Organizations have information—data in neat rows and columns, document images, documents, forms, photos, and everything else that contains important organizational information—spread throughout the enterprise. What do you need to know to ensure you're able to see the right information (and all of it)?
Almost all of you reading this understand that "enterprise content management" (ECM) is an umbrella term for many technologies including imaging, workflow, document and records management, search, email management, Web content management, etc. As organizations find themselves increasingly overloaded with information; many are turning to these technologies, singly or in suites, to deal with the overload. As mature and complementary products and technologies, facile APIs have evolved with which to pretty painlessly integrate them.
Of course, other integration methods like Web services, XML, and Java adaptors have developed in recent years that accelerate integration to an even greater extent. The latest to get a lot of attention is federated repository management (or enterprise content integration), the ability of products like Venetica to provide bi-directional access to unstructured data in content management and other systems from disparate vendors. Though FRM deals largely with unstructured data, it promises to unify data across the enterprise, even structured data when platform vendors like Oracle use FRM to pull all data into a structured database.
So system integrators and customers have a lot of options. But, hey, it gets better. According to David Newman, vice president, Research, Enterprise Information Management, Gartner, integration disciplines that were previously, at best, tangential to ECM are now morphing into one another and in the process becoming increasingly relevant to it. Indeed, he observes that structured and unstructured content are converging, and managing the data overload from applications like enterprise report management (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), custom legacy systems, mainframe-based systems, as well as all the technologies within CM requires a new approach. Gartner calls this "enterprise information management" (EIM).
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