Alexander Simons

Towards a business process-oriented approach to enterprise content management: the ECM-blueprinting framework

In today’s digital information age, companies are struggling with an immense overload of mainly unstructured data. Reducing search times, fulfilling compliance requirements and maintaining information quality represent only three of the challenges that organisations from all industry sectors are faced with. Enterprise content management (ECM) has emerged as a promising approach addressing these challenges. Yet, there are still numerous obstacles to the implementation of ECM technologies, particularly fostered by the fact that the key challenges of ECM adaptation processes are rather organisational than technological. In the present article we claim that the consideration of an organisation’s business process structure is particularly crucial for ECM success. In response to this, we introduce a process-oriented conceptual framework that systematises the key steps of an ECM adoption. The paper suggests that ECM and business process management are two strongly related fields of research.

Bridging the Gap between Enterprise Content Management and Creativity: A Research Framework

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 organizations creativity and vice versa. We propose a research framework for ECM and creativity that is grounded in diverse literatures relating to these two concepts.

Value-oriented Information Systems Design: The Concept of Potentials Modeling and its Application to Service-oriented Architectures

Companies are increasingly confronted with the question of whether or not the adoption of information technologies (IT) turns out to be a profitable venture. Thus, there is a great need for methods which allow for both the analysis and evaluation of the economic value of IT investments. In this paper we introduce the concept of potentials modeling which integrates a value-oriented perspective into information modeling. More specifically, we set out to explore the economic value of service-oriented architectures (SOA). The practicability of our approach is illustrated on the basis of a simplified application example. It is hoped that this paper will make a contribution to the ongoing discussion of IT value and stimulates further research in the field of value-oriented information systems (IS).

The business drivers behind ECM initiatives: a process perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify organizational challenges that drive enterprise content management (ECM) adoption from a process point of view.Design/methodology/approach – The presented results are grounded in both the academic literature on ECM and qualitative data from two case studies.Findings – The study identifies and discusses 21 contemporary business challenges that drive ECM adoption along the content lifecycle (e.g. regarding the creation, storage, and retrieval of content).Research limitations/implications – As the scopes of both the literature review and the case studies were limited, the presented account of ECM drivers is not considered exhaustive. The paper can, nevertheless, help researchers to further theorize about ECM adoption and investigate the role that content plays in business process management.Practical implications – Practitioners are provided with empirically grounded knowledge on the drivers behind ECM adoption. They can, for example, use the results to just...

Value Assessment of Enterprise Content Management Systems: A Process-oriented Approach

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.

Enterprise Content Management in Information Systems Research

The growing interest in technologies that support the creation and management of corporate materials—image brochures, marketing flyers, sales presentations, product catalogues, Web pages, and many more—can be attributed to challenges that result from steadily increasing volumes of digital information that impede an efficient search for corporate documents and their maintenance and reuse. Past Information Systems (IS) research has discussed a number of related challenges in the areas of knowledge management, (Web) content management, and document management. The latest development deals with the notion of enterprise content management (ECM), an integrated approach to information management that covers many of these and related concepts. ECM has received considerable attention in practice, and several market research institutions and consultancies expect increasing growth for the ECM market in the near future. With its focus on the confluence of organizational and technological issues, ECM is a relevant topic for IS research. Notwithstanding its relevance to both academia and practice, the concept of ECM has been largely ignored by the IS discipline and can be characterized as bereft of theory. As a response, this chapter collects, summarizes, and synthesizes ECM research from the IS discipline. With the help of four perspectives researchers can take to explore the concept, it characterizes and explains the concept of ECM and provides an overview and introduction to the other chapters in this book.

Critical Success Factors in Enterprise Content Management: Toward a Framework for Readiness Assessment

Enterprise content management (ECM) is an important enabler of information management, as it supports the creation, storage, retrieval, and retention processes of organizational documents and their content. The term “ECM” was coined in information management practice in the early 2000s, and it found its way into Information Systems (IS) research a few years later. While the level of research and publication activity in the field is increasing, we still see only a few academic reports on actual ECM practices. As yet, IS research provides little guidance to practitioners concerning the factors that drive or hinder ECM implementation. As a response, this chapter identifies a set of critical success factors for ECM and develops on that basis a framework that helps organizations assess their readiness for ECM. The framework was developed based on data collected in workshops with ECM project leaders and members of five companies. The expert opinions and experiences are combined with research results from the academic literature, and two illustrative cases show how the framework has been applied in practice.

Which Reward Should I Choose? Preliminary Evidence for the Middle-Option Bias in Reward-Based Crowdfunding

Crowdfunding has become an important research area, but we know little about how rewards influence fundraising success. This research-in-progress studies reward-based crowdfunding through a behavioraleconomics lens. We draw on dual-process theory and provide preliminary evidence for the middle-option bias in crowdfunding. Two empirical studies in a simple, controlled environment confirm the significance of the middle-option bias, both for varying numbers of donation options and for varying price ranges. Since our findings suggest that the positioning of rewards in a menu of rewards can influence support behavior and how much money project creators collect, they can inform the design of crowdfunding projects. Our future research will develop a mock crowdfunding website to study the middle-option bias in a more realistic environment.

Factors in the Acceptance of Enterprise Content Management Systems

This chapter investigates the factors that influence the acceptance of enterprise content management (ECM) systems. Specifically, we identify and explain twenty-two factors at the enterprise, process, technology, and content levels that can influence ECM success. Our study builds on the technology acceptance model (TAM), and the results are grounded in both a systematic review of the literature on ECM, including related fields like document management and records management, and an analysis of qualitative data collected from five organizations. Practitioners can use the results in planning and conducting ECM programs, and the results can also inform future Information Systems (IS) research on ECM acceptance and contribute to the emergence of ECM as an important field in IS research.

Reference modeling for higher education budgeting: applying the H2 toolset for conceptual modeling of performance-based funding systems

The Higher Education (HE) sector has gained remarkable economic importance worldwide. There is a huge amount of institutions competing in this dynamically evolving market. Emerging concepts like new public management advise to organize HE institutions as autonomous business units that can easily be adapted to market changes. In this context, methods of performance-based funding play an important role in governing the institutions both from an external and internal perspective. However, the right choice of indicators measuring the performance turns out to be a vital factor for the success of these budgeting methods. Wrongly chosen, they may even be misleading. Whereas most studies in this field suggest particular measurement systems, our focus of research is to provide a methodology for the design of individual measurement systems. As part of this method, techniques from reference modeling can be applied in order to reuse typical measures for special situations and then further adopt and extend them. In this paper, we study the modeling language H2 which may serve as an essential part of such a methodology. We conclude with an outlook on further research.