EIM is not a technology or a product, but rather an on-going process for organizing, structuring, and managing your organization’s information assets, independent of technology platform or organizational structure.
EIM’s objective is to integrate business goals with technology to help your organization continually manage data to simplify business processes, increase productivity, and enhance adaptability. There are many components or initiatives you can implement to achieve EIM, including business intelligence, data warehousing, data governance, and data integration activities. An integral piece of a successful EIM process is business intelligence.
Enterprise information management is the name for the field that combines business intelligence (BI) and enterprise content management (ECM). Enterprise information management (EIM) takes these two approaches to managing information one step further, in that it approaches the information management discussion from an enterprise perspective. Where BI and ECM respectively manage structured and unstructured information, EIM does not make this rather "technical" distinction. It approaches the management of information from the perspective of enterprise information strategy, based on the needs of information workers. ECM and BI in a sense choose a denominationalised approach, since they only cover part of the information within an organization. This results in a lack of available information during decision making processes, market analysis or procedure definition.

The current market demonstrates two clear and distinct approaches to EIM. The first (and most applied) one is where a separate disclosure layer is put over the sub-solutions ECM and BI. The rise of Microsoft SharePoint 2007 with the information worker paradigm has caused an acceleration of the acceptance of these kinds of solutions.
Information workers in their daily activities need access to both data (structured) and content (unstructured), as far as their role and responsibilities give them the appropriate rights. Portal solutions offer possibilities to organize the access to different subsystems, including authorization management. Also, portal solutions offer ways to work together on information products in an online environment (collaboration). Processes can be organized and managed (Business Process Management or workflow).