No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
A Business Process Perspective on Enterprise Content Management: Towards a Framework for Organisational Change
Abstract
The huge amount of content in today's work life brings up new challenges for Business Process Management (BPM). The right content has to be provided at the right time, of the right quality, and at preferably low cost. So far, a remarkable number of software products have been developed for the management of enterprise content. However, there is still a significant lack of knowledge on how to efficiently make use of these systems in a specific organisational context. With this paper, we present a framework, taking a business process perspective on Enterprise Content Management (ECM). Within the framework, different types of content are identified that are relevant in regard to the business processes of a company. For each type of content blueprints are developed that describe how to make use of specific services of ECM systems. In order to implement organisational change, methodical support is provided on how to embed the blueprints into the business processes of a company.
... While IM and KM are well-studied topics in IS literature, ECM has received little attention from scholars yet (Vom Brocke et al., 2008) and limited academic research has been conducted. Concerning the importance of ECM for IS research, Tyrväinen et al. (2006) emphasized that ECM represents an important and complex subfield of Information Systems. ...
... Within ECM literature, there are some efforts being made to add value to ECM systems by integrating enterprise content into information or process management. For example, there is a paper that aims at applying a business process perspective to ECM and to study experiences with these initiatives (Vom Brocke et al., 2008). There is also an ontology approach that supports collaborative work in the different domains (Elgh & Sunnersjo, 2007). ...
... In the KBCM framework, the different views of knowledge components represent the different types of knowledge in an organization. In contrast, other approaches have chosen the process-oriented perspective (e.g., Vom Brocke et al., 2008) that focuses mostly on the know-how knowledge component and could be well suitable for a type of innovation that is related to processes. ...
The rise of the knowledge-based economy has significantly transformed the economies of developed countries from managed economies into entrepreneurial economies, which deal with knowledge as both input and output. Consequently, knowledge has become a key asset for organizations and knowledge management is one of the driving forces of business success. One of the most important challenges faced by enterprises today is to manage both knowledge assets and the e-collaboration process between knowledge workers. Critical business knowledge and information is often contained in mostly unstructured documents in content management systems. Therefore, content management based on knowledge perspectives is crucial for organizations, especially knowledge-intensive organizations. Enterprise Content Management has evolved as an integrated approach to managing documents and content on an enterprise-wide scale. This approach must be enhanced in order to build a robust foundation to support knowledge development and the collaboration process. This paper presents the KBCM (Knowledge-Based Content Management) framework for constructing a knowledge infrastructure based on the perspective of knowledge components that could help enterprises create more business value by classifying content formally and enabling its transformation into valuable knowledge assets.
... ECM has been defined as " the strategies, tools, processes, and skills an organization needs to manage all its information assets (regardless of type) over their lifecycle " [56, p. 648] . Given that many IS authors in this particular field have adopted this understanding of ECM, there seems to be a consensus that ECM is not only a set of technologies, as it is often considered in practice, but rather an organizational concept that covers multi-faceted business issues [6, 36, 61, 62]. Against this background, it appears somewhat surprising that the impact of ECM on organizational performance is commonly analyzed with regard to efficiency (e.g., reducing searching times) or availability of content (e.g., meeting reporting obligations ) only. ...
... Consequently, one important issue appears to have dropped off the ECM research agenda: the role of creativity. While existent works on ECM highlight important capabilities regarding strategy development [40, 56], tool support, process development and deployment [62], as well as related change management [36], they tend to neglect the implications that technology has on an organization's capacity of acting creatively. However, it has been shown that organizations not only seek efficiency, but also creativity [27, 52]; creativity is the prerequisite for innovations and thus a core competitive factor in contemporary organizations . ...
... In addition, we conducted a backward search by reviewing the references of the articles yielded from the keyword search to not overlook other articles [64]. The full details of the literature review will be reported elsewhere; this paper only presents a brief summary of contributions we uncovered in our literature search [10, 11, 31, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 50, 51, 56, 57, 61, 62]. In doing so, we particularly focus on identifying common ECM objectives and drivers in order to characterize the minor role that creativity has played in ECM research so far. ...
Enterprise content management (ECM) has emerged as a promising research area in the Information Systems (IS) discipline. According to recent works in the field, ECM may increase the consistency, availability, and traceability of content. We argue that one important aspect has dropped off the agenda-the role of creativity. While the above measures are, without any doubt, highly relevant in order to pursue important business imperatives, such as time and budget, organizations must also consider the creativity and innovativeness that employees can unfold in their work processes. In this conceptual paper, we thus advocate an approach to ECM research that not only considers traditional, rather control-oriented factors, but also the impact of ECM on an organization's creativity and vice versa. We propose a research framework for ECM and creativity that is grounded in diverse literatures relating to these two concepts.
... However, prior research indicates that many organisations are struggling to achieve managerial and strategic benefits from the use of ECMS (Salamntu and Seymour, 2014, Paivarinta and Munkvold, 2005, Munkvold et al., 2006, Arshad et al., 2012, Vom Brocke et al., 2008, Alalwan, 2012. In reality, most organisations prefer a bottom-up approach that leads to immediate benefits such as cost reduction, work simplification, ability to re-use previous content and improved searching functions (Smith and McKeen, 2003). ...
... Therefore, this study posits that the effective use of ECMS will enable and lead to the improvement of decision-making capabilities. However, previous researchers suggest that any research on ECMS should consider the role of the business process in mediating the impact of ECMS use (Vom Brocke et al., 2010b, Grahlmann et al., 2010, Reimer, 2002, O'Callaghan and Smits, 2005, Vom Brocke et al., 2008, Paivarinta and Munkvold, 2005. As claimed by Vom Brocke et al. (2010b), consideration of business process structure is a crucial step for successful use of ECMS. ...
Facing an unprecedented explosion of digital content, many organisations have been left with a large repository of unstructured information. Huge volumes of electronic content have been captured and stored within organisations’ repositories, depriving organisations of the ability to analyse this data properly. As a result, many organisations are facing crucial problems, such as (1) employees wasting 30% of their time looking for relevant information; (2) operational and maintenance cost increases to handle large amounts of data; and (3) loss of opportunities to gain a strategic advantage through proper analysis of organisational data. To overcome these problems, the Enterprise Content Management System (ECMS) was introduced in the early 2000s. Having been researched for a period of 25 years, most prior studies on ECMS focus on a bottom-up approach with the intention of achieving immediate benefits such as cost-reduction, meaningful knowledge work and re-use of previous content. A top-down approach that aims to improve decision-making, resource allocation and competitive intelligence are ignored due to a lack of awareness about the importance of such benefits. Therefore, this research will explore the relationship between ECMS and how it can facilitate decision-making processes. Grounded on previous literature, the contributions of this paper are as follows: first, the paper provides insight into the research from the perspective of ECMS; second, the paper proposes a research model for further exploration of the topic; finally, implications and future directions for research is outlined.
... Other authors, such as Brocke, Simons and Cleven (2008), acknowledge that ECM initiatives should be driven by BPM frameworks. The author advocates that BPM methodologies are good tools to promote Change Management in organizations. ...
Enterprise information architectures still do not deliver all the value that comes from integrating structured and unstructured information. Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management were developed as autonomous disciplines. Thus, Enterprise Content Management still occurs without formally considering the business processes that generate and manipulate content, while Business Process Management initiatives arise without a documented treatment of materials produced by the processes. The non-integrated approach to these disciplines collaborates to reduce the potential benefits expected in Organizational Change Management programs. In such context, the article discusses the interrelation between Business Process Management and Enterprise Content Management, approaching from a historical view of these disciplines, their conceptual limits, technological support, and dialogues that would benefit both initiatives. The paper contributes to clarify a question still vague in the field of Information Management, which is how to integrate Business Process Management and Enterprise Content Management treating structured and unstructured information in a unified manner. It discusses how to approach this issue in a broad scope of IM by combining the concepts of Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management. Based on a literature review, the paper analyzes and synthesizes experiences in Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management acquired in the context of a project carried out in a Power Sector Company. The article reveals problems in separating approaches to Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management. It shows the importance of an effort for integration and presents three instruments that promote the linkage of the two initiatives, approximating process offices and analysts’ information.
... ECM can be viewed as an evolutionary phase of information management that involves the management of structured and unstructured content through the complete content lifecycle (Boiko 2002). There appears to be a consensus in the published research that ECM is not only a practical set of technologies but also includes organizational concepts that involve many business perspectives (Blair 2004;Munkvold et al. 2006;Tyrväinen et al. 2006;Brocke et al. 2008). Rocky (2006) reported that one of the main goals of ECM implementation is to have transparent content sharing by making different and disparate applications (i.e. ...
Enterprise content management (ECM) systems help firms deal with the increasing amounts and complexity of structured and unstructured organizational data. However the ECM literature shows that many organizations focus on the short-term benefits of ECM while the potential strategic decision-making benefits are rarely considered. Therefore, the objective of this research-in-progress paper is to investigate the association between ECM and decision support and to draw attention to the potential application of ECM technology for decision-making activities. This study introduces a framework linking ECM to decision-making activities, and presents five propositions based on the published literature.
... This finding can be considered as an example of the 'duality of technology' (human agents influencing technology which in turn influences the human agents) described by Orlikowski (1992) in her paper on theory of structuration in the IT domain. The case also confirms the observation of vom Brocke, Simons & Cleven (2008) that Business Process Reengineering can be part of an ECMS implementation. Further research will need to show whether this proposition also holds true for different original process types. ...
This paper presents the results of a case study on the impacts of implementing Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMSs) in an organization. It investigates how these impacts are influenced by the functionalities of an ECMS and by the nature of the ECMS-supported processes. The results confirm that both factors do influence the impacts. Further, the results indicate that the implementation of an ECMS can change the nature of ECMS-supported processes. It is also demonstrated that the functionalities of an ECMS need to be aligned with the nature of the processes of the implementing organization. This finding confirms previous research from the Workflow Management domain and extends it to the ECM domain. Finally, the case study results show that implementing an ECMS to support rather 'static' processes can be expected to cause more and stronger impacts than the support of 'flexible' processes.
... Different contents can consequently only be accessed by preset content users and content owners whereas any changes, additions or cancellations can only be performed by the content owners. While performing the case study the Enterprise Content Management platform, in accordance with Vom Brocke et al. (2008), shall be defined as an integrated system composed of: content, processes and technologies. Technologies, contrary to what was maintained by Tyrväinen (Tyrväinen et al., 2006) shall be identified as qualifying instruments and not as the solution to the problem. ...
This article provides an analysis of the correlation between a competitive advantage derived from improved decision-making processes and knowledge management through enterprise content management (ECM) platforms. Therefore, it expands literature on knowledge management and explicates the relationships among knowledge management systems, ECM systems, and decision-making processes. In other words our research question is: are the ECM systems able to create value for organizations? If Yes, how? In the studied case, we have seen that decision makers achieve their best performance through improved quantity and quality of input to the decisional process, as well as better formalization of knowledge included through all phases of the process thank to the adoption of ECM systems.
... Different contents can consequently only be accessed by preset content users and content owners whereas any changes, additions or cancellations can only be performed by the content owners. While performing the case study the Enterprise Content Management platform, in accordance with Vom Brocke et al. (Vom Brocke et al., 2008), shall be defined as an integrated system composed of: content, processes and technologies. Technologies, contrary to what was maintained by Tyrväinen (Tyrväinen et al., 2006) shall be identified as qualifying instruments and not as the solution to the problem. ...
The aim of this paper is to investigate the correlation between competitive advantage, associated with the improvement of the decision-making process, and knowledge management through Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms. As a result of our study we found that ECM platforms can be seen, as Decision Support Systems as they increase the quantity and the quality of the information needed by the decision makers and the decision processes. This study also analyses how organizations tend to modify their processes according to their capability in managing information.
Background: Failures in e-government projects to deliver expected results are frequent in the context of developing countries. These are partly attributed to the lack of balanced attention to both technical and social aspects in the implementation. However, there has been limited research on these aspects in the least Developed Countries. Objectives: Taking a socio-technical perspective, this study aims at exploring the extent of changes and effects in the implementation of e-government service-oriented initiatives in Rwanda, one of the Least Developed Countries. Methods/Approach: An empirical investigation was conducted, via interviews at 8 agencies during the period from January 2017 to May 2018. This involved two case projects, an Enterprise Content Management System and a One-Stop e-government system. Furthermore, government documents and online material were analyzed. Results: A number of changes in technology, processes and people aspects were faced in both projects. However, those changes are coupled with secondary effects; there is a need for a better fit between technical systems and social systems of organizations implementing e-government; a larger gap was identified in the first case project. Conclusions: Addressing the issues as a socio-technical system would contribute to improved work systems of agencies and better services.
This paper provides a new perspective on Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS)-use and identify novel ways in which these technologies can be used to support organizations' unified business processes. The main objective of this study is to understand and explain how unified businesses that employs highly integrated and standardized business operations could use ECMS to support their work operations. Consequently, empirical investigations using a qualitative research design were conducted in two unified organizations. Empirical evidence of the two cases were brought together in a cross-case analysis and the synthesis resulted in four modes of ECMS-use that could support unified businesses, that is, to: (1) collaborate among units on projects, (2) approve project documents and monitor project progress, (3) access standard operating procedures, and (4) provide links and access to information systems. This research fills the gap in the literature on the topic of ECMS-use and extends prior studies by reporting on organizations' experiences in using ECMS and focusing on how ECMS-use can support business processes. Business and IT managers will have a better understanding on how to maximize and gain benefit from this kind of technologies by embedding the use of it to their daily business operations.
Today, information is increasingly becoming a key business resource and organizations begin to implement Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS) to share those information. ECMS is an emerging approach that enables efficient sharing of business-related information. However, there is still a significant lack of knowledge on how to efficiently make use of these technologies for sharing information that support organization's business operations. In this paper, we investigate the use of ECMS in organizations that emphasize high levels of process integration termed as Coordination. We use a qualitative research approach to illustrate that in Coordination type of organizations, ECMS is useful for (1) sharing unstructured information, (2) sharing information that supports integrated business processes and (3) internal and external sharing. Finally, to ensure that ECMS can be effectively used for information sharing, our findings suggest three elements to be taken into considerations namely (1) relevant information that needs to be shared, (2) the patterns of integrated business processes that requires information sharing and (3) users that involve in the process of sharing. The finding is significant for business and IT managers because it will guide them with ways to use ECMS and gain more benefits from it.
Nowadays, documents can be scattered across a company in different versions, formats, and languages, and even on different systems. Not only is the resulting content chaos inefficient, it brings with it a number of risks. However, information that is contained in unstructured documents is increasingly becoming a key business resource. Enterprise content management (ECM) is used to manage unstructured content on an enterprise-wide scale. Despite the practical importance of ECM, research is still at an immature state and the process perspective is widely neglected. We suggest a process-oriented approach to identifying, assessing, documenting, classifying and visualizing enterprise content. Within a globally operating engineering company, we check to what extent the applicability of the designed research artifact can be assumed. We give process-oriented guidelines to identify and document enterprise content. Our 7W Framework (7WF) for content assessment contains a collection of metadata (attributes, typical attribute values) to create customized content surveys. Different visual representations of content are proposed, including a document map. Combining business processes and the content of an enterprise, the document map is able to integrate the ECM perspectives and provides decision support. Technical requirements can be derived from it and indepth analysis of business-critical content is enabled.
Enterprise systems development approaches can be classified into development-centric and procurement centric approaches. Based on the component-based system development methodology (CBSD), this chapter proposes a procurement-centric framework to develop enterprise content management (ECM) system. Adopting CBSD to develop ECM system avoids the drawbacks of the development-centric approaches, and remedies the ECM field lacks where there is no system development method that helps in selecting and implementing the ECM system. To validate the proposed framework, the author applies it to a case study from a large research institution with more than 30,000 students.
The main objective of this study is to understand and explain how large organisations that employ highly integrated business processes could use ECMS to support work operations. Consequently, empirical investigations using a qualitative research design were conducted in a large organisation. Concepts from Orlikowski's (2000) practice lens theory are used as a lens through which qualitative data are collected, interpreted and explained. Based on the empirical evidence, it is learnt that with basic ECMS functionalities, ECM technologies are most beneficial to be used for information sharing among integrated business units. In this paper, a guideline on how these types of organizations could use ECMS for sharing information to support integrated process structure is given. Business and IT managers could use this guideline as a reference to optimise the usage of ECMS in supporting their businesses, or resolve any issues related to underutilisation of these kinds of technologies.
The purpose of this paper is to study how IT can play a strategic role in retail business through a case study research approach of two Swedish companies. The main focus in this research approach is looking to examine: (1) how IT supports business and organizational strategies and (2) how business-IT strategies can be aligned. For this purpose we have applied two evaluation frameworks through which we have analyzed the business, organizational and IT strategies and compared business-IT alignment maturity. Finally, we have concluded with a discussion and suggestions for (a) successful relationship between three business, information and organizational strategies and for (b) improving business-IT strategic alignment that will help the IT decision makers in these retail companies to understand in which areas they should act in order to improve the strategic use of IT resources.
The aim of this paper is to better understand how highly standardized and integrated businesses known as unification types of organizations use Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS) to support their business processes. Multiple case study approach was used to study the ways two unification organizations use their ECMS in their daily work practices. Arising from these case studies are insights into the differing ways in which ECMS is used to support businesses. Based on the comparisons of the two cases, this study proposed that unification organizations may use ECMS in four ways, for: (1) collaboration, (2) information sharing that supports a standardized process structure, (3) building custom workflows that support integrated and standardized processes, and (4) providing links and access to information systems. These findings may guide organizations that are highly standardized and integrated in fashion, to achieve their intended ECMS-use, to understand reasons for ECMS failures and underutilization and to exploit technologies investments.
Nowadays, critical information that is contained in mostly unstructured documents is increasingly becoming a key business resource. Accordingly, enterprises need a foundation for managing content to understand its value and transform it into information and organizational knowledge. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is an integrated approach to Information Management. There is a need for enhancing this approach to support the transformation from information into organizational knowledge. However, assessing, organizing, sharing, and using content based on knowledge perspectives are crucial, especially for knowledge-intensive enterprises. Those enterprises provide knowledge-intensive products and services that require a robust foundation for knowledge management and innovation capacity. We present the KBCM (Knowledge-Based Content Management) framework for ECM based on the perspective of knowledge components. This paper seeks to create more business value by transforming content into valuable information assets and then from information into organizational knowledge. To demonstrate the framework, an illustrative example is constructed and evaluated.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) focuses on managing all types of content being used in organizations. It is a convergence of previous approaches that focus on managing only particular types of content, as for example documents or web pages. In this paper, we present an overview of previous research by categorizing the existing literature. We show that scientific literature on ECM is limited and there is no consensus on the definition of ECM. Therefore, the literature review surfaced several ECM definitions that we merge into a more consistent and comprehensive definition of ECM. The Functional ECM Framework (FEF) provides an overview of the potential functionalities of ECM systems (ECMSs). We apply the FEF in three case studies. The FEF can serve to communicate about ECMSs, to understand them and to direct future research. It can also be the basis for a more formal reference architecture and it can be used as an assessment tool by practitioners for comparing the functionalities provided by existing ECMSs.
Depending on the nature of businesses, the use of ECMS can be very different from one organization to another. However, current understanding on why and how such variation exists is limited. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to better understand how highly standardized businesses known as replication organizations use ECMS to support their business processes. This research takes a view that there is an interaction between organizational context, ECMS technologies and users that shaped the ways ECMS are used. A case study approach was used to study this interaction in two replication organizations. Arising from these case studies are insights into the differing interactions that occur between institutional, interpretive and technological conditions that shaped ECMS-use. Based on the comparisons of the two cases, this study has concluded that replication organizations may use ECMS in three ways, for: (1) information sharing that supports a standardized process structure, (2) building custom workflows that support standardized processes, and (3) analysis and decision making. These findings make a significant contribution in such that there is a guide for organizations that are highly standardized to support employees in achieving their intended ECMS-use, to understand reasons for ECMS failures and underutilization and to exploit technologies investments.
Enterprise content management (ECM) systems are implemented in many organizations to deal with the complexity of the structured and unstructured organizational data. The little available ECM literature shows that many organizations using ECM focus on short-term benefits while strategic decision-making benefits are rarely considered. Although the relationship between the use of ECM and decision support (DS) is investigated recently, there is scarcity in research that investigates the categories of DS capabilities that ECM systems may have. The objective of this paper is to determine whether ECM systems can have the DS capabilities of four categories of decision support systems, namely classic decision support systems (DSS), executive information systems (EIS), expert systems (ES), and group decision support systems (GDSS). The findings indicate that ECM systems can have all decision support capabilities of classic DSS, EIS, and ES. However, ECM systems can have only a portion of decision support capabilities of GDSS.
Research - not only in the discipline of Information Systems (IS) - must address the tasks faced by practitioners. The goal must always be to transform the ideas and findings into real-life business solutions. In IS research, this entitlement is particularly acknowledged by the design science research paradigm. Whereas the goal of behav- ioural science is truth, design science generally aims at developing an "IT artefact" highly useful for practitio- ners. Utility is commonly evaluated on the basis of case studies or simulations, for example. We argue that these evaluation methods must not necessarily be applied by the researchers themselves: Teaching cases represent a suitable alternative by also providing new potentials for refining the artefact. As an example of application, we refer to a newly emerging field in IS research, Enterprise Content Management (ECM). We present the results and experiences from two ECM project seminars that have been set up on the basis of workshops and interviews with a large-scale international enterprise. The teaching cases are based on firsthand accounts from our re- search in the field of ECM - a framework for content analyses. Accordingly, both courses focussed on analysing the company's content situation. The company highly valued the results gained in the seminars and has since applied our framework within additional application areas.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive literature review of enterprise content management (ECM) research, a conceptual framework of areas of concern regarding ECM, and an agenda for future ECM research, based on the review and conceptual framework.
Design/methodology/approach
– To gain an understanding of the ECM literature, a structured research approach is adopted, consisting of two phases. The first phase consists of identifying the relevant ECM research papers. In the second phase, the analysis phase, the current ECM research is categorized based on three structural pillars: system component dimensions, system lifecycle, and strategic managerial aspects.
Findings
– After a review and classification of 91 ECM publications, it is found that ECM involves several sophisticated and interacting technical, social, organizational, and business aspects. The current ECM literature can be grouped around three main pillars: the first pillar consists of the four ECM component dimensions (tools, strategy, process, and people). The second pillar is the enterprise system lifecycle (adoption, acquisition, evolution, and evaluation). The final pillar is the strategic managerial aspect (change management, and management commitment). Based on the review and a proposed conceptual framework, an agenda for future research around the aforementioned three pillars is suggested.
Originality/value
– There is a lack of ECM meta‐analysis research that explains the current state of the field. This paper contributes to information systems research by describing and classifying the published literature in ECM and by pointing out the gaps where further research is most needed. Furthermore, the paper provides a framework that may provide a conceptual structure for future studies.
Organisations are facing an incredibly increasing amount of content to be efficiently captured, organised and archived. As
a result, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has emerged as a top business priority during the past years. However, only
a few academic reports present common guidelines for evaluating and justifying the choice for a certain ECM solution in terms
of economic benefits. This paper is based on the perception that such guidelines particularly should take an organisation’s
business process structure into account, since an ECM adoption causes significant changes in work procedures. Consequently,
we consider an established business process-oriented framework for profitability analysis of IS and apply it to the context
of ECM. An application example serves as an illustration of the concept.
In today's working life, the management of content represents one of the most critical success factors. Quick access to required information considerably enhances business process efficiency as well as effectiveness. Enterprise Content Management (ECM)-a presently emerging field in Information Systems (IS) research-aims at providing concepts on how to best administer an organization's individual content situation. Nevertheless, due to the novelty of the topic, there is still a lack of methodical support for ECM systems (ECMS) analysis and specification. A further drawback to a frictionless implementation of ECM results from the negligence of re-engineering affected business processes. With this paper, we present an integrated framework for ECM adoption and business process re-engineering, reverting to established methods in the field of Business Process Management (BPM) and IS analysis and specification techniques.
In today's digital information age, companies are struggling with an immense overloadof mainly unstructured data. Reducing search times, fulfilling compliance requirements, andmaintaining information quality represent only three of the associated challenges for all sectors ofindustry. A promising approach to address these challenges is called Enterprise ContentManagement (ECM). However, there are various obstacles organisations face when adoptingECM, since the key challenges of ECM are organisational rather than technological. In this article,we claim that in particular the consideration of an organisation's business process structure iscrucial for ECM success. As a result, we introduce a process-oriented, conceptual frameworkreferred to as ECM-Blueprinting that systemises the major steps of an ECM adoption, such ascontent and ECM software (ECMS) analysis. Our research leads us to conclude that ECM andBusiness Process Management (BPM) represent two strongly related fields of research.
Innovations in network technologies in the 1990’s have provided new ways to store and organize information to be shared by people and various information systems. The term Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has been widely adopted by software product vendors and practitioners to refer to technologies used to manage the content of assets like documents, web sites, intranets, and extranets In organizational or inter-organizational contexts. Despite this practical interest ECM has received only little attention in the information systems research community. This editorial argues that ECM provides an important and complex subfield of Information Systems. It provides a framework to stimulate and guide future research, and outlines research issues specific to the field of ECM.
Today, many organizations maintain a variety of systems and databases in a complex ad-hoc architecture that does not seem to fulfill the needs for company-wide unstructured information management in business processes, business functions, and the extended enterprise. We describe a framework to implement Enterprise Content Management (ECM) in order to address this problem. ECM refers to the technologies, tools, and methods used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content (e.g. documents, graphics, drawings, web pages) across an enterprise. The framework helps to select content objects that can be brought under ECM to create business value and guide the IT investments needed to realize ECM. The framework was tested in a large high tech organization.
A framework based on high-level Petri nets is used to model and
analyse business processes. This framework is a powerful tool to support
business process reengineering efforts. The “What, how and by
whom?” approach is introduced to guide the application of this
Petri net based framework
Business Process Management (BPM) has been identified as the number one business priority by a recent Gartner study (Gartner, 2005). However, BPM has a plethora of facets as its origins are in Business Process Reengineering, Process Innovation, Process Modelling, and Workflow Management to name a few. Organisations increasingly recognize the requirement for an increased process orientation and require appropriate comprehensive frameworks, which help to scope and evaluate their BPM initiative. This research project aims toward the development of a holistic and widely accepted BPM maturity model, which facilitates the assessment of BPM capabilities. This paper provides an overview about the current model with a focus on the actual model development utilizing a series of Delphi studies. The development process includes separate studies that focus on further defining and expanding the six core factors within the model, i.e. strategic alignment, governance, method, Information Technology, people and culture.
Developing Data Warehouse Systems requires specifications of the underlying business need in the form of information models. The development of information models is often both expensive and extensive. Against this background, reference models provide useful means to reduce the costs of information modelling, because they can be used as a starting point for the construction of project-specific information models. However, reference models only provide benefits if the reduced effort resulting from their application is not overlapped by the adaptation costs. In this context, configurable reference models comprise rules which allow modifications of the original reference model depending on company or project individual determinations of configuration parameters. This paper provides concepts for a reference model-based Data Warehouse System development. Extensions of multi-dimensional modelling techniques are proposed which allow for configuring reference models. Moreover, influences of these reference models on the Data Warehouse engineering process are discussed and an appropriate tool support is presented.