Process-Centric ECM for the Modern Business
Today’s organizations are continually facing the need for agility, better management, and proactive maintenance and management of company assets. Many organizations leverage ECM systems to help them accomplish this panacea but often feel as if they fall short of the “Promised Land.” ECM has tremendous value, but there are changes in how we can architect and implement ECM as a concept and not just as a system that can provide long lasting value.
According to our trusty Wikipedia definition we know that “Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is a formalized means of organizing and storing an organization’s documents, and other content, that relate to the organization’s processes. The term encompasses strategies, methods, and tools used throughout the lifecycle of the content.”
This definition contains a couple of key aspects that are heavily weighted more now than, perhaps, ever before. Traditionally, when we think of ECM we think of the rules and the formalization needed to have structured content. This structured content is intended for organizations to find related information more easily and quickly, enabling them to rapidly pivot and adapt to swiftly changing business environments. However, what has happened is a growth in the decentralization of content as businesses work to find quick, agile solutions to immediate business problems.
While we would like to think that we can have a singular ECM system, it is growing more difficult to force fit a formalized structure for all organizational content. The reality is that almost every organization has one or more systems that contain content. Gartner identified IT as being BiModal—a mix of delivery concepts that involve “traditional IT” and what was traditionally known as “shadow IT.”
Conceptually, in order to properly deploy ECM into an enterprise, we have to think of ECM as being BiModal as well—content can be placed into a highly structured repository, and information (or content) is created ad hoc or a result of agile practices to satisfy the needs of a growing business.
Organizations look for modern tools that enhance the traditional structured needs of the organization but also provide the appropriate agility needed. These needs have shifted and highlighted the dependence of ECM to truly be a process-based architecture. By re-visiting the Wikipedia definition, we read that there is a portion of the definition that specifies that content should “…relate to the organization’s processes.”
However, in today’s modern business, rarely do we see a single business process that stays within a single department, line of business, or organization. We see processes that are evolving and growing because dynamic teams need rich communications that occur across the organization and the organization’s supply chain. A business’s ability to survive and thrive is influenced heavily by its own operational ecosystem and the organization’s ability to interact easily within this ecosystem. Understanding how the organization interacts within this ecosystem is vital to a full ECM strategy.
- What processes are driving the business?
- What content are these processes producing?
- Where is content being stored, how is it accessed, who is accessing it, and how are you as an organization managing it?
These three questions and the answers to them will help you as an organization begin to identify leverage points to balance structure and agility. As mentioned earlier, almost every organization is storing content in some capacity in one or more systems—but how do they manage it? How do you as an organization continue to find your leverage points?
Identify the processes used that 1) create content and 2) force users into using multiple content repositories. These multiple content repositories often self-propagate out of need and want. The needs and wants are often a result of organizations needing quicker access, more agile solutions, and lean communications. The desire for process efficiency drives these three needs—for the most part, processes are technology-agnostic and they are going to exist no matter what. Once this realization and acceptance is made, organizations can now implement process-based ECM architectures. There are two unilateral needs that process-based architectures must be able to satisfy:
1. Cross-organizational boundaries
2. Cross between digital content repositories
The best ECM solutions provide the rules and formalizations needed to satisfy the raw needs of ECM. The better ECM suites also provide the ability to deploy workflows and business process automation capabilities. These ECM system workflows and processes are often solution- or technology-scoped, requiring us to insert our processes (the ones that need to cross boundaries) into a highly structured system. This is a challenge because organizations have processes and content outside of a single system. The painful reality is that forcing all content and process into a single repository is difficult.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel though with process-based architectures, and that is the ability to finally begin abstracting the concepts of workflows and processes. Companies, such as Nintex, are enabling organizations to think beyond a specific technology in such a way that truly represents what is happening in the organization—processes that are crossing technology and organizational boundaries. For instance, if a process crosses one or more organizational boundaries, it is realistic to think that there is more than one content repository used during the process.
By identifying these core processes and thinking of workflow as its own object, we begin to take advantage of concepts such as Workflow as a Service (WaaS) to enable ECM architectures and designs that reflect the way organizations work. Employing tools that implement Workflow as a Service enables organizations to be best positioned to drive meaningful process-centric connections between content repositories and the full business ecosystem. A successful WaaS solution identifies the leverage points to truly manage the “who,” “how,” “where,” “when,” and “why” of organizational content sprawl. By abstracting Workflow as a Service, organizations enable themselves to alter processes without having to alter the systems that these workflows would otherwise be embedded within. WaaS, with ECM, provides the ability to embrace an agile business environment while establishing a solid backbone that continues utilizing your ECM system as the ultimate content repository.
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