Why Enterprise Content Management is your Guide to a Rejuvenated Content Strategy

As any business expands, the volume of processes, workflows, and information increases. This is especially true at the enterprise level. Once your company has thousands of employees working together in different locations, sharing critical information becomes a top priority. With so much content being shared in several different ways — collaboration and productivity become tough to handle.

If this seems similar to your situation, you need the right solution: Enterprise Content Management.

Introduction: Enterprise Content Management System

Enterprise content management system (ECM) is a platform solution that can collect, organize, and share content at the enterprise level. These contents are located in a single source system known as an ECM. The content can be accessed and distributed across various multichannel within the company.

An ECM helps reduce the time and effort you spend on handling unstructured data by storing everything in one place. This way, anyone from the company can find the information whenever they need to. With the correct ECM, your teams will work more productively and efficiently.

Why Do You Need Enterprise Content Management?

Content is the ultimate currency that fuels digital transformation. It consists of information about the customers and their sentiments and behaviors towards the company. Content stored in repositories and cloud folders across the enterprise showcases the collective knowledge of the company.

As it grows exponentially, companies are taking concrete steps to optimize their processes regarding content services. Now, more than ever, ECM has become a crucial component for any brand's digital journey.

The American media giant National Geographic Channel's online portals are spread across 133 countries in 20+ languages. Nat Geo hosts a wide range of educational content focusing on the life sciences, biology, and nature-centric topics. Over the period, Nat Geo wanted to build a repository to handle all the global assets across different continents.

They were seeking an effective way to make it possible for their multicultural audience. Icreon helped Nat Geo build a dynamic and highly searchable enterprise content management designed as a focused storage facility for all departments to share critical assets. This ECM helped in finding data for easy data retrieval while allowing seamless integration for several web applications.

Across multiple industries, enterprise content management solutions are helping day-to-day processes while decreasing overhead. They play a critical role in removing irrelevant content, which also includes outdated information or duplicate files.

How Does ECM Help Businesses?

For enterprises, as the content itself is a lot, thus poor handling might become an issue. To address such challenges, enterprise content management can significantly help! An ECM can help enterprises in –

1. Reducing the Risk of Poor Communication - ECM provides you the way to remove ad hoc processes that can cause regulatory compliance risk, minimized productivity or missed opportunity. It's a great tool to break through information bottlenecks.
2. Decreasing the Extra Costs - A good ECM solution reduces the storage costs and enables you to store what you need and eliminate what you don't. Not only this, ECM decreases the operating costs by offering improved workflows, decision-making processes, efficiencies, and seizing opportunities at the right time.
3. Saving Time While Boosting Productivity - The more information you receive, the more time-consuming it gets to keep track of them. In case your data isn't well-organized , it gets difficult to analyze it properly without a good management tool. ECM solutions help streamline the entire process by organizing the documents efficiently and making it easier to find them all to save your time.
4. Easier Content Governance - The rising tide of digital innovation and transformation trends often results in increased digital information for enterprises. Thus, the issue of poor management arises. Enterprises might struggle to separate sensitive assets and public documents. In such cases, the use of an ECM system enables more accessible governance of documents as it includes automation, assigning, and sensitive labeling of documents features.
5. Acting as a Repository for Digital Information - An ECM system also acts as a repository for organizations to store sensitive records such as technical manuals, contract documents, marketing plans, product descriptions, and specifications. The ECM repositories include the right functions for the enterprise framework and technical storage environment so organizations can properly categorize and label the digital records.
6. Easier Adoption to AI - A good ECM system offers complex, cognitive, and sophisticated intelligent technologies that help enterprises to automate, extract, analyze, classify, redact, and capture digital information for further purposes.

New York based IMG Models is known as a global leader in talent discovery and model management. They wanted to unify their efforts by creating a centralized solution to manage iterations and integrations across their brand. Icreon helped implement a robust ECM solution with various features and tools focused on minimizing the inefficiencies.

How Does ECM Solutions Work?

An ECM solution combines integration with a wide range of tools to handle unstructured content. They consist of -

• Big Data tools
• Data integration tools
• Information management tools
• Analytics, data mining, dashboards, and reporting tools
• Search and indexing tools

Ideally, ECM should deliver sufficient built-in functionality and flexibility to enable automating repetitive tasks. Also, you must be able to recognize bottlenecks, optimize the process, and build workflow across the enterprise. This increases the efficiency of the team and achieves business objectives.

What are the Key Components of ECM?

ECM can be divided into five key components: capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver. The purpose of each of them are as follows –

• Capture - This creates information by replacing paper documents with electronic formats. It also obtains and collects electronic files into a seamless structure.
• Manage - This connects, alters, and employs different information.
• Store - This component backs up the frequently changed information temporarily.
• Preserve - It backs up the changing information in the medium and long term.
• Deliver - This delivers requested information to the clients and end-users.

Best Enterprise Content Management Systems to Achieve Your Business Goals

Enterprise content management software assist greatly in handling bulk data and information. However, not all ECM solutions are right for your needs. The decision makers must hold into account the level of sensitivity of data, bulk issues, needs, and goals to hunt for the right ECM solution. Here is a detail of some of the best ECM solutions that you can opt for after conducting a thorough research:

1. Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus is created to empower enterprise-level businesses in e-commerce to deliver a flawless shopping experience to the customer. Shopify Plus's easy-to-use store editor can add augmented reality, 3D, and video on product pages to emulate in-store experiences. You can also customize the checkout page with shipping rates and personalized discounts to acquire more engaging customer experience.

You can quickly launch promos across several multichannel, schedule sales, product launches, restocks, and automate discounts for a particular or entire product line. The third-party integrations in Shopify Plus, like Launchpad, Shopify Flow, and Scripts, will simplify customization and expand your website's functionality.

2. Sitecore

Sitecore is one of the most powerful CMS platforms available worldwide. With Sitecore Experience Commerce™, you can improve your website's traffic, track the latest marketing campaigns and their results. The seamless integration of Sitecore with your enterprise makes it easy for a marketer to create a close connection with databases, web services, or any particular system to collect data quickly. You can also integrate third-party tools such as Sharepoint, Dynamic CRM, Active Directory to explore more possibilities with your website.

Sitecore's Personalization is one of the most prominent features. It helps you deliver personalized experiences for clients, such as brand-building, using built-in marketing capabilities and holistic content-management solutions.

3. Zoho Docs

Zoho Docs is a smart solution in case you're looking for file management for teams and individuals. This solution has a safe and collaborative workspace where you can make all of the data, documents, and information available in real-time for everyone in need.

There is an office suite included in this ECM solution. It is filled with spreadsheets, slideshows, and word processing documents. There's a secure file cabinet available to collaborate and innovate in a safe environment.

4. Magento Commerce

Just like Shopify Plus, Magento Commerce is a hosted ecommerce platform. It has similar features like customer segmentation and personalization, automatic inventory management, and instant purchasing. Magento's unique feature is its content creation ability. It comes with content staging and preview tools to easily create, preview, schedule, and update content. The content can be tailored to make it a more meaningful experience for customers.

However, Magento's dashboard is less intuitive than other ECMs like Shopify Plus. There are 5,000+ extensions, but those aren't plug-and-play tools that can be activated and deactivated. They have to be included in Magento Commerce API through manual coding, which can take a long-time to learn.

5. Drupal

Drupal is one of the top open-source content management systems that is widely used to create and manage dynamic digital experiences on websites and applications. It is used by millions of organizations globally and has helped deliver immersive digital experiences for the world's most prominent brands.

Some of the best benefits of Drupal are - it allows you to create, edit, approve, schedule, and collaborate on content even if you have little technical knowledge. It is powered by various community developers, users, and contributors who are continuously helping to improve the platform's overall functionality. The flexible design and impressive scalability of Drupal as a complete web solution help your brand to make an extraordinary impact. 

The Future Is ECM

Undoubtedly, Enterprise Content Management strategy is the best solution for your managing your content. The right ECM solution will help you find, handle, store and make the most of your data in one place. Selecting the right now is crucial as it will impact your enterprise's needs and goals.

You might want to go for a solution that offers website building and development tools so you can optimize your digital initiatives on an all-in-one platform. Explore Icreon’s Enterprise Ecommerce Solutions.