At Cross Roads

As part of ECM Implementation best practices, I have harped enough about phased roll-outs, department wise roll outs on multiple occasions. Its best if you could stick with one implementation and one department to ensure high success rate. Companies generally tend to stick to this direction unless there is a compelling reason not to.

Now I am actually at cross roads !

We are in the middle of discovery sessions for one specific department in a company. Suddenly there is this other department that is now interested to get started on an ECM solution.

The IT project team is all queasy about this whole thing. Whats the best way to go about ? Take baby steps and go one department at a time ?

I decided to look at the pros and cons.

Pro's of partnering:

• The choice of the right product for Enterprise as a whole.
• The "Infrastructure setup" rules and decisions. At the end of the Discovery we will have a fair idea about the over-all Enterprise application architecture.
• Possibly negotiate with vendors for Enterprise licenses rather than per user license (which they generally push for).
• ECM is all about the "E". Its meant to be for the enterprise !

Con's of Partnering:

• Losing sense of direction with too many 'wants' ?
• Departments with varied business processes , do we want to cram it all at once ?
• Varied interest among user communities - can it jeopardize the whole implementation attempt ?

I cant go further. The Pro's seem to win !

However there is this small sense of uneasiness with the negatives. Somebody help me !

Content Generation - Is this sudden ?

Doesnt it feel like there has been a sudden increase in the content generated across companies ? Yeah, I know thats really the obvious given ! Who ever you talk to seem to say they need a system to manage the giga bytes of content that the company is going to generate and it is bound to grow exponentially.

Something to ponder over - what has changed in the last few years that everyone is rushing towards some form of content Management ? I mean companies have been operating in a certain way for years now and their core line of business and process remains the same. So why then is this rush ?

I tried to pull up some reasons and group them under the different branches of ECM.

Document Management: Some real drivers for any document management initiative are to go paperless, regulatory compliance, reduce hard copy storage costs, easy retrievals and look up, version control, reduction in manual labour for maintenance. So all the companies wanting to paperless have this urge to get into electronic form of document management. It involves converting a bulk of documents that exisit as hard copies into electronic forms and move towards digitized solutions in future. So there is the first area that is responsible for generating large scale content!



Web Content Management: The internet these days has become a competitive medium for companies to present their capabilities. In the last few years the concept of portal, personalization, commerce have picked up very well, not to forget the branding ! It important to present the best information on the website and something that is forever fresh. Yes, dynamic content ! So when content generation becomes dynamic the importance of Web content Management becomes self explanatory. Until the early nineties, we still were in the world of html's. Late nineties and 21st centruty saw the birth of jsp's, jhtml's, shtml's etc. There is the second area responsible for generating content !



Records Management: Every industry is governed by some form of Federal regulation. With the growing amount of research papers, IP's, patents, trademarks, Records Management has become the first in line item for all companies. Nobody wants to be caught in a law suit. So the answer lies in efficient management of what the company identifies as "Record". And along with it comes the third area that generates content !


Email Management: Emails are the way of the masses, leave alone companies. An average corporate inbox I feel generates atleast 30 to 40 mails an hour ! Storage and retention of email information is the buzz word in the world of ECM now. The criticality of business information exchanged over emails seems to be increasing its valumes and there by adding to the fourth area responsible for generating content !


Knowledge Management: Information re-use in organizations is the 'in thing' now. Knowledge bases and repositories are nothing but a store house of content of some form. And the growth of this content seems incessent somehow, adding to the areas that generate content!


Imaging: Although indirectly a subset of document management it is worthwhile to mention the various tracks of Imaging like, forms processing, image processing, document scanning, digital asset management, that only add to another area that generates content.

I am sure there is more to it that whats listed above. But to some extent I do know now why there are all the vendors that there are and why ECM is the hottest topic of discussion across.

On a side note, this morning i saw a small note on my AT and T return envelope where the stamp zone read - Pay online at att.com/treelover !! The message was to really go paperless to save trees. That indirectly trigerred my thought process around this Content Generation fact re -finding.

Paperless World !!