So You Invested in an ECM System...What’s Next?

Whether you purchased an enterprise content management (ECM) system for a specific line-of-business initiative—such as an employee intranet or compliance application—or you plan to roll out ECM for multiple applications across the enterprise, you want to derive maximum value from this important investment as quickly as possible.

To accomplish this objective, it is critical for companies to learn how to best deploy and use an ECM solution before jumping into the implementation phase of the project. ECM implementations are essentially made up of many separate projects or phases, which, when taken together, can add up to a complex prioritization challenge. It can be difficult to know where to start.

So, how can a company move past the initial paralysis that may be caused by an overwhelming deployment? Consider your ECM vendor's consulting services team. When strategically organized and deployed, these groups can provide training, consulting and support services to help organizations prioritize and manage their ECM implementations, reaping the greatest return on investment (ROI) possible.

Customer-driven Project Delivery Models
Consulting services teams should provide as much or as little assistance as required by each individual customer. Often, the amount of services needed is driven by the complexity, schedule and cost of a particular ECM implementation.

For example, a "turnkey" model is usually necessary for customers who have an aggressive schedule and lack the IT resources needed for a speedy deployment. In this case, a vendor's consulting services team would manage and carry out nearly all implementation activities.

Some companies prefer to own and drive an ECM implementation internally. For these customers, a "subject-matter expert" model is most appropriate, where a vendor's consulting services staff is heavily involved in developing the overall solution architecture that will best meet the customer's requirements. Then the client takes the lead in configuring and deploying the application with ongoing mentoring, best practice recommendations and technical expertise provided by the vendor to the customer as needed. Typically, the customer has a large internal IT staff or system integrator (SI) that can manage the implementation against a more moderate timeline.

The last project delivery model is termed "joint staffing." It offers the best of both worlds, in that a vendor's consulting services group augments a customer's internal team and they work together to meet implementation goals.

Repeatable and Proven Methodology
Regardless of the amount of consulting services required from a vendor, customers should follow a comprehensive, deliverables-oriented methodology for implementing an ECM system. A phased approach can help steer a project team—whether it heavily consists of consultants or is primarily made up of internal employees—and enable project managers to closely follow the progress of an implementation.

Each phase involves various implementation work streams. The first three are foundational and include:
1. Taxonomy—establishing metadata and security models.
2. Technical architecture—optimizing performance and addressing high availability requirements, Web and application servers and firewalls.
3. Consumption model—configuring or customizing the user interface, navigation and search.

Because these work streams incorporate technologies and functionality that cut across the entire enterprise, they should be addressed first during an ECM implementation. After these work streams are completed, an organization can move on to the final three, which are more specific to individual business unit and department initiatives.
1. Contribution model—setting up authoring tools, templates, workflows, imaging and file plans.
2. Content migration—instituting processes for migrating content from back files and databases into ECM systems.
3. Integration Points—creating integrations between the ECM system and portals, legacy applications, enterprise resource planning solutions and other enterprise systems. These work streams are carried through the four primary phases of an ECM implementation: Scope definition; analyze and design; build and test; and deploy.

Phase One—Scope Definition
The primary purpose of this phase is to define the scope and goals for an ECM project, and ensure relevant parties within an organization are aligned with these objectives. Companies should take an enterprisewide view of a project first and then identify an initial deployment with a high probability of success that will generate rapid ROI and user adoption.