ECM – Enterprise Content Management

ECM – Enterprise Content Management

Enterprise content management (ECM) comprises the methods, technologies and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve and supply content and documents in order to support organisational processes within businesses. ECM brings together structured, weakly structured and unstructured information.

The term ECM – Enterprise Content Management – is a modern coinage intended to describe products, solutions, a market and an industry. It is made up of three individual terms, which take on a special meaning in this combination:

• “Enterprise” represents a solution that can be used by all authorised individuals within an organisation. Authorisation can be divided up into reading and editing permissions.
• “Content” represents all content within digital systems
• “Management” represents the management, processing and control of a system

There have been multiple attempts to translate the term ECM, or enterprise content management, into German. These include “Unternehmenscontentverwaltung” and “Unternehmensinhaltemanagement”. These attempts have themselves struggled to gain traction, since they contain unfamiliar concepts and undifferentiated Anglicisms within compound words. Meanwhile, the term “enterprise content management” and its associated acronym, ECM, have become established in German-speaking countries.