8 Steps to Get Started on Your Enterprise Content Management Initiative

Gather high-level enterprise business requirements.

Once you have high-level direction from your stakeholders on scope, objectives, and success factors, you will be well-positioned to start defining your ECM strategy and implementation plan.

Conduct document surveys with key representatives from each business unit/organization to understand what content your company has and what content needs to be managed. Use this opportunity to gather high-level requirements as well as possible improvements in managing the content. Also, meet with regulatory representatives and understand their perspective on content across the enterprise.

This initial work will set a base for the enterprise implementation strategy as opposed to departmental implementations.

Select your ECM platform.

Based on the requirements gathered, conduct the selection of the platform according to your company standards. It’s important to select the product that is geared towards the main goals you want to achieve, whether that is process improvement, compliance (to industry, government, or internal regulations), or security and control of your content.

Design content architecture.

Not all of your enterprise content should be considered a company asset. Therefore, it does not need to be managed or retained in an Enterprise Content Management System. It’s important to define the criteria that make content eligible for the ECM system. Every company is different; therefore, the criteria are different. Some companies use ECM to improve processes, while others use it to improve compliance. In general, content that needs to be retained for business purposes, is associated with a process, or requires sophisticated security due to its sensitivity should be managed within an ECM system.

Based on document surveys, analyze what types of content you have across your enterprise, its commonalities and dependencies, and describe them with attributes (metadata, indexing criteria, properties, whatever team you like to use it). Create a high-level tree structure of identified content types to form your Enterprise Document Object Model.

Equipped with a high-level understanding of your content, you will be able to decide on the number of repositories required to house your content. The content needs to be logically grouped in repositories. Keep the number of repositories as small as possible. It’s advisable as part of this early phase to create high-level taxonomy (one or possibly two levels) for each repository.

Do an ECM portfolio analysis.

All ECM opportunities discovered through document surveys should be analyzed, grouped into projects, and ranked based on several criteria such as cost of implementation, the magnitude of improvement, implementation risk, risk of not implementing, etc. Depending on industry and company culture list and weighting of criteria will be different. This analysis will help you establish the priority of your ECM projects. This is an important step in establishing your implementation strategy. Depending on your company, you may want to start with some quick wins to establish your reputation and gain momentum, or you may start tackling the biggest pain points. Your ECM portfolio will need to get approved.

Create an ECM road map.

Create an ECM Road Map with project timelines and high-level details. This Road Map will effectively help you to:

• Communicate your plan to Stakeholders and other interested parties
• Do resource planning
• Manage the ECM platform – introduce new products (i.e., BPM, Records Management, etc.) to your ECM platform based on project needs
• Manage the ECM infrastructure - plan upgrades, and ongoing maintenance efforts

Note: Several products will comprise the ECM platform. The most common way is to build the base platform and extended as required.

Establish ECM standards.

Standardize as much as you can. ECM is a platform, and whether a single or many teams deploy applications onto it, it will curtail to follow the standards to maintained initially created order of your ECM system.

Establish:

• Content Architecture Standards
• Repository Standards
• Naming convention Standards
• Content/Document Analysis Standards
• Security StandardsInfrastructure and Installation Standards
• Integration and Coding Standards
• Communication Standards

Design logical and physical architecture.

By now, you have your product selected and ready to build your ECM Platform. You will need to design your logical architecture of the platform and define integration points with other applications. Once your logical architecture is approved, you will map it to actual physical servers and create physical architecture. These documents are very important living documents that are updated with each new project and product added to your ECM system.

Project execution.

To execute a project effectively, it’s advisable to set up an ECM program. Also, whenever possible, form an ECM center of excellence team because of the specific skill set required for ECM projects and the fact that projects are deployed onto the common ECM platform. Having a center of excellence team will ensure better conforming to established standards, make the management of infrastructure easier, and enable repeatability. All of these things will reduce the cost of your ECM projects significantly.