On Feb. 3, Hugh Ritchie, who is an expert in enterprise content management (ECM), provided an interesting discussion about the importance of effective ECM and some recent developments in the ECM field, such as the introduction of social collaboration tools, cloud computing, and advanced mobile technologies to the workplace. Ritchie is a Program Manager at Open Text Corporation, which is a publicly traded company that sells proprietary software solutions designed to improve how enterprises manage their content. ECM software is specifically tailored to manage enterprise content – e-mails, invoices, market research, internal policies and procedures, meeting minutes, reports, and so on – according to rules and controls that not only improve the mechanisms by which content is stored and retrieved, but also ensures that content is managed in a way that complies with relevant laws and regulations. As Mr. Ritchie noted, effective ECM is crucial because it results in increased employee efficiency, heightens profits, and minimizes the risk of litigation for non-compliance.

As alluded to above, all enterprises, be they private or public sector, are required to adhere to specific laws and regulations which can vary based on the enterprise’s physical location and the industry in which it operates. For example, government organizations in Canada (regardless of industry) are subject a number of different regulations, two of which are the Access to Information Act and the Privacy Act. Of these two acts, the former “gives Canadian citizens the right to access information in federal government records” and the latter “provides citizens with the right to access personal information held by the government and protection of that information against unauthorized use and disclosure”. To be in accordance with these acts, all Canadian government content must be retrievable; and in order to be easily retrieved, content must first be properly organized and stored, and this is where ECM systems shine.

As Mr. Ritchie explained, what a well-designed ECM system allows for is the effective organization of enterprise records and the efficient retrieval of those records. For Canadian Government organizations, one outcome of a good ECM system is that Access to Information requests can be fulfilled quickly and efficiently. Similarly, as Mr. Ritchie noted, when a private sector company faces a Discovery order (which means that they are legally obliged to locate internal information for the purpose of a legal investigation), that company can save a lot of time and money if its content is stored in a well designed ECM system and so is easy to retrieve. Alternatively, the company would have to spend time and money sifting through its poorly organized content for the required information or pay exorbitant fees to a legal firm to do so.

Effective ECM is not only important for compliance with legislation and regulation, but it is also important for ensuring that organizations are operating at peak efficiency. When an ECM system incorporates a strategy for content classification (for example, one based on a vetted corporate taxonomy, or perhaps one which allows for semantic tagging), and when those classification policies and procedures are socialized to and adopted by the enterprise employees, the result is that enterprise content is more effectively organized and so more easily retrieved. When content is well organized and easy to retrieve, employees waste less time searching for that content and more time working with it.

Beyond providing an efficient way to organize content, recent ECM systems have also begun to incorporate social media tools. In the future, these tools will be important to organizations – particularly larger ones – as they will help to break down departmental silos and foster increased collaboration amongst employees. This collaboration can take various forms, from online discussions using instant messaging software, to simultaneous multi-user document editing (such as is available with services like Googledocs), to networking tools that allow employees to seek out colleagues with expertise in a particular area. From a holistic organizational perspective, this means that the enterprise is better leveraging the knowledge, skills, and abilities of its most important resource – its employees; however, it is important that when implementing social functionality a corporation develop strict policy to ensure a) users are using the tools as they were intended; and b) users’ privacy rights are not put at risk. Questions that policy must address would include (and are certainly not limited to): what information can an enterprise legally ask employees to post to their internal social networking profiles? What kind of information is appropriate for employees to share over an internal networking site? Prior to implementing social networking tools, it is important that these policies be carefully thought out so that the employee’s privacy rights are protected (which can put the well-being of the employee at risk but can also cost the enterprise in litigation fees if an employee decides to sue).

Two other important trends that Mr. Ritchie touched on were the introduction of cloud computing to the workplace and the development of mobile applications that allow authorized users to access enterprise content from their smartphones. (At its most basic, cloud computing means storing content on a secure server that can then be accessed over the internet.) What these trends reflect is the broader movement toward a mobile workforce in today’s knowledge-based society – that is, a workforce comprised of knowledge workers who are no longer confined to a single desktop computer or office space, but who can instead access enterprise content regardless of physical location. By incorporating cloud computing and smartphone technologies into their infrastructure, ECM systems are allowing employees to conduct business from almost any place, at any time. 

In this digital age, when most enterprise content has already been, or is in the process of being, fully digitized, effective ECM software is becoming increasingly crucial to the smooth operation of the modern enterprise. But as wonderful as the recent developments in ECM are, they also introduce some inherent risks. As ECM systems begin to rely on the internet as a vehicle for transmitting sensitive information and on social media tools to foster collaboration amongst employees, it becomes imperative that appropriate policies and procedures are in place to ensure that competitive intelligence and intellectual property remain secure and that the privacy of enterprise employees is not compromised.