ECM: Steps to a Successful Implementation

“ECM is expensive, which is why a low percentage of knowledge workers in an organization have access to ECM,” said Toby Bell, research vice president at Gartner.  “It’s also too hard to justify the system for everyone based on unclear return on investment (ROI) or other success measures.”

What’s the solution?  ECM systems can bring an organization huge benefits — are such systems really too expensive?  The answer is that they don’t need to be.

An organization needs to have focus and vision for what their ECM system will accomplish. That focus and vision can be hard to do and is one reason why many ECM systems aren’t as effective as they could be.  Like anything, and maybe even more so for ECM, up-front planning is essential to success.

Gartner has come up with some best-practice guidelines when choosing an ECM system.  Gartner recommends that prior to implementation of a large-scale ECM project that the organization spend at least nine months on planning and vendor selection.  And then plan to spend another five years putting the initial system in place with about 5 to 20 percent of their costs going towards maintenance.

Gartner has six recommendations that can help organizations save dollars on their ECM implementations.  They include:

1- Just don’t dump all your data and files into your ECM system.  You’re wasting time and money doing that. Plan on what data is relevant and will be useful in the system.  Get rid of old and duplicate information.  “Content Strategists” should be on the team to help determine what content should be stored.

2- Organize your content types and determine the appropriate type of metadata that will be associated with the documents.  If you are using automatic categorization, determine the rules that can identify content.

3- Have access to the right ECM skillsets.  If there are gaps in your organization’s skillsets, consider using the services of a Content Service Provider to help with consulting, implementation and other services.  Many ECM vendors, like Formtek, offer these types of services.

4- Create applications that interface to a central content repository.  This eliminates manually converting data from one format to another, such as data that may be used both for outward customer facing applications and internal applications used by employees.

5- Adoption of ECM can not only save costs by doing things like reducing paper, they can also contribute to making a ‘greener’ corporation.

6- Consider outsourcing non-core IT duties that support the ECM system.