Employee empowerment through enterprise content management:

In e-business, content is the digital information that we use at work to sell and service, our customers, our partners and ourselves. Content is the published results of what we do. It is the documents, messages, collaborations and results. Managing content should be at the top of management priorities. Content is the input of all business processes.

The E-business evolution:

As database systems defined the nature of business automation in the past, content management can be said as the automation of the creation, storage and delivery of random, heterogeneous, may be unstructured mix of data types. Integration of data sources, mostly in non-traditional forms at our disposal has changed the role of content management. In database management, we want to avoid islands of data, able to support multiple operating systems and make them and the files seamlessly available to the web.

Instant access to enterprise’s sources of business intelligence would allow it to respond quickly and proactively to any changes in its business environment. There are incredible information sources within a corporation; all we have to do is just get at them. With web authoring and metadata technologies, content can be captured, created, maintained and delivered cross department, to customers, suppliers and partners.

For example, in customer relationship management (CRM), is the ability to access customer information and use it. The next step would be to have it direct the decision-making and action-taking process. With CRM, if a customer who suddenly stops or drastically reduces ordering the usual amount of product, it should be considered as important information and trigger some action. It is a corporate business system drives decision-making and actions.

Employees and Empowerment

What if you have the right information available, the experience of many people as your advisor, you would be able to make a much better decision. In employee empowerment, employees are empowered to make decisions. Should I call this customer? and offer a discount? Should I order some more supplies, etc. Decision-making is delegated to the workers. The key is to have the right tools, information to make the decisions. Most companies do not have them available. Some people have the information but can not get at them in a timely manner. Some people have the tools but do not have the information and the training to use them in decision-making.

The competitive advantage will come from making employees more effective by giving them the timely, right information to the right people to make decisions. Knowledge management is the key issue and content management is the challenge. Having a content repository that manages all different forms of content, digital documents, audio, video, etc is critical to any portal or Knowledge Management infrastructure. Search technology has to be available so that people can find the content.