As part of deploying an ECM system (enterprise content management), stakeholders must resolve the short-comings and business objectives of the implementation project.

If the goal is only to manage a lot or paper-based documents; or it may be records management (i.e. invoices, HR records, etc); or it might be to deploy a change management plan and disperse the documents that are in a repository; or to find a good way to build a business process for filing and pulling books.

In reality, your ECM vision will consist of a mix of these inefficiencies. So we advocate first pinpointing the reasons for the initiative. These might include:

Likely ECM Campaign Drivers

Corporate Regulations –

For many companies, such campaign are driven by the need to adhere to rules for storing digital content.

Management Directives –

Many organizations are compelled by a desire to go paperless as part of a larger executive goal.

High Price of Managing Paper –

With rising prices to store documents and wastefulness of taking information from physical records, ECM initiatives were conceived.

Efficient Disbursement of Information –

For companies that help the public, there may be a need to efficiently disperse data via websites or mobile devices. For example of a regulatory business that has to publish standards to a civic website.

Business Process Automation –

Your organization may want to invest in a current tool, and hence, want to combine the ECM software with other systems.

Application Retirement –

Retiring legacy systems may lay the foundation for a new system, often ending in some locations where ECM implementation may be useful.

Improving Control of Information Management –

Organizations tend to undertake ECM projects to control who has access to the content.

Now that you understand your project drivers , let's break up this initiative into smaller components.

SUCCESS INDICATORS

First identify the main reason and the most prominent inefficiency your project will address. This will assist you in deciding on the progress benchmarks and honing in on the benefits of ECM for your business. It is always preferrable to break up the program into smaller mini initiatives so that you can start measuring and celebrating routinely.

ASSET SIZE

Whatever the influencer is, you should know the amount of information must be retained in the repository. This will enable you to estimate the extent of infrastructure required for this system.

You also want to appreciate the speed of maturation for your content management system. This is crucial to IT teams that have to understand how much space they need to house the records. This data is also helpfull when allocating for the infrastructure as it applies to on-premise or third-party implementations.

INFORMATION SECURITY

Another necessary bit of content that must be acknowledged is the amount of sensitivity of this data. Do you have to keep it onsite? Can it be retained in a third-party?

You may want to get this information from the content owners.

FORMAT

What format of content are we referring to? PDF or other type? This data will come in handy when you know how disparate platforms are handling different types. You also must understand which formats will be addressed in the immediate programs compared to other types that potentially be part of your ECM system later-on.

ASSET CONSUMPTION

How asset will be consumed is also an important inquiry that you have to research in the beginning because it will inform the method of implementation process you do. Here is what you need to ask to help understand your consumption:

Does it mandate a decision workflow?
Does it have a process life-cycle?
What functionality will users have in the content?
What happens to the documents once it's in a library?
Do you want to hold documents per retention policies or do you need to hold it as an official record?
How will access permissions be decided and when?

CONTENT ORGANIZATION

Some systems empower the building of folders to manage content.

There are other tools that use the approach of creating a bucket of files and rely wholly on search and meta-data to find appropriate content.

It can, nonetheless, be somewhat baffling for some users because they may not know where content lives, causing resistance.

INGESTION

It can be assumed, all data migration campaigns will cover ingestion, whether it's from scanning or electronic upload.

When it comes to in person ingestion, it's vital to understand what kinds of content need to be ingested. Talking to end-users and learning their daily workflows can help you.

AUTOMATION

Now that we've discussed a repository, we can now weigh how users will operate with the assets. It can be assumed it will have to be sent through numerous parts of the company. These protocols can be a simple workflow or can be combined with other systems.

Whenever the documents must to be routed from where it’s retained, we can define it as business process management (BPM). BPM today is a built-in function of ECM systems.

Typically, you can begin with simple Document Management and then add BPM automation at a later time.

CONCLUSION

Understanding business needs is the most important aspect of any ECM roll-out, getting buy-in from your executive board and project team, and will culimate in the technology implementation completing within the time allowed and under budget.