ECM has become a cornerstone of modern organizations which provides a centralized repository for managing and storing huge amounts of digital information. However, implementations often face numerous challenges that can minimize its effectiveness. These challenges arise from the complex nature of content, the diverse needs of different departments, and the evolving technological landscape.
List of enterprise content management challenges
Here are our top 9 enterprise content management challenges that your organization will face:
- Lack of unified practices
- Reduce silos
- Manage information growth
- Secure content
- Enhance regulatory compliance
- Automate processes
- Integrate with legacy applications
- Metadata and taxonomy management
- User adoption and change management
1- Lack of unified practices
Organizations are striving to implement an effective ECM strategy that aligns with the latest trends. However, the absence of standardized best practices across industries creates significant barriers. It leads to inconsistent approaches in managing, storing, and securing content, which jeopardize the ability to streamline processes and ensure regulatory compliance.
Without a unified framework, organizations struggle to fully leverage ECM technologies and miss opportunities for optimizing workflows and maximizing ROI.
2- Reduce silos
AIIM reports that 52% of organizations have three or more ECM, document management (DM), or records management (RM) systems, and 22% have five or more systems. This proliferation of platforms creates significant information silos, where critical data is stored in isolated systems, making it difficult to access, share, and manage efficiently.
Reducing these content silos is one of the top challenges in ECM because it undermines the core benefits of an ECM implementation, such as improved collaboration, streamlined workflows, and enhanced data visibility.
When content is fragmented across multiple systems, organizations struggle to maintain control over their information, leading to inefficiencies, higher costs, and greater risks in compliance and data security.
3- Manage information growth
According to Statista, the total amount of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally is forecast to increase rapidly, reaching 64.2 zettabytes in 2020. Over the next five years up to 2025, global data creation is projected to grow to more than 180 zettabytes. More than 80% will be unstructured data.
This in itself is a significant challenge that companies must carefully plan for in order to effectively handle. Only the essential and important information should be saved and stored in order to reduce processing time, and storage costs, and ensure excellent quality.
4- Secure content
We all have sensitive content that only authorized individuals should have access to, and the corporate world is no exception.
To reduce data breaches and retain a good reputation, sensitive information such as customer information, employee information, and financial reports should be safeguarded, and only authorized persons should have access to them.
It is simple to grant rights to authorized individuals and withdraw access from others when using a document management system via IRM policy. Most of these solutions provide granular control over the types of permissions and a full audit trail displaying all activities performed on each document which will allow you to control the information security,
5- Enhance regulatory compliance
Most businesses operate in a regulated industry, and noncompliance with such rules and regulations can cost them money in the form of fines and penalties. Being GDPR or HIPAA compliant, for example, necessitates the adoption of a whole lifecycle from creation to deletion.
Making certain that unneeded documents or personal information are deleted in accordance with their retention policy, and eventually automating this process, will ensure full compliance.
In addition, it makes sure that information that needs digital preservation are managed properly.
6- Automate processes
Although automation has several advantages, like greater effectiveness, less manual labor, and enhanced precision, there are still a number of obstacles to overcome before it can be successfully implemented.
One of the main points to overcome is the resistance to change that will be imposed by your employees specially the older generation. They are used to manual paper work to complete a specific process and most of them will try to resist changing how they operate daily.
From my experience, the inability to overcome the resistance to change from key stakeholders in your organization will jeopardize the success of the ECM initiative. That is why part of your job is to explain the business value behind automating document centric processes and how this will help their department achieve greatness in addition to providing effective training, communication, and ongoing support.
7- Integration with legacy applications
Organizations are still dealing with legacy applications that make integration with other systems impossible. Typically, they will manually collect the required information from these programs and input it into others. Employees typically find this to be a time-consuming and monotonous process.
This can be automated using RPA technology, and robots can complete the same precise procedures that your workers do. As a consequence, errors will be reduced and accuracy will improve.
8- Metadata and taxonomy management
Designing and maintaining consistent taxonomy and metadata structures that are in line with the organization’s content needs and business objectives is difficult.
Having trouble finding and organizing content due to inconsistent or poorly formatted metadata can result in information overload and decreased productivity. When it is inaccurate or lacking, search capability might be ineffective, making it more difficult for consumers to locate relevant content when they need it.
To address this challenge, organizations need to clearly define an enterprise metadata management process for metadata creation and maintenance. It should be simple enough to encourage employees to make use of such power techniques to easily locate information and classify them according to the types.
9- User adoption and change management
User adoption and change management are the most critical enterprise content management challenges that you will be facing during any initiative. This has to do with employees resisting the new way of work which include new technologies and tools that they lack the confidence to use in their daily job.
To overcome this challenge, you should effectively train all related employees on the new technology, providing support and documentation, and providing incentives for encouragement.
Remember, your employees are your most important asset, taking care of your employees will help you implement the changes that you are foreseeing to improve the overall business operation performance.