Nearly all knowledge management projects involve Enterprise Content Management systems at some level—they represent a core platform for content creation, sharing, and administration. The importance comes from the fact that ECM is most often the best way to integrate all the various content sources within the company. Getting a handle on ECM first involves identifying all the processes within the enterprise where content is created, edited, stored, and distributed. Below the enterprise level, there is a need for group, division, business unit, and department-level content management solutions to address specific business requirements.
The five main components of any ECM system are capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver. Each of these can be broken into separate components or can be used in any combination, depending upon the needs of the company. Many ECMs focus on one or two of these more considerably than the others, but each has a bit of each of these parts. The capture component involves converting information from paper documents into an electronic format through scanning. The management component involves document, records, web content and collaboration management. Store components temporarily store information that isn't required, desired, or ready for long-term storage. Preservation involves the long-term, safe storage, destruction of documents based on time-frames and backup of static unchanging information. The deliver components of ECM presents information from manage, store, and preserve components; the component can be in the form of visualization, or a Portal tool.
Content management systems support key business processes and functions, such as helping market and sell products and services, supporting existing customers, supporting sales channels, and helping educate customers, employees, and business partners. Iknow’s experience as business leaders helps us to create the business cases that justify the overarching investments in content management. These investments lower content processing costs, shorten business process cycle times, create higher quality outputs, and increase collaboration and sharing. Iknow has the experience optimizing the process of capturing, storing, finding, and reusing an organization's intellectual assets and by automating the content formatting and publication process to multiple delivery channels, including print, web, cell phones, handheld tablets and wireless devices, and syndication (RSS).
Iknow has experience in all aspects of Enterprise Content Management systems from initial requirements gathering, to the design and implementation of the software. For each company, the use of content management will be different, whether it tends towards document management, records management, digital asset management, or, more likely, some combination. Iknow takes into account the balance of where and in what in form the company has the information.
Product Landscape
The enterprise content management product landscape is complex and includes the following products. Iknow can help you evaluate and select the right software product to help you achieve your business objectives.