The future of business process is the future of ECM

Enterprise Content Management is hot right now. And for good reason.

As more and more companies realize they have to pay greater attention to information management, security and compliance of data, the realm of IIM is poised for exponential growth. Legacy paper-based systems provide limited value and clearly do not meet the stringent security requirements necessary in today’s workplace.

As ECM continues to develop, users are looking for solutions beyond the traditional offerings of scanning, tracking, converting and storing. Users will demand a fluid interactive experience with access via mobile and cloud to keep pace with the speed required to compete in today’s economy. The access of data in meaningful ways can be a competitive advantage across multiple business domains such as sales, marketing and finance.

Most companies adopted ECM for one of two reasons. The first was compliance. Industries including healthcare and legal are bound by a raft of restrictions and regulations from record management and archiving to information governance. ECM bundles solutions to all of those requirements so that companies can achieve compliance while enhancing security. The second reason was corporate functionality. Thanks to ECM, a company’s growing document workload could be easily captured and distributed in any form, from print to electronic. Employees could move information faster, whether it was converting file formats, automatically routing emails or basic scan and share. Collaboration, regardless of location, was facilitated.

Now, a third reason is entering the mix: business process management. In other words, ECM is becoming integral to the entire business process, whether it is customer relationship management, supply chain management or enterprise resource planning. This is an exciting step forward. Building ECM to handle a company’s entire business process connects all of the individual applications together. This, in turn, creates a holistic integration that goes deep into the user experience.

This “deep content” approach drills down to give us insight into workflow and processes, and even lines of business. Overlaying ECM across the entire business model allows integration at not only a user level, but also at the roles and permissions levels.

A deep dive to map the entire spectrum of the enterprise will shed light on how lines of business operate and connect, how the user experiences content and even what the very nature of that content is.

This, in turn, allows a company to take stock of its entire organization and make adjustments necessary to ensure survival, growth and prosperity.

The future of business process is the future of ECM.