Electronic Content Management: Know What You’re Getting Into
July 20, 2010For 
most electronic content management solution deployments, there are three key factors driving the decision. Here is a look at each of those factors, including steps you can take to ensure success.
1. Compliance & Litigation
Key Issues:
- Compliance initiatives demand that records must be retained in a certain way for a minimum period of time.
- Compliance can be compulsory (e.g., publicly traded enterprises) or voluntary (e.g., manufacturers pursuing quality control initiatives).
- Litigation is different and requires a proactive defense. Changes to the US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure in 2006 forced many CIO and legal counsels to rethink their defense strategy. While compliance typically deals with records, litigation deals with all information within the enterprise, including email. The best way to prepare for ediscovery requests is to know exactly what information the enterprise has and automate its disposition.
Steps to Success:
- Get legal counsel on-board. Issues like retention schedules are business issues, not IT issues (although they will have an impact on storage growth estimates). Counsel and the business units must determine the retention period so that IT can impose the appropriate controls.
- Remember email. It’s often the most difficult type of content to control, record, and archive. Get records out of the email archive so it can be dealt with based on IT considerations, not litigation or compliance issues.
2. IT Efficiency
Key Issues:
- Many ECM projects begin due to a very practical IT concern: the rate of data growth.
- IT managers are confronted with the challenges of managing storage growth rates of over 40% per year. They worry about the scalability of their systems and the impact this rapid growth will have on their ability to effectively meet backup and disaster recovery requirements.
- IT efficiencies are one of the few areas that demonstrate real ROI for ECM in terms of: deferred investment in new storage technology, improvements to business continuity, reduction in storage, improved ability to meet business unit demands for new functionality (for both process and knowledge workers), and reduced helpdesk requests for recovering lost documents.
Steps to Success:
- Prepare for ROI rejection. IT efficiencies will produce compelling ROI numbers but many CFOs will dismiss the storage concerns by saying “disk is cheap”. Remind them that adding disks to an array might be relatively inexpensive but major storage infrastructure upgrades are not cheap. Nor are business disruptions caused by the decay in business continuity provisions.
- Corral the key documents of the file share. ECM will never fully replace the file share. Use it for the most heavily used or process-dependent contents in the enterprise. The shared drive will always have a role for ephemeral documents (e.g., the folder “Summer Vacation Photos 2003”). It is, however, crucial to minimize the cost of maintaining the shared drive. It may, for example, be appropriate to support the shared drive on low-cost NAS storage with no business continuity provisions.
- Help end users to help themselves. The storage benefits of ECM are significant, but the greatest benefit comes from employee self service. Many ECM systems enable business units to create their own repositories and workflows, without the need for IT’s help, resulting in considerable reductions in developer effort.
3a. Business Efficiency: Knowledge Workers
Key Issues:
- Knowledge workers must use information to be successful in their roles.
- Typical roles include: analysts, engineers, managers, directors, producers, writers, and editors.
- Knowledge workers value technologies like shared workspaces, search, document, collaboration, and document management.
- The ECM business case for knowledge workers depends on a variety of factors: cycle time reduction to produce deliverables, reduced time spent finding information, increased productivity, and the reuse of knowledge assets (e.g., using existing marketing materials as opposed to creating new ones).
Steps to Success:
- Engage the end user. Process workers buy in to electronic content management because they have no choice. Knowledge workers must be sold. Identify and address their concerns. Ask questions like: “What are the biggest problems in your role?” and “In an ideal world, what technology would help you to do your job?”
- Bring collaboration back into content management. Many enterprises have content management and most have some collaboration tools. These tools are often not integrated, leading to workflow and productivity concerns.
3b. Business Efficiency: Process Workers
Key Issues:
- Process workers complete documentation. They may process forms, complete transactions, or file updates. Their jobs are structured and related to key output metrics such as the number of invoices processed or claims filed.
- Typical roles include: clerks (government, accounts payable, etc.), front line staff, inside sales people, and brokers.
- Process workers rely on technologies like forms automation and business process management.
- The ECM business case for process workers differs from that of knowledge workers. Key elements include: cycle time reduction (cash cycle, time to process inventories, etc.), reduction in paper and storage space, increased productivity due to online information access, and improved customer service and responsiveness to inquiries.
Steps to Success:
- Know the process. The ECM project will fail if the strategy or tool doesn’t completely address what the users require. Engage the business units to model the process and to explore ways of improving or streamlining it.
- Remember the outputs. Most enterprises focus their efforts on business process management and on the use of forms to create documentation. They often neglect output: how the documents become records, how they are rendered for external use (e.g., printed bills), and how they are stored for future reference.
Comments are closed.