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Reviewing Enterprise Content Management: a functional framework

  • Research Article
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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) focuses on managing all types of content being used in organizations. It is a convergence of previous approaches that focus on managing only particular types of content, as for example documents or web pages. In this paper, we present an overview of previous research by categorizing the existing literature. We show that scientific literature on ECM is limited and there is no consensus on the definition of ECM. Therefore, the literature review surfaced several ECM definitions that we merge into a more consistent and comprehensive definition of ECM. The Functional ECM Framework (FEF) provides an overview of the potential functionalities of ECM systems (ECMSs). We apply the FEF in three case studies. The FEF can serve to communicate about ECMSs, to understand them and to direct future research. It can also be the basis for a more formal reference architecture and it can be used as an assessment tool by practitioners for comparing the functionalities provided by existing ECMSs.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers who have provided extensive feedback that has considerably improved this paper. Thanks also go out to a colleague researcher for pointing out the work of Schein. The authors also thank Johanna Stange for her language reviews.

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Correspondence to Knut R Grahlmann.

Appendix

Appendix

The column AIIM refers to AIIM (2005), Pelz-Sharpe (2008) and Regli & Kas (2008). This table does not contain all papers from Table 1 since some of them did not explicitly comment on potential ECMS functionalities.Table A1

Table A1 Descriptions of FEF elements and works mentioning them

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Grahlmann, K., Helms, R., Hilhorst, C. et al. Reviewing Enterprise Content Management: a functional framework. Eur J Inf Syst 21, 268–286 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2011.41

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