Best Practices in ECM Document Consolidation and Migration

“Enterprises today are often faced with multiple content platforms and repositories without a unifying strategy or technology to make the data actionable. They need the ability to quickly and easily access and repurpose information and make it available through self-service channels.”
—Kenneth Chin, Vice President, Gartner Research

As companies scale and grow through mergers, acquisitions and reorganization, businesses are left with a dizzying array of data sources, such as databases, repositories and file servers. One such data source, enterprise content management (ECM) systems, also referred to as document repositories or archives, house millions of statements, policies and other customer-facing documents.

Businesses are forced to embark on ECM consolidation or migration projects for a variety of business reasons. These pressures result in a need to consolidate or migrate documents locked away in one or more ECM system into a unified system which is the recommended corporate standard or one based on more contemporary technology.

Several key best practices can guide innovative customer implementations to successfully fulfill this strategic objective:

Drivers for Document Consolidation and Migration

Cost. Businesses are challenged to reduce the total cost of ownership of their ECM systems due to:

• High annual maintenance charges;
• Per-seat licensing charges for multiple ECM systems;
• Ongoing operational costs for specialized staff due to the specific skill sets required to maintain and upgrade proprietary systems; 
• Maintenance and support of physical hardware and infrastructure;
• Lack of integration between siloed applications resulting in no or inadequate access to information; and
• Continued risk of incurring penalties for not meeting regulatory compliance requirements or deadlines.
  

Consider that these factors are further multiplied by the number of ECM systems that a business owns.

Mergers and acquisitions. Through numerous mergers and acquisitions, businesses can accumulate several disparate archives or repositories. This can result in duplicate systems, and make it difficult to provide a single unified source of information for customers and other users.

Positioning for future growth. It goes without saying that upon increasing your customer base, expect increased volume, demand and stress on your existing ECM systems.

Improved customer experience. When documents relating to a single customer are stored in a number of ECM systems, it is difficult to provide users with a truly seamless experience; providing self-service channels becomes a challenge. Customer service representatives are challenged by having to deal with numerous systems, and information becomes hard to get at.

ECM market trends. In recent years, the ECM vendor market has experienced consolidation of its own, and through acquisitions new players have entered the arena. In 2006 alone, IBM acquired FileNet, Oracle purchased Stellent and OpenText bought Hummingbird. As a result, the vendor choices that were once available are becoming more limited.

ECM system offerings are becoming more feature-rich and less targeted at specific niches. This reduces the differentiation between vendors’ offerings and makes each of them more monolithic, often with unnecessary functionality bundled in the ongoing fees.

Expect older ECM systems to move toward becoming unsupported more rapidly and mandatory upgrades to new versions to become commonplace.

Document Data Formats

Documents are commonly represented as an image format, Adobe PDF or in one of several print formats.

Images. Documents can be represented as a plain image, typically in the Tagged Image File Format (TIFF). The most common source of these documents is from scanning applications.

As an image, document text and images alike are represented strictly as dots on a page. The benefit is that images provide a full fidelity representation of the document, and guarantee that the documents are displayed and printed consistently from computer to computer and printer to printer.

However, because parts of the document are indistinguishable from one another, text cannot be easily extracted or searched upon (without the use of character recognition software). This limits the use of these documents beyond simply displaying them. Documents in image formats can also take up a considerable amount of disk space, requiring additional hardware to store them and more bandwidth to deliver them to consumers.

Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Adobe PDF has become the de facto standard for representing printed documents for viewing electronically. Adobe intends to release the full PDF 1.7 specification for publication by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

In this format, text is represented as strings, separately from images and other objects, making documents in this format searchable. The PDF standard also allows for features such as bookmarks and links, which allow for easy document navigation. In general, PDF provides an opportunity to make static documents more useful and dynamic. And a subset called the PDF/A standard defines the structure of a PDF document that will ensure it remains supported and viewable in the future.