Strategy development for enterprise content management

Many organizations maintain a variety of systems and databases in a complex ad-hoc information infrastructure that does not fulfill the need for company-wide unstructured information management in business processes, business functions, and the extended enterprise. We present a framework and a method for implementing enterprise content management (ECM) in order to address this problem. Framework and method help to select content objects that can be brought under ECM to create business value and guide the IT investments needed to realize ECM. Framework and method were tested in a large high-tech organization that runs four key business processes and a very large set of unstructured content. Application of the framework and the method resulted in the identification of twenty core content objects and 100 content features that were well accepted by the thirty managers involved in two key business processes.