management solution, freeing up the RM department to focus on core compliance activities.

Repetitive operational or transactional tasks can be easily automated without IT involvement. With capabilities designed specifically to support process-centric ECM, content from a variety of sources (email, scanned documents, content from desktop applications, blogs, etc.) can be seamlessly integrated, managed and secured. Repetitive or boilerplate content within structured documents can be extracted automatically using content assimilation tools, enabling reuse in other documents such as summaries and process reports.