Enterprise Content Management ECM

Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is both a concept and a grouping of specific types of technology.

Conceptually ECM provides a framework for managing one of an organisation's most valuable (and sometimes least well managed) assets - so called "unstructured" information. The document (including text, spreadsheets, images, web pages) is a primary business container for information. (Please also see Information Asset Management.)

ECM is concerned with managing the lifecycle of corporate information from its creation, through operational use and publication (via potentially multiple channels), and on to archiving and eventual destruction in a coherent manner.

From a technical perspective, ECM has emerged from a number of specific applications supporting narrower business functions to become an integrated suite of products that supports critical enterprise processes.

Within such a suite, the core components can be:

Document Management for the filing, storage, retrieval, check-in/checkout, version control, security and library services for business documents
Web Content Management for putting ownership of web content in the hands of business users rather than technologists, enabling dynamic content and supporting reuse of content across multiple publications
Records Management for legal or regulatory purposes, long-term archiving (including email), and automation of retention, disposal and compliance policies
Document Imaging for the capture and processing of paper document sin digital form
Collaboration for supporting project teams, sharing documents and information, and increasingly offering social networking capabilities
Workflow for supporting business processes and routing content, assigning work tasks and states, and creating audit trails
Report Management for archiving and retrieving fixed content print-stream reports
E-forms for capturing and processing electronic data
Digital Asset Management (DAM) for storing and managing rich media content
E-mail archiving

The Wikipedia definition is here.

In the ECM marketplace there is also the product label of EDRM, or (integrated) Electronic Document and Records Management.

An interesting trend is Content Intelligence.

Please see list of ECM vendors. Also EDRM systems list here.

Please see also Website Information Architecture.