Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management

Although organizations store information in electronic format, it is hard for them to find the exact documents they need. Many organizations overlook large, untapped reserves of enterprise content that could help them to make better decisions, because much of this content is unstructured and lies outside of databases.

WHAT IS ENTERPRISE CONTENT MANAGEMENT?

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a set of strategies, methods, and tools to capture, manage, store, preserve and deliver content and documents to enable an organization’s business processes [1]. It entails managing a document or electronic file through its life cycle from “cradle to grave.” ECM deals with content flow, the systems and processes the content touches. ECM creates value by linking people, processes and content.

ECM helps to manage unstructured data to deliver the right information to the right people, at the right level of detail, in a timely manner. It helps organizations to manage all types of electronic content, promotes collaboration and enforces consistent business processes.

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• Enterprise content management software (CMS)

Enterprise content management software (CMS)

Enterprise content management software (CMS)

As human beings we are prone to mistakes and errors. To overcome this weakness, wealthy organizations use Enterprise content management software (CMS) for them to have reliable, accurate and less error information.

What is Enterprise content management software (CMS)?

An enterprise content management (ECM) system is focused on manipulating the information (content, documents, details, and records) that is significant with your organization’s transactions. It helps manage the organization’s unstructured information content then later store and deliver these data from one network to another with its diversity of format and location. Typically works at the enterprise level of the organization.

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• The Role of the EDMS in the Regulatory Submissions Process
• Enterprise Content Management
• Welcome to my Content Management in Life Sciences Blog
• Managing With Enterprise Content Management

Managing With Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise Content Management involves capturing structured and unstructured content that’s generated all over the enterprise, storing that content, processing it into information, delivering that information to those who need it for decision-support, and finally transferring it to long-term storage for preservation until it can be removed safely from the system.

Enterprise Content Management seeks to prevent duplication of functions and redundancy in resource usage that are typical where each department and function uses dedicated stand-alone systems.

Earlier articles identify capture, storage and preservation, and delivery components. This article explores the “management” component that works on other components to achieve desired results.

This management component manages content capture, processing and transformation, and information delivery. It uses databases and access-authorization systems to do this. It also attends to the archiving and final removal functions.

Elements of the Management Component

Document Management: Document management involves:

Check out/Check in facilities for working with the content,

Version control to make different versions of the same content available to users,

Search and retrieval facilities for locating and accessing needed information, and

Viewing facilities to see the information in overview and other kinds of views

Collaboration Management: Collaboration management involves providing facilities that make working together possible. These facilities include:

Using common databases

Designing workflow procedures for more than one person to work on documents and processes

Providing facilities such as white-boarding and video conferencing that allow a number of people to hold discussions from different locations, and also add files and notes for reference and actions

Providing facilities for administrative tasks such as appointments scheduling

Web Content Management (WCM): Enterprise content management systems typically include a web portal with interactive facilities available to employees, customers, suppliers, and business partners. This means that web content management has become part of ECM.

WCM typically allows users to create content even if they do not have HTML and other kinds of programming skills. WCM includes facilities for:

Creating and editing content

Creating editorial reviews and modifications where necessary before publishing the content

Accepting content in different formats and converting to standard formats

Publishing the content

Personalizing page displays by users to meet their needs and preferences

Separating public and non-public content and restricting access to the latter

Records Management: Deals with the logic of achieving storage, archival, and removal objectives. Procedures and functions are developed for:

Document and information-retrieval metadata

Workflow and Business Process Management: Workflows can be along standard or custom sequences determined by the user. Workflow objectives are achieved through workflow engines that control the flow and workflow solutions with autonomous clients.

Managing workflow involves planning, capture, processing, delivery, administration through delegation, deadlines, monitoring and reminders, and documenting the process.

Business-process management seeks to integrate different workflows and applications into an integrated business process. It also involves generating business intelligence by mining the data warehouse.

Conclusion

The management component of Enterprise Content Management seeks to integrate all the other components into an integrated process that helps achieve business results.

It incorporates different disciplines and technologies such as Document Management, Collaboration Management, Web Content Management, Records Management, Workflow Management and Business Process Management.

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• The Role of the EDMS in the Regulatory Submissions Process

The Role of the EDMS in the Regulatory Submissions Process

As someone who works for a vendor who is heavily focused on enterprise content management and who has significantly increased its market share in Life Sciences over the past 5 years, I am keenly aware of the increasing importance of tight integration between eCTD tools and the document management repository. Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology organizations are no longer satisfied with passive integrations between the technologies, and are driving vendors to make significant enhancements to the ways the two systems work together.

In addition, the requirements for eCTD submissions are being driven back into document management systems; document preparation, assembly and quality control are functions that need to be supported within the EDMS. A high-level of granularity, document cross-referencing, and parent-child relationships, although important in the past, have increasing value in the preparation of electronic submissions. And issues like submission sequence archiving are now a standard expectation for any EDMS.

As electronic submissions requirements evolve so will technologies that support them. I expect to see a strong importance placed on the EDMS in the preparation of “submission-ready” documents and greater cooperation between eCTD and ECM vendors over the next 3-5 years.

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• The Evolution of Electronic Document Management Systems in Life Sciences – Part 1

Welcome to my Content Management in Life Sciences Blog

Organizations in the life sciences industry deal with millions of documents, and hundreds of millions of pages of information; Enterprise Content Management gives these organizations the ability to gather, process, and manage these documents more effectively.

In this blog, I will be discussing the evolution of ECM in Life Sciences. I will look at trends in the industry and what I see going on with respect to content management technology. There are many changes with respect to ECM driven by industry challenges such as a decreasing product pipeline, and increasing competition and globalization; regulatory pressures related to industry harmonization and increased scrutiny; as well as emerging IT infrastructure challenges.

As you can read in my biography I have been focused on enterprise solutions for many years, I have spent most of that time focused on vertical and horizontal applications. I would like to hear from you in response to any of the topics posted.

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