Enterprise Content Management Serves Its Role by Delivering Action-Triggering Content
Enterprise Content Management has as its ultimate objective delivering content in a manner that triggers actions and decisions. The content should provide relevant support information, in a manner that facilitates clear comprehension.
This objective is served by providing excellent search and retrieval facilities that enable users to query the content repository in different ways and get highly relevant information, in a comprehensible format.
Additionally, content can be distributed through syndication, or published for accessing by authorized persons or the general public.
The usability and comprehensibility of the content can be enhanced through localization and personalization.
Localization involves selecting the content that meets local needs and presenting it in a manner that is aligned to local culture. Personalization means letting the user indicate his or her preferences regarding the topics to be presented and the layout in which they should be delivered.
The media for delivery could be Intranet, extranet, email or Web portals.
ECM indeed has tools available to provide a superb user experience while delivering relevant content to them. What is needed is a serious attempt to use these tools by carefully looking at the needs and preferences of the users.
Some of the issues involved in content delivery are outlined in the following sections.
Information Must be Findable
The enterprise content repository will be a huge one that contains varied types of content such as text documents created using different standards, graphic objects like drawings, & photographs, and audio and video files. Different items of content are also likely to be related to each other in different contexts.
By tagging each item of content with relevant terms it can be made to come up for all queries to which it is relevant. By attaching executive summaries to the content, the user can see just what it offers, and can judge its relevance more precisely.
By allowing the user to specify the contents and format of reports, the content can be delivered in a manner that makes more meaning to the user.
Some content might be best delivered on paper while other content (or the same content in a different context) might have to be delivered through mobile devices.
Granularity of the content is also significant. A user might be looking for some specific content, such as a particular clause in a piece of legislation or a particular page in a book. By storing the content in a manner that allows such granular access, it is more likely that the user would find the right information (compared to delivering the whole legislation or book).
Objectives of Content Delivery
Organizations might deliver content to users for triggering different kinds of actions. The objective might be to provide support information for making decisions, expediting payment of an invoice or educating the person about something.
The format and presentation of the content should be carefully tailored to meet the delivery objectives.
Enterprise Content Management has to attend to the issue of content delivery by looking at the persons who would use the content, the context in which they would be using it and the purpose for which the content is delivered. These factors (and also the location of the user) would determine the structure, presentation and the media to be used for delivering the content. The aim in all cases should be to trigger desired response.