Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has become the industry term which describes the technologies and processes used to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents related to the competitive success of an organization.

In the past, organizations focused on the management of unstructured data such as documents and records. With higher stakes and increased liability, however, it has become critical for organizations to manage more than just documents. As a result, the demand to manage additional types of unstructured data throughout the organization, combined with advances in technology, has led to the ability to manage a broader range of content. In adopting ECM, consideration needs to be given to both unstructured and structured assets of many types and sources, such as:

• Core business systems
• Legacy information
• Paper
• Microfiche
• Computer Output to Laser Disk (COLD)
• Digital assets
• Email
• Instant messaging

A Gartner report published in October 2006 stated that "by 2010 basic content services will be essential infrastructure, deployed across 60% of enterprise desktops" (Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Content Management, 2006, Gartner).

This indicates that the market requirement to adopt a sophisticated ECM solution across the enterprise will be significant. The implementation of an ECM strategy will touch every area of the business and have significant impact on the IT operations staff in managing and delivering new services to both their internal and external user community.

In many cases, business will need to adopt an ECM strategy that includes a business process management (BPM) technology and business intelligence (BI) solution. Regulatory risk and compliance legislation and directives are pervasive at this time and the ability to meet change in this area is a fundamental requirement.

Gartner lists the main ECM vendor solutions and software in the following matrix that shows how the vendors fall within the Gartner Magic Quadrant.

The vendor landscape continues to consolidate with several high-profile acquisitions involving EMC, IBM, Open Text, Oracle and Microsoft. This space gives evidence that ECM is definitely being positioned as a requirement of the enterprise and that there is an obvious shift towards infrastructure vendors

Vendors have recognized this and have developed leading ECM Suites to include components such as Document Management, Web Content Management, Records Management, Document Imaging, Document Centric Collaboration and Workflow.

Attevo's ECM practice helps organizations understand how content management can help meet business and technology challenges. When the requirement is to enhance an existing departmental solution or replace a legacy or failing implementation, knowledge of market developments and direction within the ECM vendor and infrastructure community are important. Many of these technologies are leading edge and consequently the client will require practical experience around these.

The Attevo ECM practice brings together a team of people with established skills and experience in both new and emerging technologies and significant expertise in our chosen focus markets. Attevo's ability to understand client requirements is the essential starting point for the development and delivery of solutions that justifies the investment decision. The key to successful planning and implementation of an ECM solution is creating the ability to capture, manage and deliver effectively the full range of content types within an organization's users and decision-making community.

Attevo partners with a select group of leading and visionary ECM and infrastructure vendors, including:

• Open Text
• Vignette
• Oracle
• IBM
• Microsoft
• Alfresco

Attevo's ECM team offers experience and expertise in areas such as:

• Understanding the changing ECM landscape with consolidating vendors and changing technologies. With expertise in each of the listed vendor solutions, Attevo can help direct your organization to the right solution based on your needs, goals and objectives.
• Keeping up with compliance requirements and how ECM can help an organization meet these requirements.

By incorporating ECM into the infrastructure of the organization, it is possible to make the content available to everyone within, and in some cases outside of, the organization. Some organizations that have already developed a document or records management system may be looking to evolve their systems further. There may be an ever-increasing demand to expand the existing strategy to:

• Include more users or departments
• Provide many different views into the content repositories
• Allow publishing of content to both internal and external sites
• Provide content retention policies to manage the risk and liability that the content means to the organization
• Provide additional means of capturing content currently owned by the organization in a wide array of forms (i.e. paper, microfiche, X-rays, email, and instant message)