Enterprise Content Management
What is document management?
Document management — also known as document management systems (DMS) — helps you organize paper and digital files in a central digital repository. These systems process, capture, store, manage and track documents within your organization. However, that’s only the half of it.
What is enterprise content management (ECM)?
Modern technology terminology can be confusing, and “enterprise content management”, despite existing for decades, remains an unclear term. Let’s define it.
ECM is a blanket term used for DMS and workflow automation technologies. Common capabilities of an ECM system include information automation, imaging, managing documents, digital workflow, web content management, and social content management.
These systems are more attuned to the procedures and processes in an organization, and how to manage content to achieve business goals. They help companies collect, store, organize, access and share information with those who need it. More importantly, these systems are deeply embedded in a companies IT infrastructure, with a focus on improving workflows and automating processes.
However, many ECM systems today remain large, complicated and expensive, offering “one-size-fits” all solutions that don’t work for you and your specific processes.
The components of enterprise content management
ECM is not one single technology, but rather a collection of critical features and capabilities that work together to drive secure, compliant information and document management processes.
An enterprise content management system consists of several components that handle the different stages of information management in a typical organization.
The essential capabilities of an ECM system are:
Capture: Importing, digitizing and extracting key data points from any source, including PDFs, email, fax, scans, native applications, and more.
Manage: Organizing, indexing and annotating documents to ensure they support business processes.
Process: Automatically routing and approving documents within the scope of a defined digital workflow to support critical business processes and compliance initiatives.
Collaborate: Editing in native applications in carefully version-controlled environments to maintain focus on the master version.
Archive: Secure, compliant archiving with retention policy options to either protect or control the destruction of certain types of information.
Integrate: Connect data and documents to other corporate applications through native connectors or APIs.
Non-essential components might include web content management or physical records management. However, these are not offered by all vendors as they are not the core use-case of ECM.
Depending on the provider, ECM systems are provided as various individual program modules and components combined into a suite, or as one holistic system.