As with anything in life, it helps to know what you're looking for. Take technology, for example. How many times have vendors described their product to meet the specs in a request for proposal rather than indicate what the product actually is or does? That can be an important issue when dealing with a challenge as expansive as enterprise content management.

It is imperative for insurers to define what ECM is in their company, stresses Mike Sciol?, CIO with the IFG Companies. Areas such as imaging and workflow often are used to describe content management, but Sciol? maintains ECM goes well beyond certain processes that are more closely associated with document management.

“Enterprise content management is building and maintaining a collaborative group of systems that converse to produce or create something of value for the company,” says Sciol? in giving his definition.