What is enterprise content management (ECM)?

Enterprise content management (ECM) has been a major part of corporate technology architecture for over a decade. Traditionally, it was described as a set of processes,…

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Alison Clarke

June 13, 20237 minutes read

A decorative image to illustrate how modern enterprise content management works on any device, from anywhere

Enterprise content management (ECM) has been a major part of corporate technology architecture for over a decade. Traditionally, it was described as a set of processes, strategies, and tools that allow an enterprise to capture, manage, store and preserve content throughout the organization. But enterprise needs and enterprise content management solutions alike have changed radically in the last few years.

Today, information sharing and collaboration with colleagues, customers, suppliers, and other trading partners is an essential part of business. To meet the demands of global enterprises with distributed, digital workforces, ECM has morphed into content services.

What are the benefits of an enterprise content management solution?

Growing out of the document management systems of the 1990s, enterprise content management software was designed to bring an enterprise layer to the automation of core back-end, document-focused processes.

It endeavored to create a repository—a single source of truth—where content could be stored, managed, searched and retrieved. It provided new levels of information control and governance that hadn’t been previously possible.

These solutions were incredibly powerful in document and records management. As more and more content—in both structured and unstructured formats—was created, the best ECM software ensured it was all searchable and accessible for users, auditors and compliance.

So why, with so many important business functions, have so many implementations remained under-utilized? Because the focus of ECM solutions was originally on the technology rather than the business processes and the people using it. Organizations were more interested in getting control of their content than enabling what their people could do with it.

This led to systems that were excellent at capturing, storing and managing content but were difficult to use and labor-intensive for the end-user—often requiring them to change their work processes to accommodate the system.

This resulted in users often resisting the move to ECM and continuing to work as they had before. They persisted in saving their content to hard drives and file shares, only passing content to the ECM software when their task was completed.

The ECM system became primarily a system of record—which was great for control and governance of official business records—while isolated silos of information spread throughout the organization as users created new content in their preferred systems.

ECM software forced the user to come to the content and, to be effective, ECM needed to bring the content to them.

What are the capabilities of an enterprise content management system?

The move to content services gives organizations a new way of connecting content to their digital business. It delivers tools, techniques and strategies to empower end-users by making it much easier to work with, share and collaborate on content.

It gives them access to the right content within the applications they’re most comfortable with. At the same time, it builds on control and governance functionalities to enable secure information-sharing and collaboration across the enterprise and with external partners.

Organizations need decentralized, purpose-built, lightweight applications that are easy and effective to implement and use. Content services solutions that help achieve this include:  

  • Breadth of capabilities to master content management, capture, archiving, document generation and more.
  • Deep, out-of-the-box integrations with the lead applications teams are working in every day—like SAP, Salesforce, SuccessFactors and Microsoft—to minimize the need for application switching and deliver information when and where it’s needed.
  • Automatic and embedded information governance, including records management, archiving and eDiscovery.
  • Employee experiences with responsive, role-based access; anywhere on any device.
  • Scalability to process as many objects per day as required (potentially into the millions), always securely.
  • Flexibility to run the solution anywhere—on-premises, private cloud, hyperscaler (e.g. Google Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure), public cloud SaaS or extend and integrate with cloud APIs.

Why do you need enterprise content management software?

Organizations still need the core functionality that ECM software has always provided. It’s less about ripping and replacing and more about building new content services upon the foundations that most organizations have established with their ECM solutions—creating a content services platform.

According to Gartner®, ECM is used to create, store, distribute, discover, archive and manage unstructured content (such as scanned documents, email, reports, medical images and office documents) and ultimately analyze usage to enable organizations to deliver relevant content to users where and when they need it.

A content services platform takes ECM a step further.

Where ECM was once about establishing strict control over the user of content, a content services platform’s primary role is to provide users with the content they need, in the format they want, at the time they need it and on the device they’re using.

It allows for flexible deployment on-premises, hosted, or SaaS, and provides advanced analytics to drive insight and action based on all the data within your content.

What are content services and how do they relate to traditional enterprise content management?

The initial concept behind enterprise content management software is that content created within an organization is its most valuable asset and as such, must be managed throughout its lifecycle so it can be effectively accessed and used. The best ECM tools were developed with this in mind.

The traditional approach to ECM required organizations to make large investments in enterprise content management systems that were often unwieldy and complex. In many cases, this resulted in slow end-user adoption and sophisticated features that went under-used.

Today’s digital knowledge workers want access to content—anytime, anywhere, and it needs to be in a format that’s easy to work with and available within their application of choice. This way, content can be the fuel that drives business processes, not just a corporate asset to be controlled and protected.

Content services provide a new approach to enterprise content management where ECM functionality is extended into the lead applications—in the form of microservices—that people use every day, while a content services platform works in the background to provide the same level of control, security, and compliance that has long been a hallmark of ECM solutions.

Why choose OpenText as your enterprise content management provider?

OpenText has been a leader in enterprise content management for more than 20 years—delivering the best on-premises and cloud-based ECM solutions—and is the first organization to fully embrace the transition from ECM software to content services.

Here are three reasons to choose OpenText as your enterprise content management provider:

  • Number one in the market: thousands of organizations trust OpenText content management solutions for their enterprise-grade capabilities, industry-leading records management, data capture, viewing, transformation and enterprise content sharing. OpenText offers a breadth of Information Management and content services solutions to meet all enterprise requirements.
  • Industry-leading integrations: organizations need a digital workplace that enables frictionless information flows and improves process management. Integrate with SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft and other leading applications and seamlessly embed OpenText content services and content collaboration solutions to minimize application switching and boost user productivity.
  • Future in cloud: OpenText offers the flexibility to choose from all deployment options, whether private, public or hybrid cloud, multi-tenant SaaS or on-premises. Organizations can future-proof their operations by leveraging a robust roadmap and quarterly, innovative feature enhancements.

Learn more about how we can help.


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Alison Clarke

Alison is Director, Product Marketing for OpenText Content Suite and Extended ECM. Alison and her team are passionate about helping organizations use content services technologies to distill more value from information, supporting the needs of individuals and teams to improve productivity and strengthen information governance for the organization with content services-enabled solutions.

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