Organizations are in constant flux due to the variety of external forces that impact the policies, products, programs, and services they provide. In the public sector, there has been a notable shift in recent years to think about members of the public as customers versus clients, and to apply best practices around customer service often championed in the private sector to these interactions between staff and the community. Private sector organizations continue to experiment with parameters of the customer experience, and non-profit organizations strive to find the balance between these sectors. These external relationships also impact internal interactions within organizations where traditional bureaucratic structures are being managed with a customer service mindset.
You may be asking at this point what all this has to do with ECM? While a customer service focus has always been critical to ECM implementations that commonly rely on efforts like gathering business requirements and tracking workflow processes to determine next steps, we have an opportunity to expand beyond this customer-centered approach and move our relationships with stakeholders to the next level: that of a partner. There are three major objectives related to stakeholder engagement that can help you work towards successful partnerships in your organizations. These objectives include:
Successful ECM projects require participation from the end-users to work. If you have tried to implement a project without their involvement, I suspect that you may have run into challenges as those projects move forward. Lack of knowledge about ECM, constraints around time/scope/budget, lack of buy-in; these are all common barriers to stakeholder participation. Considerations of non-traditional project constraints are also important as well as you develop, sell, and support implementation plans.
What happens if you have large segments of your organization passively accepting or actively resisting changes to business processes? Is passive acceptance better or worse than active resistance? Although the answer may seem straightforward, your organization’s capacity to respond to these different scenarios can make all of the difference in how you prepare for and hopefully minimize these challenges.
Active partnerships create different dynamics in an organization than customer/service relationships. Think about the last time you were a customer: how did this impact your expectations and actions compared to an experience when you played a role as a partner? Words can be powerful, and while serving your customers is important and valuable, the assumptions and perceptions attached to this interaction will require different techniques than active partnerships to be successful.