Characterizing the evolving research on enterprise content management

Innovations in network technologies in the 1990's have provided new ways to store and organize information to be shared by people and various information systems. The term Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has been widely adopted by software product vendors and practitioners to refer to technologies used to manage the content of assets like documents, web sites, intranets, and extranets In organizational or inter-organizational contexts. Despite this practical interest ECM has received only little attention in the information systems research community. This editorial argues that ECM provides an important and complex subfield of Information Systems. It provides a framework to stimulate and guide future research, and outlines research issues specific to the field of ECM.