Today's 8 things guest columnist is Sanooj Kutty. Sanooj specializes in web site management and marketing, business process, enterprise content and records management technologies.
He has worked in India and the Middle East in varying roles covering Business Development, Business Analysis, Business Process Management and Electronic Records Management. He also pens his own blog, Sanooj's Guide to Information Management and can be contacted on .
8 Perspectives in ECM Projects That Can Make Me See Double
Every time I am deeply immersed in an ECM project, I wind up cross-eyed. That is because there are so many competing and often inconsistent perspectives that must be incorporated into the project.
These 8 cross-eye creating perspectives are mostly generic and are not specifically in an order of priority as I truly believe they are all equally important in their own way.
Now one could argue that all these perspectives are so closely related to each that they are not really unique. I would argue that these perspectives are like octuplets, similar and connected, and yet each with its own unique character. So my task is to help you differentiate these octuplets and help you identify them all -- e.g., the one with the black mole on the left cheek, the short-tempered one, the quiet one, etc. etc.
1. Strategy Perspective
While ECM related projects hover around organizational policies, procedures and processes, business strategies are usually business unit driven. Often organizations fail to think about the impact of ECM projects on their business strategies. This creates strategy silos that throw up the dependencies and impacts at the far end of the ECM implementation. By this time, much money, time and effort has been put in and this forces management to search for workarounds to address unresolved strategic inconsistencies.
It is better to spend time at the front end of a project identifying: 1) the key areas of your business that require a strategic change; and 2) the current processes and human and system resources related to these strategies. You will be better placed knowing exactly your current strategies before embarking on charting new strategies.This helps you minimize redundancies and conflicts.
2. Consulting Perspective
In the same way that strategies are often siloed at the business unit level (making it impossible to align them at the corporate level), so too are the skills and resources of consultants. Consultants with particular approaches and methodologies are often retained at the business unit level and focused on a single business process. As a result, consultants often conduct redundant studies and present conflicting or contradicting recommendations.
The end result is that same information is being managed differently in different departments without the organization being aware of this variation. One needn't say more on the consequences.
3. Project Perspective
Ensuring a synchronization of the various information management projects through the organization is very important. Identify a Program Sponsor for your ECM initiative is only the first step. Often a useful approach is to create a committee reporting to the Program Sponsor and where project alignments are put on the table through regular meetings.
4. Process Perspective
There are many definitions out there for a process.
Organizations will often create a project map using a tool like Visio to represent a process, and diligently capture all of the functions and events in that process. That's a great first step. But what often avoids the analytical radar is the information associated with a process - information that is a combination of both documents and data.
Processes get defined by business units such as sales or manufacturing or finance. However, the challenge comes when these processes cut across business units. Just like the electric grid, an organization's processes are also a grid. This grid may of course be broken down into smaller grids for greater control. A key challenge is to understand how the information that surrounds a business process flows across business units.
5. Cultural Perspective
Culture has two flavors - corporate and ethnic. The paradigm shift that some strategic projects bring about can lead to a change in the corporate culture of most organizations. While this is the most often addressed cultural element, the ethnic factor in multinational businesses is also important. The perspectives of the process participants are not necessarily the same as those of the owners. When evaluating a cultural impact, a bottom-up approach that addresses both the corporate and ethnic elements of culture is recommended, starting from the end business user and rising up to the senior most management.
6. Business Unit Perspective
If you do have the earlier criteria under control and in clarity, managing different departments is another challenge having its own set of hurdles. For ages, departments have always had conflicting views and interests.
There is never a smooth middle road. Win-win is too much to ask for and it's best to accept that you win some and you lose some.
One of the key factors to focus upon is ownership of information. Organizations need to develop the perspective that information is never owned by any single department, it is and will always be owned by the organization. Development of business rules, on the other hand, may be led by one department with other departments playing support roles. Senior management cannot isolate itself from these discussions and will have to step down a few steps to achieve consensus and ensure progress.
7. Systems Perspective
The legendary Business versus IT battle is mostly fought here. Business has always made the case that systems are procured to satisfy a business need and IT is only responsible for implementing and maintaining systems. IT, on the other hand, claims that since an IT system needs to be deployed, the ownership must lie with IT.
Let's step away from the digital world for a moment and ponder a different scenario. If a town administration wants to build a new road, do contractors decide where the road must be built? No, the administration has full ownership to decide where the road must be built.
However, the administration is not the one who must decide how the road must be built and which materials must be used. That's best left to the contractors who have the experience and the knowledge to build the road.
This applies to the legendary Business versus IT battle. Manage it just like the construction industry has for ages.
8. Global Perspective
Businesses are no longer constrained to one single country or market. Globalization has caught on like an epidemic -- today's entrepreneur thinks globally from the start.
Regulations vary from country to country. While some regulatory authorities are very mature about it, others are still on the learning curve. Ensuring you have studied the compliance requirements or lack thereof across the markets in which you operate or intend to operate in the foreseeable future can help you model an effective ECM solution.
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