While governments, education, and highly regulated industries typically use a form of enterprise content management (ECM). Some organizations don't fall within these parameters but find an enterprise content management strategy helpful. This blog post is for you.
Whether implementing an ECM system for the first time or upgrading to a new system, a knowledge-based organization needs a specific plan to meet program requirements. That management and end user's needs are addressed.
Ultimately, an ECM solution provides your staff with the information and context they need to make informed business decisions.
An enterprise content management strategy is a series of methods, practices, personnel, and technologies that form an organization's approach to storing, centralizing, managing, and sharing its information assets, including documents, records, data, video, auto, and other information assets. Laserfiche is a tech tool that enables digitization, creation, collaboration, review, publishing, search, and retrieval, regardless of the information source or original format.
Typically, an ECM strategy addresses:
Digitizing data from paper documents- If you are paying for paper storage, you don't need to anymore. And because ECM includes automation, you can cut your manual data entry time in half.
Capturing data from electronic documents- We mentioned this above, but the ROI on halving your manual data entry is very high.
Search and retrieval- It's advantageous to be able to find information when you need it. For example, when the auditors show up, you can fulfill their requirements quickly and easily.
Lifecycle management- Another term for lifecycle management is records management. Records management (RM) is the supervision and administration of digital or paper records, regardless of format. Records management activities include the creation, receipt, maintenance, use, and disposal of records. In this context, a record is content that documents a business transaction. Documentation may exist in contracts, memos, paper files, electronic files, reports, emails, videos, instant message logs, or structured data in business systems. Paper records may be stored in physical boxes on-premises or at a storage facility. Digital documents may be stored on storage media in-house, in the cloud, or in a trusted system. Trust me; if you've ever been involved in litigation, you'll be happy that you have a records management practice.
Security- Security offered by free systems isn't robust enough. Hackers are more dangerous than ever. Additionally, many security breaches come from within the organization, so having security down to the word level comes in handy. Here's a piece we wrote about Google's security.
Organizations need ECM strategies because of the proliferation of information stored in disparate forms and locations—photos and texts on smartphones and connected devices, Slack and emails on work PCs, spreadsheets and documents in the cloud, etc.—makes consolidation and just plain managing all that content a priority.
