ECM I get it! I think.?

Enterprise Content Management
Jon Zalinski

In my previous life, I was a Vice President of a company that had several facets to its income stream. I understand the challenge of trying to optimize those streams as they are being calculated in the planning of the company’s movement. There are several factors to the planning and the direction of movement of a company.

Our company was small enough that our available tools we implemented for monitoring and managing data were solutions to specific challenges. The data from these solutions was analyzed and the company’s direction was set on course. That path was based on the data that we gathered from all of the tools we had. Each tool was cycling within its own solution. This put the officers in a position to interpret the data and come up with their own conclusion on where the company’s direction should go. Most times the data that was available was not accurate. Here is one example. The information we used for today really was the information we needed to have a month ago. By this I mean, every department had a business process. This process took time. Different business processes took longer than others. For this example accounts payable had to open the mail and enter in invoices to be paid. This process took about a week. It took a week because price verification took up a lot of time, and if there were price discrepancies this would stall the process sometimes longer than a week. This would delay the accurate information of our cash flow. The cash flow data we used in our meeting was inaccurate because several invoices were not entered and had a deadline to be paid that none of the officers were aware of. This made our directional decisions at meetings moot. Our data and our business processes were so inaccurate that no one really knew where the company was and where it was about to go. This is NOT a position an officer should be in. The company could quickly find itself in a position that is very unfavorable.

So getting back to the point, Enterprise Content Management is a descriptive term that defines an industry of solution based management tools. These tools assist in the business process and assist in the management of data. The assistance in both of these areas is crucial in your company’s future. If you could optimize your company’s business processes and manage the data to the point where the data is up-to-date and accurate, the company is positioned to make better decisions for the company’s direction into the future.

The next question is, “How does enterprise content management help me and my company?” Enterprise Content Management solutions umbrella the whole company or enterprise. Your company may have several solutions running in several different departments. For example there may be accounting software being used for accounts payable and different software being used for accounts receivable. A software solution could be used for inventory that is separate from accounts payable or receivable and a separate software package for each department like human resources, manufacturing, service, reservations, research and discovery, and depending on the company there are solutions for each and every department. Enterprise content management provides a data backbone to the entire company or enterprise. Yes, it manages your company’s data and business processes. It also integrates with all of your independent solutions and coordinates all of the data in one location. Now that this data is in one central location and is easily managed and accessed the data that is available is very useful for analysis and much more accurate for making directional decisions for your company.

Other benefits of enterprise content management are that your company is now in a position to take advantage of this digital data. Some companies have automated several processes with their work-flow module. To pass information through several departments electronically saves several processing steps and speeds up the travel of information throughout the company. This transfer of data is also controlled by an administrator. The administrator sets the course of who should and should not see certain information. Enterprise content management solutions also manages the company’s resources of money spent, the paper that had to have been copied and passed along, the human resource time and payroll of having someone make copies and deliver them to each department, and space because someone would have to file the documents and store them for as long as the retention schedule dictates. By not producing the paper document, the digital data is now more secure and compliant. Having the data managed in one location, also allows the company’s data to be backed up from one central database adding a disaster recovery plan to you company.

These benefits change as your company evolves with the understanding of the possibilities of content management and business process evolution within your company. Some examples of this could be the management of digital pictures or email. Videos or mp3s can now be a part of the data to be used in business decisions. Saved webinars for training linked to the tracking of, who looked at the webinar and for how long, changes the information used by HR for hiring or promotions. Process steps are now automated speeding up the process, but also allowing the steps to be spelled out so there isn’t any missing forms or information. How about capturing email addresses from your "complaint department" and organizing a direct email campaign to win back your customer. The possibilities are endless on what you can do from here and what other tools will help you get there.We feel that the benefits of implementing an enterprise content management solution will not only pay for itself, but will also save money to your company in a short amount of time. If you are in the “C” suite CEO, CIO, CFO, COO, etc. and are asking yourself,” Where do we go from here?” I would look “inside the box” inside your company, and consider implementing an Enterprise Content Management solution to see a future with better direction.