Lately, I’ve been seeing a strong interest among ECM professionals and companies who have invested heavily in ECM technologies in understanding what makes for a successful ECM deployment. Like many, I came into ECM with a background implementing other enterprise applications. I deployed these other applications to the same types of companies and I assumed that the techniques I had used for these other enterprise applications would work just as well for content management application deployments. Now, I find myself questioning this assumption.
Having observed or been involved in hundreds of ECM deployments, I’ve noticed a consistent pattern in how people experience ECM use. We use Implementation Approach best practices that have developed from the trial and error of thousands of implementations of transactional systems: analyzing user requirements, designing future state processes, prototyping configuration design, acceptance testing, constantly striving for more user involvement in our deployment process.
But, the best formed implementation method and practice cannot take into account the shifting of user perspective, post deployment. Where we thought there existed clarity of understanding of the system, how it could be used, the usage choices that were made, and how a refined business process would function in the newly introduced system, what we find is that as people “live” with the system, using it on a day to day basis to do their job, their perspective of the ECM technology and what they expect from it, changes.
My impression has been that as an ECM Professional, my sense of ECM technology is different and doesn’t always seem to get across to those I’m trying to help. Understanding a customer's business, I can envision how their use of ECM technology will improve the way they work. But, my perspective is a product of my experience seeing how it has been used by others. Without this experience of seeing examples and hearing stories of improvement, often it is only after the experience of using the system, day in and day out, do non-technical people seem to understand how to optimally integrate ECM into their day to day worklife. When these “ah hah!” moments take place, often users will want to revise usage or find new usages. Often when this happens, a gap is created between the ECM solution that was deployed and the way it needs to be used.
Classic approaches to training and deployment don’t seem to address this. ECM system users who have gone through best practice deployments and well thought out training programs will experience this. As ECM professionals, we need to ask ourselves, “How can we alter our perspective of what constitutes ECM deployment best practices in a way that best accounts for this dynamic?”
The answer to this question will be the topic of my next posting.
JP