Should I Hire a Consultant to Help with My ECM Implementation?

Businesses need to act swiftly in order to maintain a competitive advantage, but swift action without proper planning results in unnecessary delays, potential compliance risks, and increased costs. As much as 40% of an ECM implementation’s costs could be the result of rework due to poor planning and requirements gathering.

Many organizations use a technology-first approach to quickly address a perceived business problem, often coming up short in their results. Enlisting experienced services personnel, with expertise in requirements gathering, ECM technology application, and process improvement ensures that a thorough assessment has been conducted, problems identified, stakeholder issues and considerations contemplated, process improvements made, and proper technology applied.

There are typically 3 types of external help you can procure. These are help from an external consultant in modeling processes, shaping the requirements specification and selecting systems; professional services supplied by a vendor post-selection to plan and drive the implementation; and help from a Systems Integrator (SI) to stitch together different elements and sub-systems, and to help with integration to existing enterprise systems.

Using the rework costs as an example, it stands to reason that an additional investment of 15% upfront to get the requirements and planning correctly can save you as much as 30-40% in rework costs after the fact. As a first step forward:

• Assess your internal expertise and identify the gaps
• Solicit your suppliers and external resources to fill in where you need the expertise
• Look at the process, content, and people before applying technology
• Assess options of on-premise versus cloud applications, and mobility can be used to augment or supplement the traditionally high-value proposition of ECM Solutions

By engaging external services help you achieve three things:

1. Objectivity – a view from outside your business looking in
2. Domain knowledge – how do other companies like us craft the system to solve similar problems
3. Momentum – meeting the milestones set by the (paid-for) consultant will keep the project moving.

Additionally, when it comes to change management, external resources can help develop and deliver a good, objective training about the project, process changes, and technology use, as opposed to product-specific user training from just a software vendor. This will get your people onto the same page as the services consultant, creating much more of a team effort, and will also help drive user acceptance.