Towards a Process-Oriented Approach to Assessing, Classifying and Visualizing Enterprise Content with Document Maps

Nowadays, documents can be scattered across a company in different versions, formats, and languages, and even on different systems. Not only is the resulting content chaos inefficient, it brings with it a number of risks. However, information that is contained in unstructured documents is increasingly becoming a key business resource. Enterprise content management (ECM) is used to manage unstructured content on an enterprise-wide scale. Despite the practical importance of ECM, research is still at an immature state and the process perspective is widely neglected. We suggest a process-oriented approach to identifying, assessing, documenting, classifying and visualizing enterprise content. Within a globally operating engineering company, we check to what extent the applicability of the designed research artifact can be assumed. We give process-oriented guidelines to identify and document enterprise content. Our 7W Framework (7WF) for content assessment contains a collection of metadata (attributes, typical attribute values) to create customized content surveys. Different visual representations of content are proposed, including a document map. Combining business processes and the content of an enterprise, the document map is able to integrate the ECM perspectives and provides decision support. Technical requirements can be derived from it and indepth analysis of business-critical content is enabled.