Impacts of implementing Enterprise Content Management Systems

This paper presents the results of a case study on the impacts of implementing Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMSs) in an organization. It investigates how these impacts are influenced by the functionalities of an ECMS and by the nature of the ECMS-supported processes. The results confirm that both factors do influence the impacts. Further, the results indicate that the implementation of an ECMS can change the nature of ECMS-supported processes. It is also demonstrated that the functionalities of an ECMS need to be aligned with the nature of the processes of the implementing organization. This finding confirms previous research from the Workflow Management domain and extends it to the ECM domain. Finally, the case study results show that implementing an ECMS to support rather ‘static’ processes can be expected to cause more and stronger impacts than the support of ‘flexible’ processes.