Achieving Strategic Success
Orchestrating People, Processes and Content

Enterprise content management (ECM) is not just about controlling and managing business content and the repositories where it resides. It is about understanding the relationship between people, processes and content in an organization. It is about documenting how content flows within and across departments, what systems it touches and what processes it is tied to. In addition, it is about understanding all types of content and managing the entire lifecycle from creation through disposal.

Successful ECM strategies vary from company to company, but there are several critical steps that consistently appear in organizations with successful ECM programs. The following 11 best practices demystify the process and ease the facilitation of ECM into an organization.

1. Understand today’s ECM. What is available and where can it take your organization? A comprehensive Web 2.0-ready ECM suite must include applications that address the following needs: document management; collaboration and community management; Web content management; records management; digital asset management; email management; capture and delivery; business process management; archiving; and content reporting. Best-in-class organizations understand the need for different ECM applications to manage different content types but also see value in having a sufficient level of integration between the applications and procuring them from a single vendor

2. Create an ECM strategy team. Determine who owns ECM within your organization. An ECM strategy is not an IT initiative; it is a business function supported by technology, so this individual should be a business person who has the passion to drive the program and ensure it is embraced across the organization. The most successful strategy teams are comprised of high-level representatives from throughout the organization.

3. Assess the current state of your ECM portfolio and create an enterprise vision. A focused enterprise ensures everyone in the entire organization will consistently move as one toward your ECM goal. When establishing the vision, the team must recognize the pain points as well as the high-priority opportunities for the company. Once an enterprisewide goal is developed, the team will be in a better position to see where the silos have been created and how the organization should share information

4. Let the solution evolve. Do not try to change everything in the first week. Take incremental steps as you begin the process of building your strategy and aligning the organization for change. Begin with the most problematic areas in the company. Work to encourage adoption and establish the success of the ECM solution in the initial problem area. Your organization will then be ready to move to the next stage and apply the ECM solution to the next problem area. As you repeat the process of ensuring that each stage of the ECM deployment is successful, you will end up with a comprehensive ECM solution that addresses all of your organization’s content management requirements. It is important, however, to ensure that these first stages have a very broad scope upon which to build the series of incremental successes. The following evolution is recommended as a best practice:

Stage 1—Procure an ECM solution to focus on a specific departmental business problem;
Stage 2—Adopt the same ECM solution to all other departments;
Stage 3—Extend the original ECM solution by adding more ECM components;
Stage 4—Establish an ECM standard for the organization; and
Stage 5—Proliferate the ECM standard throughout the organization.

5. Standardize across the globe. Establish a global ECM standard that can be tailored to serve regional, departmental and subsidiary needs. This provides a framework that can be re-used as each stage of the ECM solution is introduced. Although this is the optimum goal, there may be cases in which the differences in regions, departments or subsidiaries make this impossible. In these instances, specific regions, departments or subsidiaries should be given the freedom to define their own specific requirements.

6. Establish support teams to manage change. The success of a large-scale deployment often depends on the early involvement of the employees who will manage and maintain the system after it goes live. Have a strong communication plan: clarify roles and responsibilities, provide details regarding geography, communicate where requirements might differ and explain if there are limitations or benefits to certain areas of the project. In turn, the support team should ensure the systems continue to be embraced after the initial deployment. The support team should also anticipate and prepare for change-management issues, making sure end users are properly trained on how to perform their jobs using the improved processes that the new solution enables, with governance policies and procedures clearly communicated. It is human nature to resist change, but your staff will embrace it if they understand the benefits to themselves and the organization.

7. Develop an enterprise architecture. "Enterprise architecture" defines how the data your people, processes and content encounters are managed, stored and accessed to support enterprise objectives. This involves the data the enterprise wants to manage and how that data relates to other data. The right enterprise architecture takes the organization’s needs into account, meets end-user training requirements, ensures consistency in each stage of implementation, and is available to everyone across the enterprise as well as external partners, vendors and customers.