The AIIM Blog
Keep your finger on the pulse of Intelligent Information Management with industry news, trends, and best practices.
Enterprise Content Management (ECM)
Without commitment, there’s no point in moving forward. In my opinion, the single most critical element in building an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) strategy is commitment. I’m talking about the type of commitment you make when you jump out of a plane. Not that I’m suggesting ECM is like skydiving; if skydiving goes wrong, the pain doesn’t last. Commitment can’t be limited to a select few within the organization. For sure, the senior leadership team needs to demonstrate its commitment, but commitment needs to be present throughout the organization. Consider this: regardless of how committed the senior leadership team is, if the rank and file don’t buy in failure is guaranteed. So how do you get commitment? Find out what resonates and build from there. Is the motivator risk mitigation, environmental responsibility, competitive advantage, or access to information? The likely scenario is that the motivator changes depending on whom you’re talking to. Your job is to sell the program to your stakeholders on their terms, not yours.
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Not all SMBs are the same. I work for an insurance company with about 30 people, but we are more like an insurance company than we are like most 30-person organizations. We have Accounting, Underwriting, Claims, Loss Control, IT -- all the things you would expect to find in an insurance company. The nature of our business simply allows us to function with a small staff. On the other hand, we are not enough like an insurance company to find value in the marketing materials you give to large insurance companies. If you want to market to us, you’re just going to have to get to know us. In many cases, given the amount of effort you (vendors) have to make for the limited amount of sales we can provide, it seems like you aren’t really interested. Or, you are only interested when the economy is bad – I’m hearing from a lot of interested vendors today.
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Making an ECM implementation successful requires planning and attention to detail. The best way to create the right solution is to identify organizational goals and priorities. Learn how to manage a successful implementation in our free guide.
Close your email client. The vast majority of us keep our email client open all day long, just in case an important message comes in. This leaves us vulnerable to distraction every time a message comes in, whether it's that important note from the boss, an invitation to a webinar that may or may not be of interest, or an update on next week's potluck.
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I recently came across an interesting concept sponsored by the NACHA folks -- the PayItGreen Alliance. The PayItGreen Alliance is a coalition of financial services companies that is committed to educating consumers and businesses about the positive environmental impact of choosing electronic payments, bills, and statements instead of paper. They encourage consumers to turn off the paper in their financial lives - specifically to use direct deposit, receive bills and financial statements electronically, and make payments electronically.
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I was thinking at last week's AIIM roadshow about the ingredients that enter into an effective document strategy. Here are my Ten Commandments. They are in no particular order, except the first one is intentionally first (kind of like the real Ten Commandments).
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Pam Doyle, from Fujitsu, gave an incredible presentation at the AIIM roadshow in Chicago which contained some interesting “fast facts” about document management that I thought were worth repeating. These reminders of the value of document management are particularly relevant given the coming tightening of IT resources:
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