Business Context: A Better Way To Define An ECM Strategy

Defining and executing an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy can be frustrating. Tangible needs such as IT cost reduction, system and server consolidation, and keeping the enterprise out of hot water from the mismanagement of content, drive most strategies. Yet information and knowledge managers often describe their ECM initiatives as too costly, poorly adopted, or just unused. The missing piece and root cause of most ECM woes is a lack of understanding of business context — how people and business processes use content. And therein lies the challenge: How can you determine the business context for all of the unstructured information within your organization? Forrester developed a framework, based on interviews and work with dozens of enterprises and systems integrators, to help build better ECM strategies based on business context. Use this framework to improve current ECM initiatives or to redefine your ECM strategies.