Capitalize on Business Information. Put It to Work. HP’s Adaptive Approach to Enterprise Content Management

ECM: A key part of your information management strategy.
Our experience shows that it is critically important to consider and plan for the full information lifecycle from the capture of paper and digital content through its management, and then its delivery, archiving and deletion, as shown in Diagram 1 (See PDF version or Page 12 of Supplement).

We look at the overall enterprise value chain and then create the holistic information/content management strategy to support it. For example, at a high level, Diagram 2 (See PDF version or Page 13 of Supplement) shows how HP's sales and marketing content management solution fits into our overall enterprise model.

It is vital that you consider your content management strategy to be a key part of your enterprise information architecture, because content impacts your whole organization, extending out to your customers and partners. Its impact is more far-reaching than that of any new HR or ERP system. If you get it right, you will have an organization that is empowered with information and knowledge. If you get it wrong you will lose competitive advantage.

What have we learned by implementing solutions for our customers? HP uses the same philosophies and approaches outlined above to implement solutions for our customers. The results of those engagements and the best practices they produced mirror the findings and recommendations that came out of our internal ECM solution deployment. In summary:

• Plan big, yet start with small, high-value steps. It is essential that your overall ECM strategy and plan are an integral part of your enterprisewide information management strategy. But following the relevant advice that suggests eating an elephant in small chunks, you need to identify and prioritize your first project implementations, and then build on your success and progress across the enterprise.
• Quick wins. You need quick wins to gather and grow momentum. For your first implementations, select projects that have the most valuable business benefits and that can be implemented in a relatively short time. To ensure quick success, they should also have existing, well-developed business processes that are suited for automation. Finally, if possible, initial projects should be within one department or business organization to ensure strong management and team ownership, authority and responsibility.
• Executive sponsorship. As with all projects that potentially have wide-reaching impact, ensure you have high-level executive sponsorship that stays committed and actively involved at all stages.
• Users are key. The success of your project depends on uptake and adoption by all your content users—creators and recipients. So:
  • Design and build for ease of use.
  • Automate metadata tagging as much as possible. Our experience is that manual input of more than two metadata  items leads to inaccurate tagging.
  • If possible, employ the user interface from existing office applications to reduce need for training and increase speed of user uptake.
  • Communicate to users throughout the project lifecycle—for example, create user communities, newsletters, an internal website that shows progress—whatever fits your organization's culture and will likely increase user enthusiasm.
  • Make the users feel that the solution is theirs and it is not being imposed on them
• Measure and internally publicize benefits. At the outset, build a clear business case with measurable business goals. A couple of real life examples: reduce the response to a customer query from 24 hours to 3 seconds, decrease property record search time three-fold. As the project rolls out, track and measure the achievement of these goals you set and make sure that the results are highly visible across your organization.
• Make heroes and create evangelists. For every project implemented, make sure that there are recognized user heroes who will then become your evangelists and champions for further growth of ECM across your organization. It really helps if they are willing to talk to other groups about the benefits it brought to them and are willing to demonstrate their solution to others.

As Samuel Johnson said in 1775: "Knowledge is of two kinds—we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it." In 2006 we need to have organizations that can find information on a subject easily, quickly and globally.