Putting ECM to work

At a time when many IT-related investments have cooled off because of the economic downturn, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) keeps getting hotter. Logica’s Fredrik Ring explains why.

“Closer ties will be forged with business partners and customers through inserting them in your company structure”
-Fredrik Ring

At the moment ECM is one of the fastest growing segments within Enterprise Applications in the company. The quantity of emails and documents is growing so rapidly the information flow risks collapsing from a heart attack. Far too much time is spent locating the right information. The information mountain has existed for a long time but the situation is now so critical that it is crucial for the business to rectify the situation. Another reason is companies' requirements for greater efficiency. Fewer staff must achieve the same or better. Then we have the transfer of competence as older employees retire and the younger generation takes over.

Amongst other things, ECM is about greater automation and efficiency in processes where people handle unstructured information; in some branches a very large proportion of the issues can be handled automatically. It is also about tasks such as finding documents easily, traceability of documents, collaboration and enabling customers to help themselves – thereby reducing the company's costs.

Customer activity

There is a lot of talk about customers becoming more and more active in companies' work and the internet makes this possible. We have the classic example of internet banks where customers do almost all the work themselves. What we see now and elsewhere is how social networks are growing in significance and are strengthening companies' brands. The more customers interact; the more loyalty increases. For example, networks are being created where customers help one another – by Twitter and Facebook or via Wikis. You can even allow customers to have blogs in the company's name. We help companies to build up these types of networks.

We also feel that ECM can help the financial sector, taking into mind that the current financial crisis was partly triggered by unregulated financial activity, ECM can help to restore faith in the industry through document handling that proves that regulations are being followed and which enables traceability of who took which decision, when and why. Furthermore, the financial sector has a lot to gain from ECM purely through gaining greater efficiency.

ECM can lower costs through automation and processes but how does this work with new forms of business partnerships and collaboration? It's clear that collaboration is becoming ever more important; at its core is the sharing of information sensibly. This could be via blogs, thorough sharing documents and unstructured information handled via collaborative tools, which saves travelling time and money.

Cost savings

Companies can save money by making their ECM more efficient from a technical viewpoint. A case in point is that one of our customers has 250 different websites due to be consolidated into one website with one operating unit, which will result in a significant cost reduction and one satisfied customer. Another common problem is when companies find themselves with many different applications in different countries or departments and the information is locked in like an island. This can be case handling systems for marketing, for human resources or for product information – but collaboration is impossible as different departments have different ECM systems. One common platform will pay dividends in such cases. Other ways of reducing costs are through allowing the supplier to provide infrastructure, software and operation – known as Software as a Service (SaaS) – and via blended delivery, when the supplier provides an offshore-organisation with a lower price. 

What are the long-term prospects of ECM? A first step is creating structure and information order and that paves way for more collaboration, compliance, automation, accessibility, greater efficiency and so on. Also long term, I see a trend where closer ties will be forged with business partners and customers through inserting them in your company structure in extended digital enterprises.

Fredrik Ring has worked as an advisor, analyst and project manager in major ECM-related IT projects since the early 1990s. He is currently in charge of ECM in the Logica Group who have 2000 consultants and a number of larger business partners within ECM.