How Do Organizations Drive Actionable Insight from Complexity?

By Matt Forcey

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a term you may have heard before.  ECM, simply put, is a set of software tools that help us, as knowledge workers, manage our intellectual capital and use it to empower our business processes to achieve our goals.  You know, little things like creating internal process efficiencies and new revenue channels.

For most, your company’s intellectual property is a very important asset.  For some, your IP is your product.  You are in the business of providing information.  For others, like equipment manufacturers for instance, your IP supports your product or service through engineering, marketing, and customer service.

Understanding that IP is a core asset of our organizations creates some questions:

• Like, how do we capitalize on the knowledge that lies within our organization? And how do we drive insight from the complexity that surrounds it?
• How do we best communicate our information, our products, and our services to our customers and partners?  Speaking of customers and partners, they’re a pretty good source of information that most companies don’t do a very good job of mining.  How do we get them into the mix?
• Internally, how do we ensure we are keeping up with the latest industry regulations as well as the work styles of our new employees? 

So, let’s take a step back now and ask ourselves, what business processes exist to help us define our strategy for addressing all these questions?  And, what tools exist to help us integrate and manage these business processes?

The technology set that has grown up over the past 15 years or so, to address these business challenges, is called Enterprise Content Management. 

AIIM, the Enterprise Content Management Association (www.aiim.org) defines ECM as “the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.”  While there are a number of software companies that supply ECM technology (although nowhere near the number that there were just five years ago - we’ll talk more about industry consolidation at another time) let’s look at one solution that has been quite the center of attention as of late.

Over the past few years, Microsoft’s number one selling product has been an ECM system called SharePoint, in fact, it’s the fastest selling product in Microsoft history.  Its popularity seems to be based on:

1. More and more companies are understanding and embracing the value of their Intellectual Property, and see ECM giving them a competitive advantage.
2. Companies are moving away from the challenges and complexities of true “enterprise solution implementations”, and focusing on addressing business challenges at the departmental or line-of-business level. 
3. Through some key acquisitions and a lot of great coding, Microsoft has created a unified set of tools that address the needs of the marketplace, at a very attractive price point.  Anyone who knows Microsoft understands that this model is what makes Microsoft so successful.  Taking high end, complex technology and making it easily accessible from a user interface standpoint and from a cost perspective.   
4. And, because this is Microsoft, SharePoint not only provides a toolset that address the same workloads as most other competitive technologies, but enables fairly seamless integration with the business productivity tools that we all use every day (MS Word, Outlook, Excel, Visio, etc). 

SharePoint provides a content management and business collaboration platform for both the enterprise and the Internet.

For scenarios in which people need to interact with other people, with content and information, or with line-of-business data, SharePoint provides a comprehensive set of integrated capabilities that can be customized to address specific business needs and integrated with other products and solutions. 

SharePoint enables the interaction with employees, customers and business partners by using a like set of capabilities and tools, and can be deployed both inside the firewall (for things like intranets… the collaboration and sharing between employees) and outside of the firewall (think customer extranets, Internet sites, perhaps an online document store).

The consolidation of solutions (document management, collaboration, web content management, BI, social media) onto one system should make it possible to cut costs through lower training dollars, increased IT productivity, and cost effective maintenance… all within a governable and compliant platform.

Now, the full spectrum of functionality and business value contained within SharePoint is immense, and a detailed accounting of each feature is well beyond the scope of this article and, honestly, of most readers attention span.  I would like to provide you though, with an overview of the key functional areas of Microsoft SharePoint 2010, and will do just that in my next post.  In the meantime, if you want to take a deeper dive, you can visit http://sharepoint.microsoft.com