ECM (Enterprise Content Management) provides solutions for managing and handling unstructured or poorly structured information across an entire enterprise. By definition, a company is thereby considered in its entirety. In practice, however, departmental solutions are often implemented. These do have their justification, as a large number of problems do not extend across departmental boundaries. Nevertheless, there is obviously a whole series of overarching business processes for which optimization only seems to make little sense from the point of view of a single department.

A company-wide introduction of an ECM system ("big solution") is, however, in the vast majority of cases difficult to represent in an economical manner for a company. Usually only the tip of the iceberg will be visible, so that the respectively current problems are only worked off step by step. Thereby, isolated solutions are usually created here. The selection of a strategic ECM provider is also of little help here, as long as projects are approached in isolation from one another or no strategic direction is specified.