Organisations in today's dynamic business environment are always striving to integrate more and more relevant information into their business processes to make the right decisions at the right time.

With the race in time, organisations are also looking at enabling their employees to search, retrieve and review required information, and are also looking at reducing costs, while improving their customer service; and become more agile and competitive.

Today, every company is looking at drawing a fine line between having all the required information and making the right decision that satisfies customers, partners, suppliers and shareholders.
Content today is considered a corporate information asset that adds value to business operations, while improving the organisation's effectiveness and productivity.

The volume of content and the ways in which it can be leveraged is accelerating faster than before. Business Process Management (BPM) is widely accepted as a critical component of ECM to facilitate and manage content.

When content continues to grow exponentially, organisations find it harder to effectively manage the volume.  Add to this, the explosion of casually-created, contributed and consumed content.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the gamut of strategies, methods and tools that can be used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organisational processes.

ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organisation's unstructured information, wherever it exists. To gain more control, corporate entities are thinking of simplifying their infrastructure, reducing the ownership cost and finding ways to leverage content and drive the business processes more effectively.

This has led to the growth of ECM and IBM, the global IT behemoth, has taken the lead in offering ECM services to its clients.

IBM's Enterprise Content Management improves the effectiveness of work force by enabling organisations to transform their business processes and has also helped clients manage and deliver all forms of content anywhere, at any time, in the right context.

IBM, combined with FileNet, now has the broadest portfolio and the greatest expertise in the ECM market. According to Gartner, "IBM is now the largest content management vendor in terms of overall market share (based on software license and maintenance revenue) at approximately 25 per cent."
Before implementing ECM, an organisation will have to develop a strategy. When a true ECM strategy is developed, it becomes part of the company's strategic plan for sustainability, cost management, and competitive advantage.

While planning a strategy, organisations try to understand the kind of information that is created and stored, and check for duplication, so that the effort is not wasted.

Identifying what and where information exists and also understanding user requirements help a business create relevant documents.

Once this task is accomplished, risk assessment is conducted to know the biggest pain point of the organisation. The organisation also develops a set of legal procedures and policies, and most of the time; they are made available both online and on paper.

While deriving a strategy, the area of business plays a vital role. This is important as the investors would be interested to know whether they are on the right track and if their investment would get them a quick returns/Return on Investment (ROI).

With an effective ECM strategy in terms of area of business, policies, procedures and guidelines, an organisation can be very successful.

A good ECM implementation not only brings cost and business benefits, but also helps an organisation streamline its processes in the most productive way.