Building a Successful ECM Solution Team
So you have decided to tackle the daunting task of building an enterprise content management solution. What factors should be taken into consideration in order to ensure the success of such a project? First, enterprise content management (ECM) needs to be clearly defined. There are many complex definitions, but it really boils down to "file and find." You need to capture important organizational information and have the ability to find that knowledge across the enterprise.
Information comes in many forms and it is imperative that your solution reflects a single, consolidated architecture with the ability to handle all the different sources of information. All too often this concept becomes lost in the equation and thus the solution can fail miserably if you lose sight of the big picture.
Second, to build a true ECM solution you must identify your stakeholders and create a winning team, taking into consideration the needs of the organization rather than just a single business process. An enterprise solution requires the contributions of the entire enterprise. By involving other departments, you increase the scope of the project; however, at the same time, you exponentially increase your chances of success.
Let's look at a best-case scenario and assume that key players are all onboard. It's imperative that all members of the team share the same goals, objectives and a common vision. Getting everyone on the same page may be challenging; however, it will help eliminate stove-pipe solutions, reduce overall costs, reduce duplication of effort and provide a consolidated search mechanism for all organizational knowledge. Your team should include management and end-user representatives from IT, legal, HR, finance, line-of-business (LOB) applications and records management, each with their own set of requirements and risks.
Make your IT management the cornerstone of focus to buy-in on your solution. You must involve them early as they have significant buying power. They supply the mechanics who keep your solution running today and decide which platforms are supported in the future. Since their concerns stem from issues around architecture, scalability, security and storage costs, you must find an ECM solution that will ease their pain instead of adding to it.
More Team Building
Your corporate administrative offices, legal, HR and finance, deal with highly sensitive paper files that require special attention to retention and disposition. The legal department must answer to C-level management concerns on the issues of organizational compliance that will drive their interest in participating in the ECM project planning process. Representatives from human resources and finance will be interested in controlling departmental access to proprietary records. Your winning ECM solution needs a single view to both electronic and paper documents. Once captured, this information should be controlled by a robust enterprise platform based on international and domestic standards with a well-defined taxonomy allowing security to control access to appropriate users.
There may be many LOB applications that require special attention. Legacy systems cannot be ignored as integration will probably be inevitable. An API toolkit within your ECM solution will allow these systems to continue to contribute to the corporate knowledge base.
Records management (RM) departments have the responsibility to create a corporate vocabulary, including a classification plan with all the retention and disposition rules that are required for compliance in your industry. Depending on the size and scope of the project, you may need to hire consulting services to work with your A-team in order to get an unbiased view of what you're doing now and what your future ECM vision should be.
Third, once you've spent the time analyzing your departmental requirements, you're faced with a schematic of all informational points of entry. These will include a wide variety of media types generated by many different tools. They may include documents from desktop authoring tools, imaged documents, Web content, LOB applications, paper file folders and boxes and of course, email. Don't overlook process management requirements and reporting capabilities for these documents. Your solution should be capable of capturing all this information regardless of media type. The important constant in the equation is the records management repository that manages the information fed from all enterprise applications.
Your solution must be able to handle both present and future requirements. The key to building a long-lasting and scaleable ECM solution is to start with a strong RM foundation and to avoid risky customization which can lead to expensive deployment delays.
TOWER Software, a leading enterprise content management (ECM) provider to the public sector, delivers electronic document and records management (EDRM) solutions. TOWER Software's award-winning solutions empower organizations to manage and secure their vital information assets. By relying on its proven domain expertise, strong strategic partnerships and powerful solutions, TOWER Software enables organizations to improve the accuracy of information on which business decisions are made; maximize efficiency by finding business-critical information more quickly and easily; and achieve and maintain standards compliance across industries, resulting in sustained competitive advantage. TOWER Software (
www.towersoft.com) is a privately held company with operations in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.
Diminish your ECM deployment risk with TOWER Software's TRIM Context. With the industry's best rate of deployment success, it fulfills all these requirements with twenty years of best practices and principles built-in to one consolidated ECM Solution.