Critical Success Factors in Enterprise Content Management: Toward a Framework for Readiness Assessment

Enterprise content management (ECM) is an important enabler of information management, as it supports the creation, storage, retrieval, and retention processes of organizational documents and their content. The term “ECM” was coined in information management practice in the early 2000s, and it found its way into Information Systems (IS) research a few years later. While the level of research and publication activity in the field is increasing, we still see only a few academic reports on actual ECM practices. As yet, IS research provides little guidance to practitioners concerning the factors that drive or hinder ECM implementation. As a response, this chapter identifies a set of critical success factors for ECM and develops on that basis a framework that helps organizations assess their readiness for ECM. The framework was developed based on data collected in workshops with ECM project leaders and members of five companies. The expert opinions and experiences are combined with research results from the academic literature, and two illustrative cases show how the framework has been applied in practice.