Many discussions of ECM deployment issues center on topics like alignment with user needs, good implementation practices, or change management. Though important considerations, often it is the time spent in discovery and design at the beginning of a project that can have the greatest impact on achieving business value. In trying to make projects better by intensifying the focus on analysis we often overlook that increased deployment timeframes push out the financial benefit of a business investment. Taking into account the time value of money, this can result in the reduction of financial benefit, the need to turn elsewhere to achieve budgetary objectives, and the possible cancellation of an ECM project.
Not realizing value in the timeframe promised impacts business profitability. Acceleration must be a primary focus of any ECM implementation. Understanding the components of a Solution that lead to acceleration help Solution Providers make more attractive value statements about their offerings.
Solutions based on business software applications are created by combining software innovation and business expertise. These Solutions result in improvement in how business functions and they create value by being less expensive to implement and easier for people to adopt than other alternatives. But, decreasing time to value realization requires more than software innovation and business expertise. A Solution must also reflect deployment knowledge in the form of pre-configuration and functional knowledge as reflected in business best practices.
Through pre-configuration the Solution buyer can take advantage of the Solution provider’s past implementation experience thereby reducing the time spent discovering usage details, setting up software, and testing configurations. Though software innovation has the potential to improve user experience and drive greater acceptance it is the pre-configuration of those software innovations that reduce deployment timeframes.
Since not every configuration decision can be predicted, process analysis and design decision making still must take place. This is where knowledge of specific business uses as represented by published best practices reduces or eliminates the need for much of the education and experimentation that would have to take place to finalize configuration design. The more process specific and industry specific manner with which these best practices are described, the more they will contribute to accelerating deployment.
Solutions which combine software innovation with pre-configuration and formulize business expertise into published best practices will accelerate time to value. Given the current focus on cost reduction as a primary driver behind ECM projects, Solution providers would be well served by recognizing and focusing on crafting offerings with acceleration in mind.