Best Practices in ECM: A Business Owner’s Perspective

Organizations have spent a lot of money on IT initiatives in various business transformation processes. These investments are driven by various imperatives—from gaining a competitive edge, to creating a value network of partners and suppliers, to realizing the benefits of intellectual capital for effective knowledge management.

However, business owners are finding it hard to leverage their organizations’ intellectual property assets to the fullest. They are becoming more and more cautious about further IT investments in the organization, and are scrutinizing every investment from a business-value perspective. In fact, business owners are increasingly involved as the decision makers for organizational IT investments. According to one study by ITSMA, business owners are not only driving technology investments, with full ownership and accountability, but they are also starting to believe that—except for pure infrastructure—there is no such thing as an “IT project.”

Clearly, IT organizations need to do more than just provide IT solutions. They need to also improve their credibility as suppliers of quality IT solutions. Only then will IT managers be able foster a partnership and win the trust of business owners. Some of the best practices for developing quality IT solutions are presented in this article, with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as the focal point. These best practices offer insights for implementing ECM initiatives in a way that allows IT and business to work together more effectively, jointly adding value and achieving success for the whole organization.

What business owners want ...

Business owners want answers to some key questions, including:

• “It’s easy to say what we have to spend more money on. What can I spend LESS money on?”

• “How can I get more value out of what I have in my organization?”

• “How can I make the cuts I need to make without damaging our long-term performance?”

Here are two scenarios that illustrate the context from which these questions typically arise:

1. A large automotive company has all its repair and maintenance documents and comments by technicians stored in a legacy system. This data represents useful knowledge about various defects and how they were fixed, along with images to illustrate the process. Other technicians could leverage it effectively if they could search the content in a user-friendly and interactive manner. The business owners want to make it available on the Internet and want to reduce the cost of maintaining the legacy system.

2. A call center stores customer claims information, including the documents and records related to claims, in legacy systems. The data also comprises images. The call center in charge wants to leverage customer knowledge and share data with other business entities to capture all touch points to improve customer service. Business owners need to find answers that will unlock the valuable content stored in knowledge repositories. Their IT organizations face the challenge of how to make available—and manage—a lot of intellectual capital that is currently difficult to capture and share in ways that will enhance business intelligence, and to do so in a cost-effective and interactive manner.

What IT needs ...

In order for the IT organization to provide value to the business, a framework needs to be in place to manage, monitor and measure the business value as perceived by the IT and business stakeholders of the organization in a uniform manner. Such a framework calls for effective management of all the content being produced in various departments of the organization. IT organizations are wrestling with an enormous amount of unstructured content being generated by partners, employees and customers. Content from public websites, and how to use that content in Web-based initiatives, is a particularly difficult problem. In addition, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) programs are generating content related to customers, products and services. To address these various issues, some organizations are creating content-centric applications and deploying portal strategies to manage multiple types of content originating from various sources. However, these initiatives are not enough to address all the issues related to ECM.

Organizations need to develop an ECM framework to address all the content management issues, and to realize the advantages of enterprise content management for knowledge management and business intelligence. This ECM framework helps reduce the costs of maintenance, support and training by deploying best-in-class technologies and infrastructure. The framework also helps to create an integrated content infrastructure to provide uniform access to multiple content types, common administration and security modules, and a systematic approach to content categorization, indexing and tagging.

The ECM framework fulfills the following essential requirements for full information lifecycle management:

Personalization—Customization based on individual profile, business rules;

Workflow capabilities—Approvals, review processes;

Versioning capabilities—Reference, backup, review and revision;

Content lifecycle management—Creation, management, delivery, expiration;

On-line Collaboration—Teamwork and communication;

Secure Access—Content access control (views and rights);

Dynamic User Interface—Configurable visitor experience;

Integration services—Seamless access to various back-end systems (EAI);

Multi-touch point services—Wireless and mobile devices;

Single repository—Security and speed;

Flexible Application Layer—Separation between the business logic layer and the presentation layer; and

Application robustness—Scaleable, stable, extensible and flexible (accept variety of industry standards: J2EE, XML, JSP, Java servlets, COM, CORBA, Web Services, .NET).

Using this framework, organizations can create a comprehensive Enterprise Content Management strategy to develop ECM infrastructure that meets their business objectives.

How to deploy an ECM strategy

“Best practices” steps to deploying an ECM strategy are as follows:

1. Conduct assessment of the existing applications portfolio: Existing applications should be subjected to an objective, “value-based” analysis that clearly identifies areas where action is needed. The analysis should be conducted to identify the true business value and contribution of applications in cost-effective management of ECM applications. Key factors to be considered include:

• Is the content being created in silos?

• Is the content searchable with intelligence?

• Are there redundancies in content?

• Does the application provide capability to produce knowledge management capability through interactivity?

• Does the application help in keeping the records and legal documents as per the statutory requirements?

Existing applications should also be evaluated for technical fit in the ECM framework. Many existing solutions do not fit in the ECM framework, and do not provide value to ECM initiatives.

2. Associate value management with ECM initiatives: An organization must create a “value-management approach” and associate it to the ECM framework. This will help you understand how the interaction of digital assets—both tangible and intangible—affects the bottom line. Associating enterprise value with the ECM process will help derive greater value for the enterprise. An enterprise value management approach h