Guest Column: Making The Grade: Common ECM Challenges For School Districts

By Allen Gavlak, Optical Image Technology

School districts implement enterprise content management (ECM) for similar reasons. Typically, they are inundated by great volumes of paper. Physical storage is a challenge, as is efficient management of student and administrative records.

As the world transitions to electronic processes, paper—offering a unique set of challenges—can seem like an anachronism. Documents are often duplicated, misfiled, or lost. When colleges, universities, and stakeholders have the expectation of receiving student and administrative information in digital format, converting paper records on the fly can be time-consuming.

As a result, organizations are recognizing the importance of enterprise content management (ECM). A high-performance ECM system has the ability to integrate with legacy and line of business applications, allowing school districts to centralize all of their content in a single electronic repository. ECM helps school districts comply with privacy and record retention regulations. In addition, it makes student records, faculty files, agendas, minutes, payroll reports, invoices, purchase orders, etc. available to authorized personnel at the click of a mouse.