This column is the personal view of the editor of this Website, Sorab Ghaswalla. This Website may or may not agree with the same.
Internal content, i.e. content that an enterprise generates daily, is the “boring” side of content. Businesses, whatever may be their size, generate volumes of data by way of documents like Word files, Excel sheets, presentations, images and videos; even customer feedback, across functions, forms, formats and channels.
Before the dawn of the World Wide Web, things were easier. Departments physically filed documents, sent them across to other departments when required, or deposited them in a central library, and individuals tasked with their safe-keeping such as a librarian would handle their filing and their retrieval based on library science.
Then, with the digitization of data, it got complicated. Digital files, folders, images and other paraphernalia, structured and unstructured, started to pour into every enterprise, making their retrieval and their use a challenge. This is why and how the enterprise content management (ECM) platform came into being – invention is the mother of necessity, after all.
The growth of enterprise content management systems or ECM was directly linked to the expansion of Information Technology (IT). Till recently, ECM was an IT function in a company. But now things are changing. Today, an ECM is linked to a customer relationship management (CRM) software and similar software for instantaneous and well-informed decision-making throughout the enterprise.
One factor driving this change is the fact that more and more employees are working remotely. This leads to the creation of unsupervised content with almost nil sense of ownership. GDrive and Excel sheets are fine but to a point. But enterprises have started to realize the necessity of getting all the documentation across business functions such as HR, Sales and Marketing consolidated for not only better functioning but also informed decisions, hence the need for an ECM.
Here’s a scenario: A content freelancer in New York working for a Bangalore company emails a slideshow on the positives of biometrics to the content manager located in Atlanta. The latter, in turn, sends in over email with his own notes to the web master, requesting him to upload it. Once published, a lead watches this slideshow and gets in touch with the marketing VP in London for additional information. The latter now has no clue who is behind the original piece of content or why someone in the enterprise had felt the need to develop that slideshow. He perhaps does not even have permission to access the slideshow to begin with.
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