Compliance - Securing compliance for one regulation such as Sarbanes-Oxley or HIPAA will cause your costs to continue to grow as each new regulation is delivered over the years. To help limit the risk and cost, proactive ECM strategies must be developed within key areas, such as records management and business process management.

Collaboration - When using collaborative tools, you must be aware of records management, knowledge capture, and compliance requirements. For some industries, all customer communications must be kept. And, for a collaborative product design process, companies must be sure that the results are kept as business records.

Continuity - Because the lifeblood of most businesses today is represented by electronic documents, ECM has a key role to play in continuity. After all, without access to the most vital electronic documents, a business is dead in the water. ECM technologies allow the creation of centralized repositories where all vital corporate information can reside.

Cost - The cost of not implementing ECM tools is too often left unmeasured until too late. Things like the cost of long legal proceedings, the loss of repeat business through the inability to perform simple customer service interactions, and the cost of typical business process delays are easy to measure after the fact-lawyers' time, the cost to acquire new customers, and salaries.