C3 Associates Inc.

A former client and good friend sent me an interesting request the other day. Susan Lowe was updating the course details for an Information and Records Management program she is involved with and was looking for quotes to describe Enterprise Content Management to those who may not be familiar with the field. Here’s what I came up with:

ECM is about managing information rather than just storing it. Done properly, it helps your organization take advantage of the vast amounts of information created every day by placing content in an appropriate context for your user community. This can mean pushing content out through a web portal or providing intuitive tools to allow users to create, browse or search for content when needed. The end result is that your organization will be both more efficient and more compliant with the rules that govern your industry because you will be able to retain information for as long as needed but no longer.

That strays a bit from the traditional definitions of ECM but I think that is kind of the point. It got me thinking about what I like about my job and why I got started on this crazy adventure in the first place. First off, I like ECM because I like people. The successful ECM implementations I have seen have not been implementations of a technology but have instead focused on efficiency, compliance, sharing and know-how; all of these things are influenced by the human beings in the mix and the technology is only a supporting player. Conversely, the ECM implementations I have seen that have not been as successful have been seen as technology rollouts.

The other thing I enjoy about ECM is that it allows me to work in a variety of different business areas. Although the focus of C3 Associates is on the energy, oil and gas industry there is an incredible diversity amongst the various business units in each of our clients. The opportunity to work with engineers in the morning, lawyers at lunch (because they’re busy the rest of the time) and accountants in the afternoon doesn’t come along very often. Each has their own unique perspective on the business of their organization and I see ECM as an opportunity to unite all of them to achieve more than they would have otherwise.

If helping people take their work to another level doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning, I don’t know what does.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm and is filed under Calgary Document Management, Calgary Information Management, Collaboration, ECM, ECM Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.