Your choice of ECM application is critical. Your plans for rollout and growth of enterprise content management within your organization will dictate the scale and complexity of the Enterprise Content management application that you choose. The importance of selecting your vendor shouldn’t be underestimated.
Ensure that the applications you are considering have been proven by a customer you respect. Most leading Enterprise Content Management vendors have tools and collateral to help you through your evaluation process. As an example, Enterprise Content Management Documentum has produced a very straightforward guide to Enterprise Content Management that makes no assumptions and spells out clearly the evaluation criteria you need to succeed.
Next, think about how the ECM system will work in your environment. No Enterprise Content Management system that is adding value to an important business problem will stand alone. Try to understand the flow of content in your organization. This is sometimes termed “the content value chain.” Where is content first created? It may come from domain experts in a specific department; it may come from an enterprise application (like a CRM or an ERP system); or it may come from outside the organization such as a partner, supplier, or external information source. Map the business process, taking care to understand how and where it crosses departmental or functional boundaries.
Once the business process is mapped, an impact analysis can be conducted and any required points of integration pinpointed. An assessment needs to be made of how much development work will be required, and how much customization needs doing. Then, the findings are matched with the resources available. Enterprise Content Management systems typically include integrated development environments (IDEs) to make development quicker and easier.
Assuming you’re convinced that you need to implement an Enterprise Content Management technology, what approach should you take as your first step? Should you launch a major implementation project across your whole organization, like you may have done in the late 1990s with your ERP systems? Or should you take a cumulative approach, implementing Enterprise Content Management departmentally, identifying high-value scenarios and accretive milestones for success, and building progressively across your company—the “start small, think big, and execute fast” strategy?
The answer is that both approaches are valid. There are clearly certain advantages to implementing Enterprise Content Management in an incremental fashion, as that will allow you to focus on a specific requirement set, obtain budgetary approval, and achieve payback as quickly as possible.
Do you need to comply with industry regulations and implement a compliance control system, where audit trails, electronic signatures, and longevity of content are paramount? If so, you need to start by implementing a document management system, possibly supplementing it with records management. Perhaps your most crucial requirement is managing your relationships with your suppliers and partners more effectively.
Business process management and collaborative workspaces can help you with that. On the other hand, if your most pressing challenge is to improve the quality and functionality of your customer-facing Internet sites, then you probably need to start with Web content management. There are many other examples of business critical content-centric processes for which content management systems are essential: catalogue management, policies production, new account openings, derivative processing, standard operating procedures management, invoice (or claims or application) processing, and so on. Again, identify the most pressing needs and look to implement Enterprise Content Management there first.
Some companies look at Enterprise Content Management in a holistic sense and seek to implement a corporate-wide content management backbone as their initial foray. Such companies view Enterprise Content Management as an infrastructure technology, in the same vein as they view a relational database or an ERP system. They may start department by department, but with a defined goal of connecting these departments to leverage content across their business processes. Few strategic business processes are confined to a single department and few are devoid of important, unstructured content. Companies with vision understand this.
It is extremely rare for an organization to stop at one enterprise content management application. Experience shows us that most medium to large-scale organizations implement at least three more content-centric applications after their initial experience. And here is another significant point: you will undoubtedly implement ECM in one form or another in more than one business area over time. Once you do that you will want to leverage content from one system to another.
