Andrea Herbst

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...

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.

Social Content Management Systems: Challenges and Potential for Organizations

At around the time of the new millennium, Enterprise Content Management (ECM), a concept for the enterprise-wide management of information, emerged. However, the trend toward adapting social media technology brings a new situation for ECM, as organizations are challenged to manage diverse “social content” from social media in order to ensure quality and compliance. At the same time new opportunities arise from social content as a powerful asset for creating business value. Recognizing the importance of social content has led to the development of a new generation of information systems, Social Content Management Systems (SCMS). SCMS are ECM systems that focus on the management of social content. SCMS have yet to receive much attention in research, particularly in terms of their potential benefits and the challenges organizations may face in using them. This paper evaluates the importance, potential benefits, and challenges of SCMS for organizations through a survey of 89 professionals from several countries and industries. For the survey we draw on challenges and potential addressed in the existing literature of SCMS and social media use in organizations.

Lessons Learned from Implementing Enterprise Content Management at the National Public Administration in Liechtenstein

The objective of this chapter is to summarize the experiences gained from an enterprise content management (ECM) initiative at the National Public Administration (NPA) in Liechtenstein. The results are grounded in the academic literature on ECM and in qualitative data, including observations, document analyses, and semi-structured interviews, collected over a period of 19 months (March 2009 to October 2010). The chapter presents and discusses fifteen important lessons the project group learned during the implementation and customization of an ECM software package in one of the NPA’s departments. These lessons include informing those who will be affected about the pros and cons of ECM early in the process, defining a transition strategy from paper to digital records, performing a content audit, and establishing ownership along the content lifecycle. The results are limited in that they were determined from a single implementation project of ECM. Nevertheless, they can assist researchers in future studies on ECM adoption, also in contexts other than public administration. In addition, public administrators are provided with ECM success factors at the organizational and departmental levels that can assist them in planning, executing, and evaluating their own ECM initiatives. The study contributes to information systems (IS) research by investigating in some depth the adoption of ECM in the public administration context.

Information Seeking Strategies in Organizational Information Architecture

Organizational users daily manage a tremendous amount of information. Their management can be challenging for many users. Especially retrieving unstructured information from the organizational file server involves often major difficulties. Causes are, for instance, an intransparent filing structure as well as limited search and retrieving functions. Failure of information retrieval can result in major organizational inefficiencies such as recreating already existing information or wrong decision making due to an incomplete information base. Locating needed information requires the user’s engagement in an information search process in the organizational information infrastructure. This search process shows usually different information seeking behaviors. The paper at hand reports on an empirical study on information seeking strategies of users in the organizational information architecture and in particular at the organizational file server. Investigating such information seeking strategies can help to identify information seeking patterns of organizational users as well as determining information seeking problems, which influence the users’ decision on the search strategy. The results of the study indicate that users apply many different strategies when searching information on the file server. The strategies which are applied depend on the user’s personal preferences, information seeking constraints as well as problems encountered during the information search process. A further important aspect on the selection of the search strategy is the level of contextual information about the needed item a user might possess. It is hoped that the identification of the search patterns can inform information system designers for developing innovative systems and interfaces which facilitate a more effective and efficient information search process.

Shedding Light on the Impact Dimension of Information Systems Success: A Synthesis of the Literature

There is little consensus among researchers and practitioners on how best to measure IS impact and on what level to assess this impact. Although various dimensions of IS impact, such as individual impact and organizational impact, have been proposed, the number and type of IS impacts dimensions and how these dimensions can be measured remain unclear. This paper contributes to IS research by synthesizing and extending the knowledge on the evaluation of IS success. In particular, the goal of this research is to synthesize IS success literature in order to identify potential IS impact dimensions and measures suitable to operationalize them. Based on our observations from the literature, we propose a comprehensive IS Success Impact Framework (ISIF) that can serve as a conceptualization for both dimensions of IS impact and possible evaluation perspectives as well as a measurement instrument.