Enterprise Content Management—Thinking Beyond the Repository
Enterprise content management (ECM) traditionally is defined as managing unstructured information, such as Microsoft Word documents, scanned images, records and emails, in a central repository where it can be classified, reused and managed as enterprise assets. While this process often addresses a fair amount of content within an enterprise, is it truly enterprise content management? To manage content throughout an organization, companies also must deal with the vast amount of unstructured content stored outside of a central ECM repository.
Often it is not feasible or desirable—due to complex business functions, technology restrictions and work habits—to move all enterprise content into a managed ECM environment. For example, a vast majority of users work with content on their desktops or laptop computers and only interact with the ECM system when “checking in” or “checking out” a document. Interaction with the ECM system may not be part of their normal workflow, and much of the content they create and use will never be submitted into the ECM repository.
Does that mean true ECM is unobtainable? Not necessarily. To manage all content within an organization, companies must expand their common definitions of ECM and move beyond the limitations of traditional ECM repositories. They need to institute processes for managing content stored on users’ machines and in information technology (IT) systems typically not considered content management solutions.
By viewing ECM as a strategy versus a repository, IT departments can better determine the processes and systems that must be put in place to successfully manage all unstructured assets within an organization.
Step 1. Establishing a Core ECM Infrastructure
While ECM is broader than a set of individual content repositories, it is still critical to implement a core IT infrastructure to support a company’s content management strategy. Typically, this infrastructure consists of line-of-business content management stores, traditional content management applications and other enterprise application content stores.
Enterprise content management solutions (such as Oracle® Universal Content Management™, formerly Stellent® Universal Content Management™) provide broad support for line-of-business and enterprise-wide applications via a flexible, scalable and extensible middleware layer. This layer provides enterprise services through a service-oriented architecture and a unified ECM
platform offering document management, records and retention management, Web
content management, collaboration, digital asset management and email management functionality.
Additionally, ECM solutions should support an extensible enterprise metadata model; include tools for building content-enabled vertical applications; and leverage an enterprise security model for controlling and providing access to business content.
Step 2. Managing Legacy and Non-ECM Stores
After establishing a core ECM technology infrastructure, companies should identify and begin managing non-ECM and legacy information stores, such as application databases, attached file systems and previous-generation content management systems. Individual employees also typically have a myriad of places where they store content, including shared file systems, FTP servers, email inboxes and departmental collaboration servers.
When identifying content stores, companies should classify them as strategic, replaceable or tactical. Strategic stores exist outside of the traditional ECM infrastructure, but contain unstructured content that may have strategic value to a company. For example, business-critical content may exist in financial or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Because of their strategic value, these stores must remain in their present format.
Other storage areas may be identified as replaceable, meaning these stores will eventually be migrated into the traditional ECM infrastructure identified in Step 1. For instance, information stored in an email archive or Lotus Notes database can eventually be seamlessly transitioned into an ECM repository.
Tactical content stores are not considered strategic to a company, eliminating the need to migrate them into an ECM system. This determination may be made based on return-on-investment considerations or resource constraints, among other things. As an example, archived project collaboration areas on outdated tools may not have business drivers for migration to a traditional ECM system. Despite their limited strategic value, it is important to identify these stores so they can be properly managed.
After identifying content stores, companies can bring them into a more strategic, broad and policy-driven content management framework while keeping them within their legacy systems, either permanently, or until content is migrated into a traditional ECM repository. Importantly, the goal should not be to immediately migrate content into an ECM system, but rather put infrastructure in place on top of existing content stores to enable IT to implement the strategic ECM vision of managing all content within an enterprise.