Organisations are becoming increasingly aware of the information they hold, and are recognising the value of being able to use this information effectively and efficiently. Enterprise content management (ECM) is a combination of technology and practice designed to successfully manage information and is becoming an important part of the organisational IT infrastructure.
In the same way that enterprise resource planning (ERP) works to improve the operational efficiency and competitiveness of an organisation, ECM allows the organisation to gain control over the information that it uses to achieve organisational objectives.
With the right ECM infrastructure in place, information can be geared around practices thus providing the right information at the right time.
The code of practice lets you:
• Meet key organisational objectives
• Achieve operational efficiency
• Gain competitive advantage
• Demonstrate compliance and reduce risk
• Support discovery
Over the last few years, ECM has developed from a department level, point-based, niche solution to an enterprise-wide infrastructure.
In order to achieve the maximum benefit from ECM, organisations need to have a clear initiative for its implementation and operation.
Good management of information facilitates discovery; poor management impedes it, making discovery practices unreliable and more expensive than necessary. ECM can support the former and safeguard against the latter.
PAS 89 seeks to encompass key aspects of ECM practices and offers a simple yet effective approach on how to measure the value of your ECM implementation to enable successful enterprise wide deployment.
The document supports benchmarking and enables consistent, measurable ECM with increased accountability and transparency across all relevant information.
Using PAS 89 in its entirety can assist in helping an organisation to obtain the potential benefit from ECM, either as a new initiative or as an improvement to an existing one. Whilst it is certainly preferable that this PAS is followed in full, where there are critical time factors relating to an ECM project, which do not allow for its entire application, then this code of practice acts as a useful reference in any fast track implementation.
It is applicable to all those involved in or considering ECM, particularly end user organisations. In particular it is intended for use by project managers, business stakeholder managers, IT managers, record managers and information managers in organisations who are engaged in seeking to establish good use of information organisation-wide.
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