As before, you will need to take the elements of these structures and weigh what will work within your organizational context. My hope is that you will be able to use some of the elements of these structures when creating an ECM organization for yourself.

The following three structures are scaled for small, mid-sized and large organizations. Again, these are not the only possible options but I have found that our clients have had success implementing ECM using structures similar to these.

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The most important aspect of this particular structure is that the ECM group is not part of the IT department, Legal group or even an administrative or business services group. This organization has chosen to align ECM with overall business operations in a group called Technical Operations and Competence. This division is responsible for helping the organization achieve operational excellence across their core business, and includes such functions as Engineering Standards, Maintenance and Reliability, Environment, Health and Safety (EHS), Training and Development, and, finally, the ECM function.

The concept of moving ECM out from under IT applies equally to smaller organizations although there does need to be a certain level of scale to justify moving ECM into it’s own area. One key benefit of this model is that the ECM team is able to focus exclusively on the business benefits of content management and not get caught up in the minutiae of IT systems operation. This is not to say that the technology aspects or ECM are not important; as I said last time the best ECM solutions come from open conversations with your technical team. However, the root cause of many failed ECM implementations is an over-emphasis on the technology and not enough focus on the business problems ECM will address.

You have likely noticed that this structure doesn’t reference an executive steering committee. That is indeed a shortcoming of this particular structure, although this is offset somewhat by the fact that the team reports into a Vice President. Also, there was an executive steering committee in the initial project phase of this particular ECM program but as the ECM team transitioned to an operational mode it was decided that reporting to a single VP was sufficient to ensure business alignment.

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This organization shares many of the structures used by the larger organization but the key difference is that this group reports into IT (although the overall program is guided by an executive steering committee to ensure proper business alignment).

The other important aspect of this structure is that the core ECM roles report into a Director of Information Management, who has a dotted line relationship with the technical personnel responsible for ECM development and day to day operations. Again, I believe this separation of business alignment and technical execution is important to ensure that the ECM solutions continually focus on providing business value.

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This organization has a small but mighty ECM team and again reports into the IT function. The fundamental ECM roles have been collapsed down into a smaller group but note that there is a specific role focused on Change Management. This was the topic of the comments posted in response to Part 1 of this blog, with one person going to far as to suggest that the acronym ECM should stand for Enterprise Change Management.

I won’t go that far but I do agree that one of the keys to any successful ECM program is to ensure that your user community is ready, willing and able to adopt ECM-based business processes.

Finally, there is a shared accountability for managing the tasks of the ECM Operations (and development) team between the IT Manager and the ECM Program Manager. They report directly to the IT Manager but have a dotted line relationship to the ECM Program Manager to ensure they are engaged in meeting the business objectives and strategies set out by the ECM team.

I hope you have found these posts to be useful. I welcome your comments and would be happy to share further observations and experiences in the comments section or directly. You can drop me a note on Twitter @GregClarkC3 or send me an email at greg.clark@c3associates.com.

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.

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.

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.

In an earlier post I listed Eight Things SharePoint 2010 Needs to be a True ECM System, and, at first glance the new version looks very encouraging from an ECM perspective. As I’ve said before, I get excited by anything that can help my clients better manage their information and SharePoint has the potential to be a transformative platform bridging structured content, unstructured content and social computing in one flexible package. SharePoint 2007 does a decent job of this but it has some deficiencies when it comes to managing all content in the enterprise.

I’ll also give you the same caveat I gave last time; While this post focuses on SharePoint as a technology, technology is about the very last thing that should be considered when an organization sets out to manage its content more efficiently. Information management should start with a good business case, appropriate sponsorship, choosing the right areas of focus then building capacity within the organization to truly succeed. Technology is only the last piece of this puzzle. All of that said, there has been an incredible amount of interest in SharePoint (as illustrated by the 7,500 people who attended the SharePoint conference from October 19 to 22, 2009) and many of my clients have questions about where (or whether) this tool should fit into their ECM strategy.

Finally, the updates below are based on my attendance at the SharePoint conference where I went to as many breakout sessions as possible and chased down beleaguered Microsoft staffers to ask questions in what must have felt like a trip to the old Roman Coliseum (with the lions, not with Caesar). I tried to focus on attending ECM-specific sessions and have done as much reading as I can but as a vendor-neutral consultant Microsoft hasn’t seen fit to furnish C3 Associates with a pre-beta version of SharePoint 2010, so I haven’t actually used the system myself. As always we will continue to learn as much as we can about all of the ECM tools and technologies that are of interest to our clients but in the absence of actually working with SharePoint some of our understanding will be incomplete or possibly incorrect. I will provide updates in future posts as I learn more.

I have used a five point scale to evaluate the how well I think SharePoint 2010 meets my “Eight Things” criteria for inclusion into the ECM club. Remember that these are based on only my first look at the tool and are subject to revision as I learn more about how the new features and functions actually work.

Initial Ranking Scale

With all of that out of the way here are the eight reasons I think Microsoft has moved towards a more complete ECM solution.

1. Persistent links – The single biggest shortcoming of SharePoint 2007 is the inability to link directly to a unique object ID. One of the greatest benefits of ECM systems is the ability to send content via a link rather than relying on email attachments. In traditional ECM applications this isn’t a problem; each content object has its own unique ID that doesn’t change regardless of where it lives in the repository. In SharePoint 2007, links break if you rename or move a file. The other benefit of persistent linking is that it enables the management of compound documents (a container that stores multiple documents like the chapters of a book) and the ability to link directly to an older version of a document.

2. Store once, use many – SharePoint 2007 had a nasty habit of copying content throughout the system rather than using pointers to a single source of the truth (because content links might break as noted above). Perhaps the best example of the misguided use of “copy” capabilities in SharePoint is the “Send to…Records Center” feature where a copy of a document is sent to the Records Center while leaving the original in place rather than either moving the document and leaving a pointer or changing the state of the document to indicate its changed status (see point 3 for more on the RM capabilities of SharePoint).

3. Honest-to-goodness Records Management – I recognize that that SharePoint 2007 is DoD 5015.2 certified but the statement from the product development team that the DoD 5015.2 components are “not intended for customers…who would like to enhance the records management functionality of MOSS 2007 with particular 5015.2 oriented features but are not required to run their system in a certified configuration” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Add to this the fact that SharePoint doesn’t allow users to efficiently manage physical objects out of the box and it is clear that Microsoft needs to decide if they are really serious about the records management space or if they will leave it to partners.

4. Better metadata management – Metadata in SharePoint 2007 took a quantum leap forward with the introduction of Content Types. However, managing metadata in SharePoint 2007 can be difficult especially when dealing with multiple site collections.

5. Reusable search templates and stored search results – There is no question that search is a focus for Microsoft based on their acquisition of FAST and their push into public internet search with the recent launch of Bing. Search in SharePoint 2007 is reasonably good but the tool does not have the ability to either store a “snapshot” of search results for future reference nor does SharePoint 2007 allow users to create reusable search templates. This feature would save users time by allowing them to create a search query then either re-execute that query in the future or add new criteria without having to rebuild the entire search.

6. More granular security – This is one area where SharePoint was already reasonably strong but truly deep ECM systems include advanced security features like the ability to deny permission to certain objects on an as-needed basis. The current process for managing security is a bit cumbersome but I expect this is something Microsoft is working on. It will be interesting to see if what changes, if any, make it into the final release of the product.

7. Surface the audit trail – One of the things I like the best about established ECM applications is the ability to see who has opened my documents. I find this particularly handy on status report day when I inevitably discover that I’ve made a mistake in the document I’ve just sent out (as an unbreakable persistent link of course). I can check the audit trail to see if anyone has opened the document and if not, make my changes without anyone knowing I’d messed up in the first place. While SharePoint tracks most major audit events, the list of events is not as extensive as in a traditional ECM application nor is this information surfaced through the function menu of the content object.

8. More and more mature line-of-business integrations – This should be a strength of SharePoint given the sizeable .NET developer community as well as the extensive Microsoft partner ecosystem, but SharePoint still has a lot of catching up to do in this area. Organizations deploying SharePoint won’t be able to hold a single vendor to account for a series of modules (or Content Enabled Vertical Applications, as Gartner likes to call them). This may or may not be a bad thing depending on your perspective but established ECM vendors have offerings that satisfy a variety of industry verticals and business functions. To achieve the same thing with SharePoint customers will need to research, purchase and deploy modules from a variety of Microsoft partners. CMS Watch offers a good summary of the issues associated with third party add-ons for SharePoint.

To sum up, it is clear that SharePoint will continue to have a significant impact on the ECM landscape. The question is whether the functional improvements evident in SharePoint 2010 mean that organizations with significant commitments to other ECM platforms have to start all over again with SharePoint? In the short term, I think the answer is no. In many cases, the true benefit from the investments made in traditional ECM can be realized by surfacing some of this content though SharePoint interfaces; done well this can significantly enhance the user experience while still ensuring that the strong compliance engine in your existing ECM system keeps your content safe and your CEO out of jail.

I suspect that any changes in the ECM world will be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. SharePoint is a disruptive technology to be sure, but given it’s breadth, relative lack of maturity and a widely varied partner community Microsoft will help the overall ECM market grow and likely take established ECM vendors with it. As they (used to) say on Wall Street, a rising tide floats all boats.

This is not to say that things will be easy for the makes of FileNet, Documentum, Livelink and others; they have a significant challenge ahead in trying to position their products not relative to one another, but relative to SharePoint (whether they like it or not). The vendors that do this well will continue to thrive and any that choose to ignore SharePoint or do not recognize the significance of the changes in SharePoint 2010 could be in trouble.

As always I appreciate your feedback on anything you read here. Feel free to leave a comment here or drop me a note via my Twitter account at GregClarkC3.

I’m working on an update to my SharePoint 2010 post based on what I’ve learned since it was released in beta this fall. Look for that post early in new year. Until then, I wish all of my readers the best of the season and a fantastic 2010!

ECM is about managing information rather than just storing it. Done properly, it helps your organization take advantage of the vast amounts of information created every day by placing content in an appropriate context for your user community. This can mean pushing content out through a web portal or providing intuitive tools to allow users to create, browse or search for content when needed. The end result is that your organization will be both more efficient and more compliant with the rules that govern your industry because you will be able to retain information for as long as needed but no longer.

That strays a bit from the traditional definitions of ECM but I think that is kind of the point. It got me thinking about what I like about my job and why I got started on this crazy adventure in the first place. First off, I like ECM because I like people. The successful ECM implementations I have seen have not been implementations of a technology but have instead focused on efficiency, compliance, sharing and know-how; all of these things are influenced by the human beings in the mix and the technology is only a supporting player. Conversely, the ECM implementations I have seen that have not been as successful have been seen as technology rollouts.

The other thing I enjoy about ECM is that it allows me to work in a variety of different business areas. Although the focus of C3 Associates is on the energy, oil and gas industry there is an incredible diversity amongst the various business units in each of our clients. The opportunity to work with engineers in the morning, lawyers at lunch (because they’re busy the rest of the time) and accountants in the afternoon doesn’t come along very often. Each has their own unique perspective on the business of their organization and I see ECM as an opportunity to unite all of them to achieve more than they would have otherwise.

If helping people take their work to another level doesn’t get you out of bed in the morning, I don’t know what does.

You can download both slide decks in the Presentations section of our site.

Here’s a picture from the big night. Congrats again Pankaj, we’re lucky to have such talented people on the C3 team!

Sheila Bryant, Pankaj Bhawnani and Greg Clark celebrate Pankaj's PMI-SAC award