With this unparalleled focus on corporate governance, privacy, and overall sound records management practice, organizations can no longer consider ECM systems as an indulgence or an option. With the spotlight fixed on issues surrounding compliance, ECM systems are pretty much a mandate for organizations. The penalties for non-compliance are too severe - not only the heavy financial costs (or even jail sentences…) but also in terms of damage to the organization's reputation.

With the media and industry analyst coverage of the mounting regulations on corporate and civil service behavior, the language of legislation has become commonplace. Basel II, Sarbanes-Oxley, Public Records Office, Anti Money Laundering Regulations, Gramm-Leach-Biley Act, and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, to name a few, have worked their way into daily conversations. More so have the acronyms - HIPPA, GLBA, PRO, AML, DoD 5015.2, and, of course, SOX.

If organizations do not have the foundation technologies to manage the content required to meet the mandates of this broad set of regulations, the future is bleak. The time, money, and resources required to satisfy regulatory compliance edicts without systems in place to streamline the processes that facilitate them is enormous.

That said, progressive organizations are now looking at regulatory compliance issues in a strategic manner. Taking a holistic view that combines people, processes, and technology, organizations are beginning to establish frameworks for "proactive compliance" - an architecture that empowers organizations to mitigate risk by providing a policy-driven compliance platform for management of physical and electronic knowledge assets.

Compliance, is really about managing content better - from creation to in-process management, to archival, to ultimate disposal. Any organization that embraces the concept of proactive compliance, including establishing and enforcing the processes to support compliance and the ECM system to manage required content, will be in a solid compliance position and realize the many other benefits of sound content management.

Making information accessible from a variety of user interfaces is critical to capitalizing on the value of organizational knowledge assets. According to research, large organizations spend close to five percent of total revenue managing and delivering corporate content. For many, this translates into tens of millions of dollars. Beyond direct costs of managing and delivering content, organizations suffer from lost productivity. According to independent research firm IDC, users spend a great deal of time searching for information required to do their jobs; often to no avail. In fact, IDC research indicates that close to 40 percent of users cite the inability to find information as one of the leading impediments of productivity improvement.

Stories of redundant work across organizations also abound. Take for instance the story of the algae-based medicine capsule. A team of 11 worked for nearly three months to develop a capsule that would stably contain an algae-based medicine (the medicine kept leaking out of traditional capsules). Proud of their accomplishments, the team discovered that another team of 14 in the same organization was equally pleased. As it turns out, the 14 person team was unknowingly working in tandem to develop the same capsule. Conservatively, that equates to 5200 hours of work and at a materials and salary cost of roughly $200/hour for the 11-person development team about $1 million dollars wasted.

Other issues on the horizon also validate the argument for systems to better manage enterprise content. For example, employee turnover and, in the case of some government agencies, an impending competency gap challenge due to an aging workforce pose serious challenges in terms of information capture and retention. The ability to capture and retain intellectual property and "know-how" is of critical importance and, if unsuccessful in doing so, organizations will certainly sustain lost opportunity and profits.

In short, the concept of ECM as a platform that delivers incidental or marginal returns is stale. Progressive organizations are implementing ECM in order to address the issues outlined above as well as to directly impact overall employee productivity, improve organizational velocity and agility, and achieve superior business insight. They are looking to ECM as a way of delivering on the promise of "contextual information" - information anywhere, anytime, and in formats conducive to users getting the job done. In doing so, organizations will realize not only "soft cost" gains but also significant and tangible cost savings from reduced work redundancy, protected intellectual capital, and streamlined processes.

By automating the content lifecycle management process (the process of managing content from its creation through its disposal), organizations free up staff to focus on matters of strategic importance that directly impact the bottom line. No longer will staff occupy their time manually filing paperwork, or spending inordinate amounts of time searching for information. Rather, they will have more time and energy to focus on those three keys to business advantage mentioned above - speeding time to innovation, helping the business become more agile, and concentrating on quickly discovering revenue generating opportunities.

By making information more readily available, accessible from a variety of devices and interfaces, and by automating many previously manual content-centric processes, ECM equips organizations with a platform for competitive success. Moreover, ECM represents a foundation for building tailored content-centric business solutions. Beyond managing unstructured information and automating the content lifecycle, ECM enables firms to streamline other business processes and generate business advantage. Contract management, correspondence tracking, deal room management, anti-money laundering monitoring, and virtual team collaboration are all solutions enabled by enterprise content management systems. Not only do solutions like this aid firms in achieving goals of revenue, agility, and opportunity generation, but they serve to reduce costs and streamline business operations.