Brian Dirking is Principal Product Director for Oracle Content Management. He is a former AIIM Board member and very active in AIIM's Golden Gate Chapter. He tweets at bdirking and blogs on the Content blog. He can be found on LinkedIn .
[Note: The integration of content and processes will be explored in more detail at our upcoming seminar series. Have you registered for the AIIM Information Management seminar in your city? It's FREE. Sign up for the on .]
8 Things You Need to Know About Integrating Content Management With Enterprise Processes
1 -- Not all content is equal.
Some is important, some not so much so. There’s more content that’s not important than there is important stuff. The difficulty is in sifting through all the content to find the important stuff. In many cases you can base that upon metadata – the document type, the author – these can be key indicators of important content. But often you have to have other methods. A content use tracking system can be a good way to determine important content – less used content is less important. Some content is important to the enterprise, some is important to the individual. Some content is important only in the short term. A sales proposal might be important for 30 days. A marketing plan might be important for a year. Then there is some content that is not important on a day to day basis, but is important in the long term. You might not refer to your insurance policy for 35 years, but when you need it, it might be the most important document in the company.
2 -- If you need it in one system, you might also need it in another.
The important stuff tends to get reused. And mostly the important stuff of short term value. Business transaction information such as a shipment notice might appear in your ERP system and also in your CRM system, tied to a customer record. But reuse doesn’t mean copying – it’s good to have a system that allows one source of truth to be referenced from both systems.
3 -- When content is siloed, people bridge the gap.
In most companies, the siloed content (as well as siloed business processes) means that people fill in the gaps. Usually one person understands the process, and makes it happen. This is a sneakernet phenomenon. If that person goes on vacation or falls ill, the process stops. Make sure to at least document your processes if your organization can’t justify a full-blown BPM system. But if you can you will also gain flexibility – you can build in workarounds for when people are on vacation and the other types of things that pop up in everyday life.
4 -- Content doesn’t exist if it is not accessible.
If a tree falls in the woods, does anyone hear it? If a document is locked away on a hard drive, does it really exist? Documents that live on overused file shares, on local hard drives, on CDs, on thumb drives pose a problem. How do you get access to it when you need it? Like when the person who knows the process is out on vacation, when you can’t open their hard drive without a password, the content is inaccessible. Almost as if it didn’t exist.
5 -- Content that is too accessible causes risk.
How do you secure a document when it is sitting on a share drive? Or how do you secure it when it gets out of your organization? Lost laptops are one example. A malicious employee is another example. But everyday documents leave our organizations with our blessing. Documents being worked on at home, documents shared with partners or board members – lots of documents leave our premises everyday. DLP (Data Loss Prevention) vendors provide systems that patrol the perimeter of your organization, but that doesn’t address documents that willingly leave. How does an organization disable content after it has left?
6 -- Understand your green benefits.
Moving business processes to be keyed from electronic documents certainly can save your organization a lot of paper. But the other benefits are where you will really see the dollars add up. Eliminating shipping costs can have an impact. Saving storage space can be a huge benefit. But the real green benefits come in dollars saved by improving your business processes. Some organizations have saved as much as 90% by replacing paper systems with integrated electronic systems. Providing faster access to information for a more and more decentralized set of workers will keep your organization competitive.
7 -- Content in context raises value.
By integrating content directly into your enterprise applications, users can look up and refer to content from right in their enterprise application interface. No need to go down the hall and find invoices or employee documents in a file cabinet. No questions about is this the right documents, is it the latest one, etc. Content in context means faster resolution to questions, and more accurate answers.
8 -- Understand tech trends and know when they will collide.
There is a coming collision between Enterprise 2.0 and e-Discovery. Many organizations are beginning to experiment with Enterprise 2.0 (social media) functionality to improve collaboration and productivity (see the AIIM research). But how do you manage that content and where will it go? How do you make sure the content is kept for the appropriate amount of time? Is this information discoverable? Where will you go to perform e-Discovery? And most important, does your organization have a written policy about Facebook, Twitter, and other social media usage?
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Want to know more?
This essay will be one of the topics we explore at our upcoming seminar series.
Every Spring and Fall, AIIM runs a series of seminars to help end users understand the issues they will encounter in building an information management strategy.
Our theme this Spring -- 8 Ways Your Organization Can Improve Efficiency, Increase Productivity, and Reduce Risk.
Our six cities and dates are as follows.
Attendance is free! Check it out. We'd love to see you there.
- Seattle, March 9 (Tues)
- San Francisco, March 11 (Thurs)
- Anaheim, March 16 (Tues)
- Denver, March 18 (Thurs)
- Dallas, March 23 (Tues)
- Houston, March 25 (Thurs)
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