The nature of ECM or enterprise content management is – as the name reveals – to make data once worked on accessible to future projects in order for the organization to save money. At least if they’re not being misused for communication purposes dedicated to reaching out to the customers. There are better solutions out there for that.

One of the primary advantages should be that the access to information is easier than it would have been on paper.

While this proves to be true from a decentralization aspect and that the data is accessible even in the most remote branch office, a lot of organizations don’t or hardly dedicate time and budget on installing sufficient search servers in the system which make finding the information, once it’s been archived, easier or possible in the first place.

Another problem is presented to organizations through the lack of understanding by their team, who simply don’t acknowledge that value of adding search words when archiving the documents or – if forced to do so by the systems setup – will enter no more than rubbish just to get rid of the error message.

As to many problems I’m confronted with in my work there is no one-size-fits-all-solution out there; especially in context to the factor of human failure I’ve outlined above each situation is unique, as is the organization I work with.

However, some general advice would be that upon deployment of an ECM platform make sure that you’ve checked with the vendor and maybe with someone that knows their stuff around search engines (not necessarily your IT-staff) that the search engines included in the ECM are good enough to meet your needs.

Another important factor would be whether documents (PDF, Word files, etc.) can be search natively by the system and actually show up in search results. The alternative would be to mark the documents with keywords upon uploading them which bears the risk of employees not taking this seriously or important words not being included thus making the whole effort invested obsolete.

I’m thinking of dedicating a whole white paper to the whole corporate intellectual property management section in the future.

Let me know whether there is raised interest on this issue.

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Furthermore, there are issues like the fluctuation in personnel. Employing someone today may very well result in a headhunter standing in your door and draging this valuable resource out of your company within months, leaving the company with a painful loss. If this organization had a proper knowledge management system installed and encouraged their employees to document what they do etc., the loss would not have been as tremendous.

These are just some of the examples that go along with Enterprise 2.0, not to mention issues like CRM, corporate, internal and external blogging, etc.

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