PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to identify organizational challenges that drive enterprise content management (ECM) adoption from a process point of view.Design/methodology/approachThe presented results are grounded in both the academic literature on ECM and qualitative data from two case studies.FindingsThe study identifies and discusses 21 contemporary business challenges that drive ECM adoption along the content lifecycle (e.g. regarding the creation, storage, and retrieval of content).Research limitations/implicationsAs the scopes of both the literature review and the case studies were limited, the presented account of ECM drivers is not considered exhaustive. The paper can, nevertheless, help researchers to further theorize about ECM adoption and investigate the role that content plays in business process management.Practical implicationsPractitioners are provided with empirically grounded knowledge on the drivers behind ECM adoption. They can, for example, use the results to justify and evaluate ECM investments, or determine the scopes and objectives of their ECM initiatives.Originality/valueThis study is important because the understanding is still vague as to what organizations strive to gain through implementing ECM and what results they can expect from the same.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is an important enabler of information management, as it supports the creation, storage, retrieval, and retention processes of organizational documents and their content. The term ''ECM'' was coined in information management practice in the early 2000s, and it found its way into Information Systems (IS) research a few years later. While the level of research and publication activity in the field is increasing, we still see only a few academic reports on actual ECM practices. As yet, IS research provides little guidance to practitioners concerning the factors that drive or hinder ECM implementation. As a response, this chapter identifies a set of critical success factors for ECM and develops on that basis a framework that helps organizations assess their readiness for ECM. The framework was developed based on data collected in workshops with ECM project leaders and members of five companies. The expert opinions and experiences are combined with research results from the academic literature, and two illustrative cases show how the framework has been applied in practice.A. Herbst Á A. Simons Á J. vom Brocke