Biographical Information

Articles by Erin McCart

An Information Governance Disaster?

Of the 2,320 respondents participating in 451 Research's 2013 report, "E-Discovery and E-Disclosure 2013: The Ongoing Journey to Proactive Information Governance," less than half believed that an information governance program was important to their organization, but more than half of the IT staff responding they thought it was important. The report also stated that only 32% of senior management believed information governance was important. AIIM's 2013 Industry Watch Report, "Information Governance—Records, Risks and Retention in the Litigation Age," noted that only 24% of organizations train new recruits on information governance and only 16% regularly train all staff. . . .

Information from Anywhere, Any Time

The technology market can be characterized as: softly, unintentionally with originality and nonchalantly with sensibility, in other words, marketers trying to amplify cognitive dissonance about your purchasing decisions.

In reality, the technology market is a bit scarier and can be characterized as: pervasive networks providing information anywhere and at any time; the emergence of new, disruptive business models (Cloud, anyone?); intensifying competition; and customers who require instant information. The ability for a CIO and/or head of IT (hereafter CIO) to consistently manage. . . .

Enhancing SharePoint for Content Integration

Microsoft SharePoint is a "jack of all trades" technology—providing everything from an intranet portal, to a document management, records management, collaboration, knowledge management solution, to a replacement of file shares. . . .

Managing Content for Business Success

In 2011, I wrote an article titled, "Effective Management of Enterprise Content". In the article, I stated: "Most content management vendors are chosen for their software's ability to solve the toughest business challenges. . . .

Effective Management of Enterprise Content

The discipline of enterprise content management (ECM) has undergone considerable changes since its inception. Arguably, we can trace ECM back to electronic document management (EDM) and imaging. The concept was to apply paper-based records. . . .

What They Don’t Tell You About Governance, Risk and Compliance
Integrating and Auditing Content across the Enterprise

The understanding that an organization's content is a critical competitive asset is universally accepted. However, the scope of what comprises that content has expanded dramatically. Content is created and resides in a wide variety of sources, including email, transaction records, images, photographs, audio and video files, Web pages, wikis and blogs. Content also includes spreadsheets, documents and presentations generated by individuals at their desktops. For most organizations, statements, bills, checks, invoices and high-volume reports generated by business applications are critical content, too. The risk of not managing this content effectively is high. Think about it: Do you know where all of the content in your organization resides, who authored it, who owns it, who can access it and which version is correct. . . ?

Managing Information to Create Business Success
How Information-Based BPM Works With Content Management

First, some definitions: Business process management (BPM) is a discipline that confronts inefficient, rigid and error-prone enterprisewide business processes. It provides techniques, methods and tools to model, automate, implement and optimize these processes to improve operating effectiveness and agility and bolster business results.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is a discipline to manage and publish structured and unstructured content created by humans and applications in a meaningful way. It uses strategies, methods and technologies to capture, archive and deliver content according to an organization's business processes.

BPM and ECM must work together to bring agility to the business, flexibility to changing environments and the ability to manage information to create business success.