Managing content has become a significant challenge for growing companies. Handling numerous files can become a task for stakeholders as a company expands, often leading to unfavorable outcomes. Effective and efficient records management is essential for businesses to carry out various tasks, which is possible with enterprise content management (ECM).
Using specialized software platforms, ECM gathers, saves, and arranges various forms of unstructured content, including papers and photos. As a result, an ECM solution is necessary to manage material and ultimately support the successful expansion of enterprises.
Importance of enterprise content management solution:
Planning is necessary for an ECM deployment to be successful. Security, compliance, and the content lifecycle inside a company should all be considered by content managers and businesses for deploying ECM solutions.
A well-designed enterprise content management solution can enhance processes, facilitate document findability, and do much more to boost a business’s productivity.
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4 Enterprise Content Management Best Practices for Deployment
The following best practices can facilitate effective deployments, regardless of whether an organization is implementing its first ECM system as part of a digital transformation programme or is migrating from one system to another.
1. Develop a content strategy:
A content plan should be the first step in any ECM implementation. Content managers should decide which ECM features, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, to incorporate into the strategy based on the long-term objectives of their organization.
For the advantage of businesses looking to digitize documents, they can integrate these strategies with initiatives for digital transformation. Electronic records can be created from paper documents by digitization. Digital documents are more accessible to look for, use, and process than paper.
One potential project goal could be to develop a system to collect data about customer contacts or contract expiration dates using artificial intelligence (AI) and optical character recognition to scan paper records. Subsequently, the software can initiate a client engagement or renewal or make that data searchable.
2. Examine the content lifespan:
A business document’s journey through multiple stages, from creation to retirement, is called a content lifecycle. Content managers should look into how an ECM system could optimize workflows and procedures inside an organization’s content lifecycle to determine how they could do so.
Answers to the following questions help make an informed decision –
- Do we need to follow procedures for content authoring and approval?
- Are digital signatures required for documents?
- Does content processing by external apps have to be done before migration?
By asking the above questions, businesses can identify a system most suited to a particular content lifecycle, optimizing document workflows and saving staff time.
3. Integrate security:
Businesses need ECM systems with integrated security features to guard against cybersecurity threats like data breaches since they handle documents containing sensitive information from clients and staff. When formulating an ECM plan, content managers should think about the steps that best safeguard the data within their company.
An organization can utilize configurable settings to enhance content security regardless of whether it keeps material on-site or in cloud environments. Security features, for instance, restrict content access by document or content type, keeping private material out of the hands of too many people. Systems can encrypt data both when it’s moving and not.
4. Put the user experience first:
One way to boost user acceptance is through the user-centric implementation of ECM systems. Content managers need to consider all possible users and ascertain how the new systems and processes would differ from those they were using previously.
Organizations must optimize system performance throughout the early stages of development and deployment. This makes it possible for users to locate pertinent content within the system swiftly. Employees should be able to find the information they need by using the search engine provided by the solution. Even while full-text search makes content discovery more efficient, optimizing synonyms, metadata, and predictive analytics can enhance search performance and outcomes even more.
Conclusion:
ECM is essential for any organization handling large volumes of content to increase accessibility and usability. These best practices benefit enterprises that want to implement improvements in ECM protocols and solutions, significant integration and speed, and improved organizational efficiency. Keeping these factors in mind, businesses can implement an ECM solution that satisfies their particular establishment’s unique workflow, user, security, and compliance requirements.
