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Enterprise Content Management

One governed place for the documents a business runs on, with access, versioning and retention attached to the record rather than to the folder.

What enterprise content management actually is

One governed place for the documents an organisation runs on, with access, versioning and retention attached to each record rather than to the folder somebody filed it in.

The distinction that matters is not storage. Every company already has somewhere to put a file. It is whether the rules travel with the record, so that finding it, controlling who sees it and disposing of it on time happen without anyone remembering to do them.

What it is for

Most companies have somewhere to put a document. Few can say, for any given record, who may see it, which version is current, what it is kept for and when it goes. That gap is what enterprise content management closes, and it is a records question before it is a system question.

The test

Uncomfortable and quick. Pick a contract signed four years ago and produce, inside an hour:

  1. The current version
  2. Its approval history
  3. Its disposal date

Estates that pass have their rules in the system. Estates that fail have their rules in people’s heads, and those are usually the ones that have already bought a platform.

Where estates actually are

Three patterns cover almost everything we are called into.

  1. 01 The shared drive

    A folder convention that half the company follows, where the current version is whichever file has the most recent date in its name.

  2. 02 The department systems

    Two or three systems bought by different departments, each holding part of the same case, with the connection between them maintained by whoever has been there longest.

  3. 03 The platform

    A platform bought as an ECM and used as a filing cabinet, because the retention and access rules were left for a later phase that never got funded.

None of these are failures of diligence. They are what happens when documents are treated as the output of a process rather than as records with obligations of their own.

The register comes before the selection

What you hold, in what volume, under what obligations, and how much of it should not survive the move.

Selecting a platform before that is answerable means selecting on features, and the feature lists are close enough to identical that the decision ends up being made on price and on whoever demonstrated last.

  1. The market

  2. 01 What the estate is carrying

  3. 02 What it has to connect to

  4. 03 What the organisation can actually run

  5. Worth a demonstration

We do not sell a platform, which is the reason we can say that.

Which system suits an estate depends on what the estate is carrying, what it has to connect to and what the organisation can actually run, and those three answers rule out most of the market before anyone sits through a demonstration.

Where this sits

Enterprise content management is the operational half of a strategic question: what your information is worth, what it costs to hold and what obligations attach to it. That question is Information Value Management, and it is the one that decides whether a content platform earns its licence.

Information Value Management

The first conversation is usually about what you are holding and where, which is answerable in an afternoon and is the question most selection processes skip.

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Enterprise content management, asked plainly

  • What is enterprise content management?

    Enterprise content management, or ECM, is the practice and the systems for holding an organisation's documents as governed records: contracts, invoices, personnel files, drawings, certificates and correspondence, with access, versioning, retention and audit history attached to each record. It covers the whole life of a document rather than the moment it is stored.

  • What is the difference between an ECM and a document management system?

    A document management system stores, versions and retrieves files. An ECM governs records: it also carries retention and disposal, access by role and by case, audit history, and the connection to the business processes that produce the documents. Most estates sold as ECM are being used as a document management system, which is why the second audit goes badly even though everything is in one place.

  • What should an ECM system actually do?

    Four capabilities are worth paying for. Apply retention and disposal automatically rather than by reminder. Scope access by role and by case, so nobody administers a list by hand. Keep a history that answers who changed what and when without an export. And accept documents from the processes that create them rather than requiring somebody to file them afterwards.

  • Do we need an ECM system or better governance first?

    Governance first, in the sense of knowing what you hold and what has to be true of it. A system configured before those rules exist encodes whatever the folders already do, at which point the migration has moved the problem rather than fixed it. Governance first does not mean a year of policy work: it means the register and the rules, which is weeks, not quarters.

  • How long does moving into an ECM take?

    It depends almost entirely on how much of the estate has to come with you, and that is the question worth answering before anything is selected. Most estates contain a large share of material that is duplicated, superseded or past any purpose it was kept for, and deciding that before a migration is what separates a project that finishes from one that runs twice as long as it was scoped for.