The Basics Of ECM

By Martyn Christian, IBM Enterprise Content Management

Fundamentally, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) empowers companies to transform their business. ECM is the combination of people and technology working real-time to improve workforce effectiveness. ECM helps companies manage content, optimize business processes and enable compliance through an integrated information infrastructure. While ECM tools have been in existence for more than 20 years, it is the integration of these technologies that is so powerful and can bring significant benefits to users – allowing them to make better decisions faster.

ECM accelerates productivity, reduces costs and cycle time, and improves customer service, collaboration and knowledge exchange by improving critical and everyday decision-making. And it is this focus on improved decision-making in the business that is generating critical ROI and providing competitive advantage for customers in a wide variety of industries – from financial services to telecommunications to government agencies worldwide.

There are three main business drivers for ECM. These include the need for:

• continuous process improvement to reduce costs, improve efficiency and quality of service;
• improved corporate accountability, risk reduction and regulatory compliance through content control and process visibility; and
• knowledge management and collaboration to support innovation and product development.