According to a recent study entitled "Enterprise Content Management: Toward a New Content Paradigm" by IT research and consulting firm, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), a large number of organizations still don’t have strong content management mechanisms in place.

ECM is a critical part of IT which assists businesses in accessing structured information, meeting legal and compliance directives and serving customers.

As e-mail, instant messaging and blogs continue to become preferred mode of communication for enterprise users, businesses need to adopt strong Enterprise Content Management (ECM) disciplines that enable them to create, store, index, deliver and delete a wide variety of content said the report.

Some of the key findings of the report include:

• Online content technologies are rapidly overtaking traditional content—instant messaging is already more popular than fax, and corporate blogging will triple in 12 months—even though most companies are not prepared for them.

• Overall, enterprises are very happy with their ECM effectiveness and cost-benefit—more than 80% rate their ECM solution as being effective with at worst a neutral cost-benefit.

• Enterprises are implementing ECM primarily to improve access to information, collaboration and productivity.

• E-mail is by far the most used content delivery mechanism, ranked most important by almost 90% of enterprises, beating both Web pages (66%) and hardcopy delivery (50%).

• Many organizations have little or no content management discipline. 82% of enterprises use network file servers as their primary content repository; 60% use e-mail folders; 14% have no formal content repository at all.

"Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a rapidly evolving field within IT management. In addition to the challenge posed by traditional content such as documents, images, forms and videos, today’s enterprise must be able to address new online content technologies like web pages, blogs, wikis, podcasts and RSS feeds in their overall ECM strategy," said Andi Mann, senior analyst, EMA.