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ECM: Dirty Data Costs Money
Garbage in, garbage Out. Everyone has heard that expression. And it is good advice when applied to content management systems. Be selective in choosing the data that you want to maintain. When setting up a new content or document management system it is tempting to just start dumping data into it. But doing that is a recipe for disaster. Before deploying any system, careful up-front planning to understand the type of data and documents you will store, how you will organize your data, and what additional metadata you will need to collect is essential.
A first step in addressing the problem of choosing the right data and documents is to define and build your content data model. Some ECM systems provide great flexibility in allowing users create groups of metadata elements that can dynamically be assigned to documents and data. Alfresco, for example, uses the concept of Aspects that allows grouping of metadata.
A Records Management aspect is an example of how Alfresco can add to and extend an existing content model. In the case of RM, RM-specialized metadata is required for classifying and managing the lifecycle of the record; data that’s unrelated to the type of content that is being managed. Not all data needs to be classified as records, so creating a single superset content model of all possible metadata that could be collected, and then applying that model across all documents would be a waste of space because the RM-specific pieces of metadata would be used by only a subset of all documents. Instead an aspect allows the addition of RM-metadata to a document only when needed.
Similarly, core content models can be extended with additional metadata components with Alfresco aspects like ‘Versionable’ and ‘Publishable.
