ECM implementations in practice: objectives, processes, and technologies
Journal of Enterprise Information Management
ISSN: 1741-0398
Article publication date: 15 August 2018
Issue publication date: 30 August 2018
Abstract
Purpose
Enterprise content management (ECM) is an important topic in information management, but researchers have long had difficulty developing a consistent definition. The purpose of this paper is to analyze ECM case reports from practice to identify ECM’s objectives, processes and technologies and to provide a foundation on which ECM can be conceptualized and defined.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper assembles more than 1,200 case reports on industrial ECM implementations in order to characterize the ECM concept from a practitioner’s viewpoint. The paper provides a descriptive overview and historical examination of ECM implementations over time and across countries and industries, grounded in a structured content analysis.
Findings
Even though the case reports share some commonalities, their ECM projects differ considerably in terms of their objectives, processes and technologies, and vary widely across countries and industries. In addition, ECM implementations are much broader today than they once were, so the scope and boundaries of the ECM concept are increasingly blurred in practice.
Originality/value
While several researchers have characterized the ECM concept based on literature reviews, only a few have approached the definition problem from a practical viewpoint. This paper provides a foundation from which to evaluate how well researchers’ conceptualizations of ECM match current business practice.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The research described in this paper was funded by the Liechtenstein National Research Fund (research project “Enterprise Content Analytics;” project ID: wi-3-14). The paper is a revision of a research paper originally presented at the Information and Communication Technologies in Organizations and Society (ICTO) 2016 Conference in Paris, France, and it builds on data and ideas presented at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) 2014 in Tel Aviv, Israel (Herbst et al., 2014). The authors thank all anonymous reviewers from ICTO and ECIS, as well as the JEIM editorial team and reviewers, for their constructive comments on the research. The authors also thank Andrea Herbst for her support in collecting and preparing the data.
Citation
Jaakonmäki, R., Simons, A., Müller, O. and vom Brocke, J. (2018), "ECM implementations in practice: objectives, processes, and technologies", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 31 No. 5, pp. 704-723. https://doi.org/10.1108/JEIM-11-2016-0187
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2018, Emerald Publishing Limited