5 Tips to Evaluate Content Management Platforms in a Changing Enterprise

By Marisa Peacock (@marisacp51) Jan 19, 2011

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Think you know what to look for when choosing an enterprise content management system? There are many factors that can influence a company's decision: cost, technology and security to start. Thanks to the enterprise's changing landscape, such decisions are making it harder to evaluate which system to integrate. Here is some guidance that may help.

Emerging Technologies, Empowered Employees and the Changing Face of the Enterprise

Recently we spoke to Roger Bottum, vice president of marketing at SpringCM about the ways that CMS are influencing companies and the way companies are influencing how CMS can serve them better. Now that most organizations have adopted or plan to adopt more cloud-based services, for example, to store and manage their content, companies are (or should be) focused on the implications that cloud computing has for security, cost and technology. But that's not to say that all ECMs are cloud-based. No matter what platform you choose, it's important to know what to consider and factor into your decision making process.

The ECM landscape is much different than it was 3 or 5 years ago. Even SpringCM has had to do some rearranging to help align their products with the changing face of companies, emerging technologies and priorities. Five years ago, their primary customer only managed a handful of seats and engaged in simple file sharing. Now, multi-national companies manage call centers full of hundreds of people and generate information from across a variety of applications. As well, the consumerization of technology has afforded individuals to become better acquainted with devices, applications and communication platforms like never before.

Has this exposure influenced the way professionals implement new platforms into their business strategies? After carefully examining how companies and their customers choose a content management system, SpringCM not only sees how much empowered employees are driving content management, but offer up five components that every business needs to consider when evaluating a CMS. Let’s take a look.

1. Evaluate Cost Compared to Value Delivered

Companies have always been focused on the bottom line. The economic recession has many organizations demanding to know what their enterprise content management is really worth. Time, productivity and cost are all factors but evaluating them isn’t always straightforward.

To ensure that your company gets the most bang for their buck, it’s imperative to have the right people involved in the decision. IT and the C-suite must come together to take inventory of what they currently have in place and how other solutions can impact the way they do business

2. Determine the Right Amount of Complexity

Companies need to know what each ECM requires and the basic functionality that it is capable of providing. At its core an ECM should work to streamline business process management (BPM). With each additional layer of capabilities built into it, security shouldn’t be compromised, nor should previous problems go unsolved. Software as a Service implies that it is there to solve a problem. As a result, it shouldn’t create more issues than it’s solving.

By understanding how much is too much, companies can choose the right ECM for them, cloud-based or not, rather than selecting one that is too much to handle.