Enterprise Content Management A cure or a curse

Enterprises are full of content and float in content every moment. There must be a system to share, store, protect, control, and destroy content so that only authorized content is shared or stored. In the absence of a content management system, documents may be lost or destroyed or distributed unauthorizedly or stored in the wrong locations. So that content is properly managed, enterprises adopt a centralized Content Management system, which is popularly known as Enterprise Content Management (ECM) or Content Services (CS). Both of then represent the way content is organized and systemized in an enterprise.

Traditionally, enterprises managed content in a scattered manner, some in the storage location of individual employee’s computers or the more organized ones pointed storage in one central drive in their network. However, this is rule-based, and success depends on employees following the rules to store as per corporate policy and procedure. They were indexed to search but did not have any associated taxonomy tags to group them for easy retrieval. Keywords search within content was also not possible easily.

Cloud-based content management systems coupled with file sharing and file synchronization services became quite popular during the last decade and occupied center stage in corporate adoption. However, there were concerns about security for adoption at a faster rate and became more popular as an employee’s personal cloud content management system quickly. Some of them have improved and are addressing the gaps for being a full-fledged enterprise content management system with robust collaboration features. Multiple users collaboratively manage web and enterprise content, synchronizing their thoughts, actions, and expectations. ECM systems have brought the vibrancy of active collaboration for concerted effort and shared storage, avoiding duplicate storage of the same documents within a single network. The deduplication of document circulation has saved a substantial amount of space and corporate bandwidth usage in their buy operational timing. In one of our client locations, the average saving on deduplication noticed was close to 50% of data circulating over email.

Retail ViVA, our Retail Management System, has integrated ECM across the other 25 modules and stores data with intelligent taxonomy for easy retrieval. The accountability matrix created for content access is in adherence to corporate governance policies of the enterprise. Retail ViVA stores all reports in ECM and circulates a link for access, providing transparency of who has consumed or otherwise. ECM helps retailers to achieve the efficiency of content storage coupled with ease of content access.

ECM is green, clean, and is the cream of corporate governance objective. Retailers must care about what content is distributed and who has authorized such content for distribution. We can achieve the best accountability while avoiding duality of authority, bringing in clarity in the organizational hierarchy towards faster achievement of enterprise goals and objectives.

Written by
(Ragu)nathan Kannan