Reviewing Enterprise Content Management: a functional framework

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) focuses on managing all types of content being used in organizations. It is a convergence of previous approaches which focus on managing only particular types of content, as for example documents or web pages. In this article, 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 which 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.