Enterprise Content Management Systems Cross Departmental And Operational Boundaries
What is content? What does content management involve? And what is special about enterprise content management? This introductory article will seek to answer these questions.
In today’s context, content means digital information. This information typically resides in text documents, audio or video files and other kinds of digital files. Digital information is easier to manage compared to paper-based information (even though it is vulnerable to its own special kinds of risks).
Content management involves managing the different stages in the lifecycle of content. The lifecycle stages of content are Creation, Updating, Publication, Translation, Archiving and Destruction.
Capturing data in an electronic form creates content. This could be through direct entry of relevant details at the time of a transaction or through transcription from original paper-based transaction documents into data entry forms.
In some cases, such as contracts, the paper documents are converted directly into a digital form through electronic scanning, and then made into an editable text-document with the help of Optical Character Recognition – OCR – technology.
The major management task in creation of content is ensuring that only authorized persons can do it, and they can do it in a convenient manner, with a minimum of cost to the organization.
Created information often needs to be edited or updated in the course of the business. This is the second lifecycle stage. Managing this stage involves restricting access and edit rights to authorized persons, and making the tasks of retrieval of the original document, its updating, and saving the updated version, convenient and easy.
