This makes content easily available to the right people at the right time. Users with access privileges can even perform full-text searches for specific documents. Regardless of device, they can then read, edit or print a copy whenever they need one, wherever they are. They can use the ECM system to look for words or phrases within the stored documents, too. In the beginning, organizations used ECM exclusively to reduce paper and streamline filing. But its role has become bigger——much bigger.
A strong ECM solution reduces the time and costs associated with managing documents throughout their life cycles, ensuring compliance with record retention policies.
If you handle questions from customers, ECM puts the answers right at your fingertips. It also automates manual tasks——things like photocopying, dragging and dropping, and hand delivery.
It can increase security by restricting access to files and folders. And it can allow individual departments to control access; for example, keeping human resources information restricted to HR personnel. To understand more specific ways it could help your company, consider these three types of ECM.
Across industries and service sectors, effective, enterprise-wide content management solutions are improving day-to-day processes while minimizing overhead.
Most important, ECM systems can be the first line of defense against the threats we face in our increasingly interconnected world. ECM forces organizations to manage and monitor content——all content——so that key personnel can more effectively respond to, and protect against, data breaches and financial fraud. Reducing operating costs through reduced storage costs and by improved workflows that come result from moving materials to electronic formats.
Boosting productivity by putting the right information in the right hands at the right time and by allowing for the automation of routine tasks. Increasing customer satisfaction by giving personnel easy access to the information customers need.
Improved decision-making processes, allowing organizations to cut costs, improve efficiencies, and seize opportunities in a timely manner. Ensures continuity in business operations, no matter what happens, thanks to account backups, archives, secure storage, and disaster recovery process. Before you decide to implement ECM, understand the current state of your organization by asking yourself a few questions.
By documenting everything, you can get the clarity you need to create and manage a content management system that is secure, compliant with regulations and company guidelines, and that meets the needs of every part of the organization. Once you perform the due diligence, draw some conclusions on how content is created and where it is stored. Who has access? How do individuals and departments retrieve it? Who needs what when? From that analysis, you should have a pretty clear picture of the existing environment and should be able to categorize your data.
Doing so can go a long way toward determining who needs access to certain information as well as what content needs to be saved and what can be deleted or thrown away. At that point, you should have a good idea of what type of ECM solution you need. And you can begin to choose the vendor and software to help you achieve your goals.
This, of course, increases user adoption and helps smooth the implementation of the changes. More and more teams are blending social collaboration tools into the way they approach ECM, because it's not just about handling company information, it's about creating an integrated culture and corresponding platform where everyone is involved in how information is captured, stored and utilized.
There are two things that immediately jump out of this "evolution," one being that ECM can not be limited to mere content management. It encompasses a greater range of responsibility including management, organization, searchability, application, and components.
Second, it's becoming mandatory for teams to have a digital platform that provides infrastructure for what was once unstructured, a tool that has both functionality and flexibility and enables the content lifecycle to be more interactive.
Streamlining ECM tools and processes within a unified platform for digitization will help teams meet deadlines, and more importantly, provide them opportunities to grow. What was once self-contained systems and repositories are now open services that are able to adapt continuously to meet the evolving needs of the customer.
Social collaboration software has had a huge impact on the way teams integrate content and information into their day-to-day work, and the ability to get on the same page with your team, collaborate in real-time, and utilize a uniform navigation process makes even more of a difference on the effectiveness of your ECM software.
An ECM solution should be able to provide the means to break down barriers with an open content platform that spans a range of applications, allowing teams to take advantage of the benefits of an interactive product suite. Advances in cloud, mobile, and analytics technology - as well as the continued integration of social collaboration tools - have expanded our expectations for what an ECM tool can do. The sheer volume of content that is being created and stored can be staggering, and over time, these technology improvements will drive the need for better usability and mobility among end-users.
All of these signs point in the direction of cloud deployment as a primary means of maximizing ECM's effectiveness. Moving ECM to a cloud-based platform allows organizations to avoid up-front implementation and infrastructure costs, mitigate staffing expenses, and ultimately reduce their total cost of ownership on the storage and management of content.
In addition to significant cost-reduction, organizations looking to improve their ECM's ease-of-use and accessibility will find that cloud deployment provides just that. Moving your ECM tool to the cloud makes it even easier for team members to store, retrieve, and apply content while on-the-go or working from home.
This also includes the creation, management, processing and archiving of documents, all the way to the digital signature. Documents are available everywhere, and security and compliance are safeguarded. Even mobile users have access to all necessary data and multiple employees can access the same document in parallel.
In addition, with robust logging and analytics capabilities, organizations have a record of who accessed, changed or removed document and when.
These document management capabilities are enhanced by digital workflow automation. Digital workflow enables an organization to establish predictable, repeatable, measurable processes that remove the need for manual data entry, lost information and constant status updates.
Some ECM systems include additional tiers of content management such as web content publishing, but these are not generally recognized as a core competency. ECM enables communication with customers and suppliers to be digitized, modernized and consequently improved. And that documents are intelligently organized and assists with their retrieval.
Regarding some features, that is OK, but it is not the whole truth. The easiest way to think about document management is as a subset of the broader ECM capability set. Document management covers many of the core features such as capturing, indexing, archiving, automating and controlling information, but that information is typically document-centric. A complete ECM system might manage information from web content, social media accounts, and other highly dynamic and scalable information sources that are outside the boundaries of a document.
For larger organizations, this is valuable, but expensive to implement and maintain. Enterprise Content Management is the systematic collection and organization of information that is to be used by a designated audience — business executives, customers, etc.
Neither a single technology nor a methodology nor a process, it is a dynamic combination of strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver information supporting key organizational processes through its entire lifecycle. Document management eventually was subsumed into content management in no small measure because there is more information available to us today than ever before, and most of it is not being created by us.
Thanks to the mainstreaming of a whole range of sources like the Web, thumb drives, smartphones, cloud, etc. Structured information is information that is highly defined and not only is intended to be processed by a computer program but readily can be — like most of the information held in relational databases and acted upon by line-of-business solutions. Unstructured information is, well, information that does not have a fully defined structure and most likely will be read and used by humans.
As examples, think of most of the information produced by common office applications word processors, presentation programs. Semi-structured information is information that lies somewhere in between, like invoices, purchase orders, and receipts, which contain data to be computer-processed but which come in formats and layouts that first need to be identified and classified — a task that often is handled by humans but increasingly is being automated as the tools improve.
This all becomes important when you consider the effect on your business that not managing these elements can have!
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