A taxonomy for decision support capabilities of enterprise content management systems

Enterprise content management (ECM) systems are implemented in many organizations to deal with the complexity of the structured and unstructured organizational data. The little available ECM literature shows that many organizations using ECM focus on short-term benefits while strategic decision-making benefits are rarely considered. Although the relationship between the use of ECM and decision support (DS) is investigated recently, there is scarcity in research that investigates the categories of DS capabilities that ECM systems may have. The objective of this paper is to determine whether ECM systems can have the DS capabilities of four categories of decision support systems, namely classic decision support systems (DSS), executive information systems (EIS), expert systems (ES), and group decision support systems (GDSS). The findings indicate that ECM systems can have all decision support capabilities of classic DSS, EIS, and ES. However, ECM systems can have only a portion of decision support capabilities of GDSS.