Many Content Management initiatives today involve the deployment, upgrade, consolidation, or replacement of ECM technology and/or an improvement in Content Management practices. Whether you’re looking at getting a handle on your file shares, putting project workspaces in place, doing something about your explosion of email, scanning in the mail room, automating a business process, or trying to do something to improve your existing ECM system, you need a plan. You need a Content Management Strategy.
You may have already invested time in creating a Content Management Strategy, maybe you have some bright eyed consultants in your office offering to develop one for you, or, perhaps, you’ve just been throwing pasta against the wall. (Hey, get it right and it will stick!) Whatever your situation, you may want to take a step back and look at what constitutes and Content Management strategy. Evaluate your situation, what is being presented to you, and look at how complete it is. If your it doesn’t cover these three things you may not be taking all the elements into consideration that you need to as you develop your ECM Vision and Roadmap.
A Content Management Strategy should include:
- A systematic plan designed to meet your Content Management improvement goals
- An understanding as to how your ECM system helps people work better
- Actions designed to get people to think differently about how they create and use information
Anyone with experience doing projects in a corporate environment understands the need for a systematic plan. Usually defining goals, expected results, value, and return is a prerequisite to project budget approval. Often, the justification that won budgetary approval can get you halfway to your systematic plan. A common issue that seems to come up though is setting priorities. There can be, at times, more demand than budget to cover the activities required to fulfill all the requirements the organization presents you with. Setting priorities means having a plan that is focused on the most important improvements at this point in time.
This is the challenge. Individuals may feel that their initiative, their project, should come first. Emotion can get in the way of logic and you may find yourself getting pushed to pursue an initiative that doesn’t solve the current problems of the organization. Setting objective measures to weigh each initiative will help your team communicate what the priorities should be and will give your sponsors and stakeholders the information they need to support you and make the right decisions. Things to look at in defining your measures could be related to the criticality of a regulatory issue, the need to improve information security, how well the project supports a compliance initiative, or the level of productivity improvements that will be achieved by addressing a particular project requirement. Letting someone know that their project isn’t getting first shot is easier when the decision has been made objectively in this way.
Defining the right set of requirements based on organizational priority is a critical step. This will ensure you are focused on the areas of value to the organization but creating value for the individual is also critical. If there isn’t a sense of individual benefit and enablement acceptance will be weak. The value and benefit of Content Management is lost or greatly reduced as long as individuals and groups continue to treat their electronic information the same way they have treated their paper information. Constant replication or not sharing information may appear to be minor annoyances but when this is done repeatedly over long periods of time ECM systems become swamped, information is lost, recreated, and costs mount. Taking into account how people in your organization look at the information they use and taking steps to try to move those perceptions becomes a critical activity. When successful, you will gain a greater sense of ownership and interest from ECM system users in improving their CM practices.
So now you’re probably saying, “Yeah OK, JP, but how in the heck do you expect to do that?” Fair enough, I acknowledge that we’re into some “squishy” stuff now. Things that are difficult and not easily addressed. Though these types of changes don’t happen overnight there are changes that can be made and should be a part of your strategic focus.
Often, ECM systems have been put up as infrastructure that users are expected to take advantage of in the same way as their email, or office productivity applications. In some cases, the ECM system was put up to address a departmental process requirement and then the system expanded to other groups as a general capability that they were expected to understand how to best leverage. Since users of ECM systems don’t optimize their Content Management practices if the use of the system isn’t aligned to the way they work it is common to see paper based processes being done with electronic content and not really taking full advantage of the ECM system.
To be intuitive, an ECM system must be configured to conform to business process or adapted to the business process when it changes. How this is done depends upon the ECM system and the primary processes users are engaged in when leveraging the system. It could be as simple as how the content is organized or creating entry pages that surface key content. Automation through the use of workflow or similar technologies maybe needed. Integration with other business applications might be necessary to get content into the system or to gain access to structured data needed to index the content being used.
The objective is to help people work better but this is also about helping people to think differently about the way they work. This is a critical distinction; a distinction which is at the core of creating greater value from your ECM system investment. I’ve seen implementations which went all out to meet every process requirement, create perfect user interfaces, and snag each process step. These projects were artful attempts to create truly user oriented ECM systems. These deployments often carried with them a heavy price tag, they often contained significant customizations, and they proved costly to maintain over time. None of this was necessary.
Yes, of course, we want to hit some critical areas of user experience and business process but what is often overlooked is that this is not just about helping people work better but this is also about helping people to think differently about the way they work. As people use these systems more and gain value from them, they will start to see ways they can work differently; new ways to get the job done better and easier. Ways of working that we would not be able to predict up front. By addressing the basics and getting the system into use, we give people the chance to experience ECM tools and improved Content Management practices, learn from the experience, and begin to create new ways of working. As specialists, it’s our job to encourage, coach, and train as this process takes place.
Investing in the creation of a process-perfect system doesn’t make a lot of sense if we understand the potential for the process to change and adapt. Rather than focusing on getting it all perfect the first time, money could be saved, and a better system created by focusing on incremental improvement based on user experience and feedback. The same is true for existing deployments. Often, once the problem is understood, all that is needed is small, incremental, changes in the ECM system and how it is being used to gain significant benefit and begin to change user behavior. How you get that user feedback and respond to it will be, in large measure, based on your approach to Content Management governance, another blog topic to check out on this site.