'ECM aids content sharing across enterprise'

Q&A: Bill Kearney

Organisations are investing a big share of their IT expenditure on enterprise content management (ECM). IDC predicts that the content management market in the Asia Pacific region will enjoy a 5-year compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.8 per cent to reach $385 million (around Rs 1,500 crore) by 2011. Seema Sindhu spoke with Bill Kearney, general manager, ECM solutions, Oracle Asia Pacific, about the technology and its applicability.

Why is ECM important to India?

The amount of electronic content, unstructured data and documents is growing very rapidly. Organisations are in need of advanced, automated content and process management solutions to manage this information explosion.

Beyond safeguarding and maintaining the information, it is important to organise the information in a way that is simple, useful and creates knowledge for the user.

As regulatory and compliance obligations increase in India, organisations are likely to increasingly turn to ECM to automate document- and paper-based business processes, so that they are efficient, reliable and auditable.

How important is ECM for companies to upkeep their digital assets?

ECM technology helps share content across the enterprise. People inside and outside the organisation are generating content that has to be organised, shared and made readily available.

ECM technology enables these creators of information or contributors, like individuals, to contribute and manage any type of unstructured content "" from audio and video files, to CAD drawings, Office documents, Web content, and email, in multiple different ways.

ECM Technology also helps to share and distribute content via intranets, extranets, public web sites, enterprise applications, wireless devices or other repositories.

Which particular segment of industries requires ECM the most?

Organisations in the banking, financial services and insurance sector, and specifically insurance, are the biggest users. Besides that, securities, government, manufacturing, telecommunications have also leveraged ECM.

What is the cost and benefit to companies implementing ECM?

There are many benefits in deploying ECM in a paper-intensive data environment. Typically, the solution can enhance the speed and efficiency of an organisation, enhance the accuracy of the organisation in its business dealings, provide support for better decision making, facilitate organisation, improve customer service, structure and control around information, increase security and disaster recovery of key information assets, facilitate compliance and generally improve organisational productivity.

But information in government departments is mostly unorganised.

Most organisations these days, not just government organisations, recognise the need to gain greater control over all of the different content sources that are being generated within the organisation.

The typical starting point for organisations tends to be an area where efficiency gains can be achieved or better customer service can be delivered or both. Indian government departments are really no different.