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 !