The Benefits of ECM are numerous and, I think, well described on AIIM, Open Text, and other ECM-related web sites. I'm assuming that anybody reading this posting is already familiar with the potential benefits but may well be wondering what the costs of an Enterprise Content Management solution might be.

It would be nice to think that ECM always comes with a positive and sexy Return On Investment (ROI) making everybody involved with the purchase and implementation of an ECM solution happy campers. However, if ECM had such a positive ROI then ROI would be one of the lead reasons for purchasing an ECM solution but that is rarely the case. Is that because ECM doesn't have a positive ROI to talk about?

When a computer application has a small resource footprint, either because of very few users and/or a very small problem space, then the costs associated with physically running the application are often so minuscule as to be completely absorbed by other budgets and be effectively zero. However, as the application resource requirements increase, the costs of providing those resources rises to become a significant cost.

One of the big problems with "Archiving" of data that software vendors must understand is that it is handled by IT and so costs and Return On Investment are focused around infrastructure like Tier