Enterprise Content Management in Information Systems Research

The growing interest in technologies that support the creation and management of corporate materials—image brochures, marketing flyers, sales presentations, product catalogues, Web pages, and many more—can be attributed to challenges that result from steadily increasing volumes of digital information that impede an efficient search for corporate documents and their maintenance and reuse. Past Information Systems (IS) research has discussed a number of related challenges in the areas of knowledge management, (Web) content management, and document management. The latest development deals with the notion of enterprise content management (ECM), an integrated approach to information management that covers many of these and related concepts. ECM has received considerable attention in practice, and several market research institutions and consultancies expect increasing growth for the ECM market in the near future. With its focus on the confluence of organizational and technological issues, ECM is a relevant topic for IS research. Notwithstanding its relevance to both academia and practice, the concept of ECM has been largely ignored by the IS discipline and can be characterized as bereft of theory. As a response, this chapter collects, summarizes, and synthesizes ECM research from the IS discipline. With the help of four perspectives researchers can take to explore the concept, it characterizes and explains the concept of ECM and provides an overview and introduction to the other chapters in this book.