The Magic of Enterprise Content Management

On a Tuesday morning in April, I was wrapping up a presentation on new technology. Of about two dozen middle and senior managers, one spoke up. She said the five words IT professionals love to hear.

“When can we have this?”, Louise asked.

This particular session started with a question I’d asked of presentation attendees before, and numerous times since: Have you, yourself, ever created a document and at some point in the future you could not find it?

From Board Members to individual contributors, not once has someone said they always find their documents without any difficulty. And if we have trouble finding our own stuff, how poor are the odds that we can reliably find the wealth of helpful information our peers create?

What was the “this” that Louise wanted so quickly?

Enterprise Content Management (or ECM) is a bit art, and a bit science. It blends a process-based approach to storing documents with the power of a modern, organization-spanning search system. If you have ever used Amazon to buy something and enjoyed the product filter feature (such as to find bookends made of wood that cost less than $35, for example), you have benefited from a prime showcase of this powerful technology. Well-implemented ECM empowers you to do things like search for "vacation" and refine search results by only policy documents.

You may already own a platform that offers this solution to you and your colleagues. For example, Microsoft SharePoint is a leader in this space, and it is already included in many flavors of Office 365. Explore ECM. Leverage your existing investment in SharePoint, if you are fortunate to already own it. And start seeking and consistently finding the value in your company’s organizational knowledge.?