C3 Associates Inc.

Creating the right organizational structure for your ECM program can set the stage for success. In the first of a two part article, I will talk about the roles and responsibilities that should be included in your ECM team.

But first, a caveat. The roles as well as the org structures I will discuss next time are intended to be a starting point. We don't live in a perfect world (at least I don't, not so sure about you…) and we can't always count on creating the ideal organizational structure. Existing structures, HR policies, sponsorship issues and other organizational dynamics can get in the way.  My goal is to give you a guideline based on my experience with what works.

And one final point. Although many of the roles listed below are called "teams" this can often be one person or multiple roles can be performed by a single person, depending on the scale of your organization, your budget and your ECM program.  Again, this is a guideline to help you develop a structure that works best for you and your organization.

Steering Committee

The role of the steering committee is akin to that of the Board of Directors of a company; they provide high-level direction for the activities of the ECM program and sign off on major program deliverables.   The steering committee should be made up of senior executives (ideally C-level executives or, if that isn't feasible in your organization, their direct reports).

Your project sponsor should be a member of your steering committee and should be your go-to person when you need to escalate issues or if you need business guidance. You should have regular meetings with your steering committee. Ideally once a month but no less than quarterly.

Program Manager

The Program Manager  runs the ECM program and is responsible for the initiatives conducted under the ECM banner. This person is ultimately responsible for all deliverables, budgets, timelines and program objectives. Some specific tasks of the program manager include:

• - Drive the creation and execution of the ECM strategy
• - Liaison to the steering committee
• - Manage vendor relationships
• - Hire and manage the ECM team
• - Contribute to or lead the development of an appropriate information architecture
• - Identify, track and act upon key metrics for the ECM program

Project Team

The project team leads the implementation and design of discrete ECM initiatives. This can include document imaging rollouts, shared drive migrations, team site deployments, the creation of new workflows, system upgrades and many other projects.

The core skills on your project team should be a combination of strong project managers and ECM-savvy business analysts. I have often seen these roles combined and this is my preferred structure. Only in very large projects will you require a standalone project manager

Information Governance Team

The information governance team is responsible for the creation and implementation of your ECM governance framework . This includes aligning ECM activities with the relevant corporate policies by creating guidelines, standards and procedures related to ECM.

The information governance team also works closely with the project team to develop and implement metadata standards, taxonomy standards and the overall information architecture for your ECM solution.  They are the "go-to" team for questions about content disposition or exceptions to your ECM principles (for example, when is it okay to copy content rather than link a single document in multiple locations).

And yes, the information governance group also includes the more traditional records management roles. This includes the creation and application of a corporate retention and disposition schedule and can also include the management of a records centre or corporate library.

Change Management Team

This role is responsible for ensuring that your end user community is ready, willing and able to adopt ECM. While this  activity is often rolled into the accountabilities of the projects team, in my experience it is best to have a person or a team dedicated to ensuring the significant changes that can come from an ECM implementation are accounted for. This is often the single biggest cause of ECM project failure. When we consider that the change required to succeed with many core use-cases for ECM (for example, moving from a "File / Save As…" world to the need to add metadata to a simple MS Office document), there is little wonder end users will often rebel.

The change management team works actively with the project teams and the program office to ensure they incorporate good change management practice as part of each project plan.  The information gathered as part of this process is incorporated an overall change management strategy, which identifies the change impact of each ECM activity and ensures that communication, training and support plans  are in place to ease the end user transition to your ECM solution.

Training Team

The training team's role is relatively straightforward; ensure that your user community knows how to use the ECM toolset.  This is often more of an art than a science. My advice is to focus on providing your end users with "one best way" for performing a particular task. Even though the tool likely supports a variety of methods for achieving the same thing, there's nothing more confusing than giving someone three ways to save a document.

The training team should be ECM experts in their own right. Although it can be tempting to repurpose existing trainers to also provide ECM training, the complexities and subtleties of ECM are often lost on people who are not experts. Where this isn't possible, use the ECM experts from your other teams to implement a "train the trainer" approach.

Support Team

Your support team is often made up of members of your projects team, change team or training team (or all the above).  The role of the support team is to provide second-level support to your end user community. They must be ECM experts and should know the nuances of your ECM toolset very well. They will work closely with your help desk and technical team to identify and trend issues, and will help prioritize system fixes or enhancements.

Technical Team

Your technical team is tasked with keeping your ECM system up and running. Despite the complexities of ECM applications, you know this team is successful when it looks easy.  Technical teams generally have development groups, operational / system administration groups and may also have their own infrastructure groups.

It is critical that your technical team have a close working relationship with your all other teams. Although your projects, change, training, governance and support teams should be ECM experts, the best solutions come from open conversations with the technical team.  This will ensure that the implications of any proposed customizations, new modules or other system changes are well understood and communicated to your user community.

Other Roles

We can't forget end users, of course. They're the reason we are doing all of this in the first place. Ensure that you have a good feedback loop through each of your teams so the end user experience is  understood and incorporated into the continuous improvement of your ECM program.

It is also common to have a close relationship between the ECM team and the communications and / or portal team. There groups are often a separate entity, but there is significant overlap in areas like governance and information architecture.

The Role of Consultants

It is important to recognize that consultants or vendor professional services teams can and should play a role in your ECM program. They have the expertise that comes from having implemented ECM in a variety of different organizations and you should be able to take advantage of their knowledge and experience.

However, when working with consultants it is critical to have an employee assigned to shadow the consultant and ultimately take over their role. Although it can be valuable to engage consultants to establish or revamp your ECM program, it can be risky to become too reliant on them.  If your consultants don't want to mentor your employees to eventually replace them, find different consultants. 

I hope this has been a useful guide. Next time I will share some sample ECM organizational structures. In the meantime, I welcome your comments and feedback.

Cross-posted to my AIIM ECM Expert Blog.

The last post on my AIIM blog generated a lot of very good feedback about whether it is ever okay to maintain two separate repositories, one for collaborative content and one for records. This proved very helpful as I put together some recommendations about this topic for a client. One very nice thing about the blogosphere is that I have the choice as to whether or not I take a stand on an issue; in this case I decided to walk a fine line and look at both sides of the issue. Unfortunately, one doesn’t have that luxury in client work. I needed to make a recommendation and that meant taking a stand.

And my stand is this: I believe we shouldn’t give up on the information lifecycle.

Although it is tempting to think that by using separate systems, one for “collaboration” and one for “records” we can remove the burden on end users from worrying about how to classify a document, I believe this is false economy.

The risks of separating collaborative and records content can be high. Having a formal records platform for only final records leaves the very good question of what becomes of all the drafts and versions that led to the document becoming final. I’m no lawyer, but I can tell you that in any discovery process you will be asked for the draft and work in progress documents even if you have legitimately disposed of your “record” copy.

I agree with those who commented that we can’t always achieve perfection. My post from last month speaks to this and I definitely stand by the fact that we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I believe we can have “good” even while not losing sight of the information lifecycle. Although those words may scare some people, information lifecycle management doesn’t necessarily equate to a lot of overhead. In fact, proper information lifecycle management should mean LESS overhead.

The term I’ve used in the past is “subversive” RM. By this I mean end users don’t know (and probably don’t care) about when something is declared a record or what the classification is. This can be achieved relatively easily by using simple metadata inheritance at the container level.

I advocate a big bucket approach instead of a big budget approach. Wherever possible consider creating a retention schedule based on retention period instead of content type. This means that users likely won’t be able to use retention as a search item but let’s face it, most users don’t use records classifications as search terms anyway.

At the end of the day it comes down to business value and risk. Every ECM project should focus on maximizing business value while minimizing risk. Clearly it can be a challenge to rationalize these two things but in my next post I will address strategies for creating an ECM organization structure that can help resolve these questions and help you achieve your content management goals.

I had two very similar and very surprising discussions with different clients this week. Both organizations have mature ECM implementations and in both cases have had their ECM programs in place for more than a decade. The original mandate of their programs was to manage all information through its entire lifecycle, following AIIM’s advice to capture, store, manage, deliver and preserve all unstructured content.

But a funny thing happened on the way to ECM nirvana. Both organizations decided to pursue a “parallel” strategy; one system for collaboration and work-in-progress documents and one for “official records” or final versions (often copies) of documents that have completed the collaboration cycle (and yes, the rise of SharePoint plays a part in this decision, but that’s a discussion for another day).

I will freely admit my first reaction was “are you nuts?” After all, as a red-blooded ECM professional my mission in life is to reduce duplication and promote information lifecycle management. But I’m always willing to listen to both sides of any story (and they’re my clients so they’re always right, right?).

On the positive side, establishing a process to manage only final copies of records mirrors the paper world; if an organization has a well-established physical file management system why not try to replicate that in the electronic world? The other benefits are that final versions of documents are more likely to have a natural structure which leads to more intuitive metadata and greater discoverability (at least in theory), and content disposition is simplified because the retention schedule for “official” copies is often easier to determine.

On the other hand, isn’t the point of ECM to manage information through it’s lifecycle? If we are never going to achieve true ECM why do it at all? You also have the problem of costs; the cost to train people to know when to move a document to its final state and to know where to put it can be high; this is especially true if those people don’t attend training or if they do, still choose not to move final copies to the approved location. The alternative is to assume that any documents that need to be moved to an official repository will be managed by administrative personnel. Again, this increases costs and impacts efficiency, both areas ECM is intended to improve. And there are always the potential risks (and risks always translate into costs one way or the other) from duplicate content in multiple systems. This is gravy for lawyers in an eDiscovery process because it creates the possibility of confusion about which version was used to make a decision.

At the end of the day it is difficult to say definitively which is the best approach. Every organization is unique and has its own history, business drivers, processes and rationale for certain courses of action. General ECM best practice would dictate that information is managed through its lifecycle using a single system or at least seamlessly integrated systems, but this isn’t always possible. What I will say is that minimizing duplication and streamlining business processes through good information management usually means managing the information lifecycle. This should be the approach wherever possible and I suspect in most cases this will be the most cost effective approach in the long term.

Ensuring you have a good understanding of the capabilities of your current platform will also help; in many cases the traditional ECM tool may be perceived to have “failed” but in fact meets all of your functional requirements. The other alternative is to look into the possibility of integrating a collaboration platform with a system of record. Even if the truth is both of these platforms are technically capable of managing the information lifecycle, if users perceive that one is better than the other for a particular task you will have more success managing more content, and that’s really what we are trying to achieve.

I was in Edmonton, Alberta last week presenting at the first AIIM Western Canada chapter session to be held there. It was a big success and I want to thank Damian Hollow, Steve Widen and the entire AIIM Western Canada board for their efforts in organizing this fantastic event. For those of you in Calgary we’ll be holding the same session on June 6th. Details and signup information can be found here.

The participants were a diverse group but there were many records managers in attendance. The session itself was very interactive and we had a great discussion about Microsoft SharePoint and the future of ECM.

One of the most interesting aspects of the discussion was an attitude shift from many, if not all of the records professionals in attendance. In the past I have observed that many RM-led ECM initiatives have focused on the records management aspects of the content to be managed. Often this meant that end users were trained to file their documents into a structure that mirrored the corporate records retention schedule. While this might make perfect sense to records managers, unfortunately most users in your organization are probably not records managers. As a result, many implementations failed to meet user adoption targets because users didn’t feel the structures they were being asked to use fit the context of their regular business day.

I call this the 20/80 approach; 20% of your content is managed perfectly while 80% is scattered across partially-deployed ECM systems, email inboxes and shared drives.

Amongst the records professionals at the AIIM event, however, there was a clear shift in attitude and approach over what I have experienced with similar groups in the past. They strongly believed that building business-focused structures and small-but-mighty metadata models tailored to core business processes was preferable, even at the expense of “perfect” records management. This is the manifestation of what I have long believed; it is better to have 80% of your content under some form of management even if this isn’t perfectly aligned with the retentions schedule. Yes, you still need tighter management of a small portion of critical or high-risk content, but you should never let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

I am often asked where I think the Records and Information Management function should exist within a company’s org chart. This question usually comes up in the context of a frustrated practitioner who is having a difficult time getting traction for their ECM program or from business users how are frustrated at being told by IT, RM or someone else that they need to manage their information in a certain way that may not be immediately intuitive to them, or does not support their business processes.

The first question to ask is whether it really matters. Shouldn’t a first class Records and Information Management (IM) program succeed by virtue of its own momentum and the value it creates irrespective of what the boxes on the org chart say? In a perfect world that would be true, but unfortunately we don’t live in a perfect world (if you need proof see my earlier post about the Calgary Flames missing the playoffs).

So where should the Records and Information Management function live? Not in IT, at least not in most cases.

Notwithstanding the fact that the “I” in “IT” stands for “Information”, the mandate of most IT organizations is to keep servers running and to manage vendor relationships. I know that many, if not most IT professionals are truly dedicated to helping their customers manage their business more efficiently, but at the end of the day the great majority of IT organizations are not set up to accommodate the challenges of managing information well.

And these challenges are many. Perhaps the most important comes from the fact that Information Management implementations do not have a natural beginning, middle and end. Information Management is an ongoing process that evolves and changes over time to support changing business requirements and the needs of their user community. Information Management is not a project and it certainly is not a technology deployment.

IT groups on the other hand generally operate a project management office tasked with standing up servers, upgrading software and rolling out new technologies. Each of these tasks fit well with a traditional “waterfall” project management methodology that expects right and wrong answers along the way. Information Management on the other hand is more art than science. Yes, it is critical that IM projects are managed properly and that appropriate controls are in place to ensure the implementation stays on track, but the key aspects of IM projects are people and process rather than technology. Change management is critically important and, let’s face it, most IT organizations are not adept at the people side of change.

That leaves the question of where the Records and IM function should live within your organization. In my experience there are three good answers depending on the makeup and business challenges of your organization.

1) If you are in a heavily regulated industry or are likely to face more than your fair share of lawsuits you likely want to align your IM program closely with your corporate legal group, reporting in to chief legal counsel.

2) If your objectives are to enhance operational efficiency or improve the bottom line of your business by managing your information better, align your IM program with an operational support area or even a strategic marketing or R&D group.

3) Finally, if you are in a situation where the only logical spot is within IT, try to ensure that you carve out the IM function from the other core teams in the IT group. One of my clients appointed a Director of Information Management a s a direct report of the CIO, which made her a peer of the more traditional IT roles of Infrastructure and Application support and gave her a seat at the table to advocate for IM.

In the end, when push comes to shove the core mandate of each part of your organization will ultimately prevail. In the case of IT, generally speaking their mandate is to keep the servers running and as a result the processes and political power tends to support this objective. Many IT groups can walk and chew gum at the same time but if they start to stumble they’ll spit out the gum before they fall over. Placing IM in a part of your organization where it can fulfil its mandate is one of the first steps on the road to success.

Cross-posted to the AIIM ERM Community blog.