Enterprise Content Management (ECM) at WORK

What is ECM? Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the technologies used to create, capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.  An Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tool and strategy allows the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.  

Cornerstone Communications’ proven Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, Unifier, was designed to manage an organization’s unstructured information.  Unifier is a cradle to grave solution.  It focuses on the creation, capture, collaboration, distribution, management and storage of an organization’s unstructured information. 

Compliance  

The key to a successful compliance strategy is integrating the idea of compliance success into your business—not viewing compliance as a project that can be completed and then considered “finished.”  While painful, complying with regulations should be viewed as an opportunity to improve common business processes and not just an ongoing cost to the business.

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To help limit the risk and cost, proactive ECM strategies must be developed within key areas, such as records management and business process management.  Cornerstone's Content Management (ECM) Consulting services ensure that the proper business practices are followed and that content is properly captured, stored, managed, and disposed of at the appropriate and legal time in its lifecycle.

Developing a compliance initiative properly will tap many areas of expertise, particularly legal, IT, and records management; all in support of the overall business objectives of the organization.  Individuals from each of these areas must contribute their knowledge and perspectives to ensure the benefits of a sound compliance program. 

Cornerstone Communications’ proven Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system, Unifier, was designed to enable organizations to comply with the rapidly changing world of corporate governance.  Regulatory strategies   far to often rely on human intervention as a key component for regulatory compliance.  Each point of contact can be considered a potential point of failure.  To minimize these risks, Unifier provides a robust document audit trail.  Every time a document is touched an electronic fingerprint is recorded pointing back to every action taken with that document.

Cost  

While content management (ECM) can be a costly initiative, what are the costs of not properly managing your content?  The cost of not implementing an enterprise content management (ECM) system is too often left unmeasured until too late.  Things like the cost of long legal proceedings, the loss of repeat business through the inability to perform simple customer service interactions, and the cost of typical business process delays are easy to measure after the fact—lawyers’ time, the cost to acquire new customers, and the FTE salaries. 

Understanding the cost of these potential losses will allow you to see that ECM investments have valuable benefits that often can be measured, but not always.  The key is to set your key metrics for success up front and measure your success based on those expectations.  Measuring the revenue based on the improved information in the call center can be done as well as measuring the cost benefits of improvements in the process speed for a loan application, claim process, or FDA drug approval (just to name a few).  The improvements will not always show on the final balance sheet but they are out there.  

While identifying a direct ROI can be difficult, it is not impossible to see the impacts of the improved process efficiency on the business.  Content management consulting (ECM) and tools can make your organization more efficient and drive down the cost of doing business.  These technologies provide value to your organization by more efficiently organized use, and ultimately, disposition.  Plus, as these tools are used by more organizations, it becomes part of how you work.  What’s the ROI on a telephone? Yet you wouldn’t think of doing business without one, would you?  

Cornerstone Communications specializes in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consulting and cost reduction strategies.   Prior to any engagement, a prospect would go through a transactional document assessment.  This content management tool would provide a side-by-side comparison or a “blue print” of how to move from a manually intensive document process to an automated electronic process.  Cornerstone Communications’ transactional document assessment is summarized by an Executive Overview, which contains an annualized hard and soft cost figure and a Return on Investment for a proven strategy.  

Continuity 

Keeping a business going 24X7 is a task of business continuity planning.  While often mentioned with disaster recovery, business continuity planning is the overall strategy for ensuring that operations continue in the event of any disruption—natural or man-made.  Disaster recovery is more narrowly focused on getting an organization’s IT infrastructure going again, a subset of business continuity.   Because the lifeblood of most businesses today is represented by electronic documents, a content management (ECM) system has a key role to play in continuity.  After all, without access to the most vital electronic documents, a business is dead in the water. 

ECM technologies allow the creation of centralized repositories where all vital corporate information can reside.  The method of storage will vary depending on how critical the content is to the company –from off-site back up tapes to redundant, mirrored sites separated by geography and on different power grids.  A strong continuity plan will show you that not all content is critical, companies must prioritize their content to determine how quickly content needs to be back online in the event of disaster.  Business continuity begins with a sound plan and high-level executive support.  Next, mission-critical processes and the entities on which they are dependent must be determined, followed by a business impact assessment to determine the impact of a disruption, or losing, those processes.  Defining what a business considers a disaster and explaining how key processes will be recovered are the next steps in the plan.  A crisis operations center should also be established with procedures for chain of command and other roles.  Finally, don’t forget to update and test the plan annually or as business needs change. 

Effectively delivering on a continuity plan will enhance your ability not only to recover during a system failure but will enable you to better define the priority of your business content and improve your overall content management strategy.

Cornerstone Communications specializes in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and cost reduction strategies.  Unifier, Cornerstone Communications, flagship strategy is flexible enough to comply with any type of continuity plan.  These plans can range from Enterprise operations being back up and running in a of couple days as with a simple tape back strategy ascending to zero down time accomplished with a mirrored solution either  hosted or deployed.  Cornerstone Communications gives any enterprise the security of knowing that they will always be able to access their mission critical documents. 

Collaboration 

Collaboration is the art of working together.  The key to strong collaboration is utilizing the set of technologies - instant messaging, whiteboards, online meetings, email, etc. - that allow work to take place wherever and whenever needed.  It's good business; groups can accomplish more than individuals.  Collaboration allows individuals with complementary, or overlapping, areas of expertise to create better results faster than before.  With today's collaborative tools, business units and teams can work together anytime - whether in adjoining offices or a world apart.  The technology can now address operational objectives like saving time, streamlining processes, cutting costs, and improving time to market.

With the many different types of collaborative tools available, companies must be sure they select the correct content management (ECM) system for their business need.

Functionality can be broadly grouped into: 

    1) communication channel facilitation, which enables short-lived interaction such as chat, instant messaging, white boarding, etc.; 

    2) content lifecycle management, which manages content objects involved in a business process; and, 

    3) project facilitation, which organizes and simplifies the way that people work toward a common goal. 

However, there is a catch with collaboration.  When using collaborative content tools, you must be aware of records management, knowledge capture, and compliance requirements.  For some industries, all customer communications must be kept.  And, for a collaborative product design process, companies must be sure that the results are kept as business records. 

Cornerstone Communications’ proven Enterprise Content Management (ECM) tool, Unifier, provides the ability to see documents from anywhere in the world.  Teams from across the globe can collaborate on the same documents as everyone else in the company.  Not only are employees enabled to work on vital documents, but through secure access grants, your customers, prospects, and vendors are empowered to work with specific documents, as well.  More than one individual can search, view, chat about a particular document simultaneously.

Unifier’s rules bases routing, or Workflow, can enhance the above free-form collaboration.  Workflow ensures that all critical steps to a business process are completed in a timely fashion.  The collaboration of a document is completely monitored by Unifier’s content lifecycle management (ECM) tools.

Click here for direct answers regarding how content management (ECM) consulting and tools can dramatically improve your company's system and cost of doing busineess.

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