is ECM Architect with The Dominion of Canada General Insurance Company. During her 15 year career in the field of ECM she gained wide experience in all aspects of ECM implementations from defining strategy and roadmap to design and implementation. Adisa can be reached at .
Get the complete list of all 8 things articles (there are now 63!) and access to 2 free e-books by clicking HERE.
8 Steps to Get Started on your Enterprise Content Management Initiative
1 -- Gather high level Enterprise Business Requirements
Once you have high level direction from your Stakeholders on Scope, Objectives and Success Factors you will be well positioned to start defining your ECM Strategy and implementation plan.
Conduct document surveys with key representatives from each business unit/organization to understand what content your company has and what content needs to be managed. Use this opportunity to gather high level requirements as well as possible improvements of managing the content. Also meet with regulatory representatives and understand their perspective on content across the enterprise.
This initial work will set a base for the enterprise implementation strategy as opposed to departmental implementations.
2 -- Select your ECM platform
Based on the requirements gathered, conduct selection of the platform according to your company standards. It’s important to select the product that is geared towards main goals you want to achieve whether that is process improvement, compliance (to industry, government or internal regulations) or security and control of your content.
3 -- Design Content Architecture
Not all content of the enterprise is company asset therefore it does not need to be managed, retained or kept safely in an Enterprise Content Management System. It’s important to define the criteria that make content eligible for ECM system. Every company is different therefore the criteria are different. Some companies use ECM to improve processes some to improve compliance. In general content that needs to be retained or have strong process associated with or is sensitive in nature requiring sophisticated security is a good candidate to be managed within an ECM system.
Based on document surveys analyze what types of content you have across your enterprise, its commonalities and dependencies, and describe them with attributes (metadata, indexing criteria, properties, whatever team you like to use it).Create high level tree structure of identified content types to form your Enterprise Document Object Model.
Equipped with high level understanding of your content you will be able to decide on number of repositories required to house your content. The content needs to be logically grouped in repositories. Keep the number of repositories as small as possible. It’s advisable as part of this early phase to create high level taxonomy (one or possibly two levels) for each repository.
4 -- Do an ECM portfolio analysis
All ECM opportunities discovered through document surveys should be analyzed, grouped into projects and ranked based on several criteria such as cost of implementation, magnitude of improvement, implementation risk, risk of not implementing etc. Depending on industry and company culture list and weighting of criteria will be different. This analysis will help you establish priorities of your ECM projects. This step is a very important one in establishing your implementation strategy and again depending on the company you may want to start with some quick wins to establish reputation and gain momentum or you may start tackling the biggest pain points. Your ECM portfolio will need to get approved.
5 -- Create an ECM Road Map
Create an ECM Road Map with project timelines and high level details. This Road Map will effectively help you to:
- Communicate your plan to Stakeholders and other interested parties
- Do resource planning
- Manage the ECM platform – introduce new products (i.e. BPM, Records Management, etc) to your ECM platform based on project needs
- Manage the ECM infrastructure - plan upgrades, and ongoing maintenance efforts
Note: Several products will comprise the ECM platform. The most common way is to build the base platform and extended as required.
6 -- Establish ECM Standards
Standardize as much as you can. ECM is a platform and whether a single or many teams deploy applications onto it, it will be curtail to follow the standards to maintained initially created order of your ECM system.
Establish:
- Content Architecture Standards
- Repository Standards
- Naming convention Standards
- Content/Document Analysis Standards
- Security Standards Infrastructure and Installation Standards
- Integration and Coding Standards
- Communication Standards
7 -- Design Logical and Physical Architecture
By now you have your product selected and ready to build your ECM Platform. You will need to design your logical architecture of the platform and define integration points with other applications. Once your logical architecture is approved you will map it to actual physical servers and create physical architecture. These documents are very important living documents that are updated with each new project and product added to your ECM system.
8 -- Project Execution
To have effective project execution it’s advisable to set up ECM program. Also, whenever possible form an ECM center of excellence team because of specific skill set required for ECM projects and the fact that projects are deployed onto the common ECM platform. Having a center of excellence team will ensure better confirming to established standards and will make management of infrastructure easier, enable repeatability which will reduce cost of projects significantly.
Get the complete list of all 8 things articles (there are now 63!) and access to 2 free e-books by clicking HERE.
Sponsored link -- Information strategy seminar -- How to improve efficiency, increase productivity, and reduce risk
Recent Comments