The business drivers behind ECM initiatives: a process perspective

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify organizational challenges that drive enterprise content management (ECM) adoption from a process point of view. Design/methodology/approach – The presented results are grounded in both the academic literature on ECM and qualitative data from two case studies. Findings – The study identifies and discusses 21 contemporary business challenges that drive ECM adoption along the content lifecycle (e.g. regarding the creation, storage, and retrieval of content). Research limitations/implications – As the scopes of both the literature review and the case studies were limited, the presented account of ECM drivers is not considered exhaustive. The paper can, nevertheless, help researchers to further theorize about ECM adoption and investigate the role that content plays in business process management. Practical implications – Practitioners are provided with empirically grounded knowledge on the drivers behind ECM adoption. They can, for example, use the results to justify and evaluate ECM investments, or determine the scopes and objectives of their ECM initiatives. Originality/value – This study is important because the understanding is still vague as to what organizations strive to gain through implementing ECM and what results they can expect from the same.