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Electronic content is accumulating in organizations at a dizzying pace. Consider the volume of documents, e-mail messages, Web-based information and multimedia content in use at a typical large company.

How an organization manages all this content — or fails to manage it — can have a significant impact on business processes, customer service, performance in the market and corporate risk. It can also have regulatory compliance implications, as many of the regulations govern how information and records are stored and accessed.

Many companies are turning to enterprise content management (ECM) software to help them control content throughout the organization. ECM products are used to manage, store and provide access to all manner of digital content. Some products have features such as e-mail management, Web content management, search capabilities, records management and content integration.

“The growth in unstructured content and organizations' difficulty in managing unstructured content is what is driving the growth of the ECM market,” says Michael Knight, vice president of Unbounded Solutions, a consulting company focused on ECM. “ As more means of distributing unstructured data, such as instant messaging, blogs and wikis, continue to gain acceptance, unstructured data will continue growing. Additionally, organizations will continue to invest in ECM for compliance and records-management purposes.”

The worldwide ECM software market is expected to grow more than 12 percent per year through 2010, from $2.6 billion in 2006 to more than $4.2 billion in 2010, according to a report from research firm Gartner Inc. In 2007, worldwide ECM revenue is projected to total $2.9 billion, up 13 percent from 2006.

One of the key benefits of ECM applications is that they give organizations centralized management of company content. The technology also enables organizations to ensure that content is accurate and up to date.

ECM gives organizations the ability to more easily reuse content; enables users to search for the specific content they need, leading to productivity improvements; reduces corporate risk by providing security; and decreases costs by reducing errors in data content and access. Among the more popular recent drivers is the fact that ECM can help organizations establish better controls for regulatory compliance.

Vendors that provide ECM products include Documentum, Open Text, Interwoven, IBM (through its acquisition of FileNet), Oracle (through its acquisition of Stellent) and Microsoft. Also available are a variety of open source ECM products.

Organizations that are considering an ECM implementation should create a team to plan and oversee its deployment and track the performance of the technology over time. In addition to IT management and senior business executives, the team should include people who understand the technology and how the content will be used, as well as some end users who can have input on features and ease of use.

One of the roles of this group is to develop an ECM strategy that outlines what the organization hopes to accomplish with ECM, what technology will be used, how access to content will be provided, what security provisions will be needed, how return on investment will be measured, and other issues.

An organization considering an enterprise rollout “needs to treat the ECM deployment in ways similar to other enterprise software deployments,” Knight says. “The implementation process is typically very complex, and without commitment throughout the organization, milestones can be missed and timelines will grow. Also, management should continue to reinforce the importance of using the ECM application over time to ensure that the company is realizing the benefits that the application provides.”

Expect the growth of ECM to continue, especially as enterprises adopt technologies — such as business intelligence, radio frequency identification and Web-based collaboration tools — that add to their information stores and expand their business into global markets.

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