ECM’s main challenge isn’t the organising and storing of content, but rather liberating information contained in documents and records for productive use, writes Abie Speers.

Unlocking the valuable information contained in documents, and using it for the benefit of the organisations is where the real business value of ECM systems lie.

In this regard, organisations implementing electronic document and records management systems (EDRMS) and thinking they are checking all ECM boxes are doing themselves a disservice. Document management and records management have fundamentally different goals, and combining them in one system always ends up in compromises that lead to substantial organisational underperformance.

Consider the analogy with Financial Systems.

Organisations generally have Financial Accounting and Management Accounting systems. Financial Accounting is based on compliance to regulated external standards and is mainly aimed at proving past performance, but is not much use in defining future performance.

Management Accounting, conversely, is not based on regulated standards, but rather on good industry practices and business imperatives. Its purpose is to mine information from historical data, in order to use it to improve decision making and thus optimise future performance. Efforts to combine Financial and Management Accounting invariably leads to a system that is dominated by compliance issues, and in the process loses the freedom to focus on business improvement.

Let’s replace ‘Financial Accounting’ with ‘Records Management’, and ‘Management Accounting’ with ‘Document Management’, in the previous paragraph.

Organisations generally should have Records Management and Document Management systems. Records Management is based on compliance to external standards and is mainly aimed at proving past performance, but is not much use in defining future performance. Document Management, conversely, is not based on regulated standards, but rather on good industry practices and business imperatives. Its purpose is to mine information from historical data, in order to use it to improve decision making and thus optimise future performance.

Efforts to combine Records and Document Management invariably leads to a system that is dominated by compliance issues, and in the process loses the freedom to focus on business improvement.
The holy grail of document management should be to enable quick and easy access for everybody in an organisation to exactly the right documented information needed to make the most optimal business decisions.

Organisations that aim to introduce a comprehensive Electronic Document and Records Management System (EDRMS) for all content invariably get hung up on compliance to records management standards that doesn’t share the same imperatives, and despite high ideals they always end up compromising on providing easy and intuitive access to documented information for corporate decision making.

By all means, do what needs to be done to comply with the records management standards governing your organisation. However, if your content contains information that can be used to improve your business decision making, you need to ensure you have systems that are focussed on liberating this information in the most user friendly way possible.

In the financial world there is no such thing as an efficient combined Financial and Management Accounts system, because the different objectives and drivers are clearly recognised and valued. Isn’t it time that the content management world acknowledges these imperatives?

Abie Spies is founder and Managing Director of Engineering Informatics, a product-independent Enterprise Content Management (ECM) consulting company. www.ei-anz.com