The official definition of enterprise content management was created by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) International, the worldwide association for enterprise content management, in the year 2000. The abbreviation ECM has been reinterpreted and redefined many times [2].
In late 2005 AIIM defined ECM as:
Enterprise content management is the technologies used to Capture, Manage, Store, Preserve, and Deliver content and documents related to organizational processes.
In early 2006 AIIM added the following paragraph to the definition:
ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.
In early 2008 AIIM changed the original definition to:
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists. [3]
The latest definition is intended to encompass the legacy problem domains that have traditionally been addressed by records management and document management. It also includes all of the additional problems involved in converting to and from digital content, and to and from the traditional media of those problem domains (such as physical and computerized filing and retrieval systems, often involving paper and microforms). Finally, ECM is a new problem domain in its own right, as it has employed the technologies and strategies of (digital) content management to address business process issues, such as records and auditing, knowledge sharing, personalization and standardization of content, and so on.