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.

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.

The conclusion I draw is that while SharePoint is clearly having an impact on the ECM market (in addition to the fact that it is the fastest growing server product in Microsoft history, esteemed organizations like AIIM have started to dedicate entire communities to SharePoint), at this point it appears that SharePoint's success has not come at the expense of incumbent vendors.  It will be interesting to see how this evolves but for now, it seems like there is room enough for everyone.

And just to continue the earlier trend of putting SharePoint into the mix of all ECM discussions, there was a great debate on the AIIM ERM Community blog this summer about the merits of SharePoint records management.  James Lappin feels there are significant shortcomings in SharePoint records management, Mike Alsup disagrees.

1. Traditional ECM remains strong even as SharePoint rises. It seems that everyone (myself included) has been talking about the impact of SharePoint on the ECM space, and SharePoint's influence is undeniable. Many analysts, consultants, customers and even casual observers have been predicting that SharePoint will eventually become the de-facto standard ECM application at the cost of market share and license revenue for traditional ECM players.  Then along comes Open Textand the aannouncement of their results for fiscal 2010.  Total revenue is up 16% and profit increased 24%.  That doesn't sound like a company on its way to irrelevance. 
2. Records Management still matters.   Even though most of the hype in our industry seems to be reserved for trends like Enterprise 2.0, open source, and the impact of cloud computing on ECM, enabling proper records management is still a big part of the value proposition for ECM.  Nothing brings this fact into sharper focus than the mountains of electronic and paper records that will be produced as part of the investigationand lawsuits related to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
3. The future of ECM is cloudy (and Cloudy?). It is natural and healthy for any industry to take stock of where it is in its' evolution, and the ECM industry seems better than most at navel gazing.  Joe Shepley published a good piece on his vision for Second Wave ECMand AIIM's fearless leader John Mancini shares his thoughts in a recent YouTube video.  There are enormous opportunities in ECM (cloud computing, continued data proliferation, Enterprise 2.0) and significant challenges, including significant debate on the definition of Enterprise Content Management itself.  John Mancini says that "ECM as a term is stressed", which tells me that even AIIM is thinking about the future of this acronym.

   Others are also debating the definition of ECM. Laurence Hart, though his Word of Pie blog, has been trying to come up with a new definition for ECM for several years now.  His most recent attempt to define ECM was last week and it has spawned some interesting discussion in his blog comments.  I'm always up for a good debate and this discussion has me thinking.  Should ECM include both structured and unstructured information?  Should it include web content? How about reusable chunks of content that can be used to pull together documents (e.g. standard paragraphs for a contract)?  Tweets? Facebook pages? Just good old fashioned documents?  

   I don't have a good answer (okay, I don't have a short answer) to these questions but I suspect you probably have an opinion, which I  encourage you to share below.

   ]]> http://www.c3associates.com/2010/09/things-i-learned-about-ecm-on-my-summer-vacation/feed/ 1 http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/enterprise-content-management-at-a-crossroads-the-case-for-microsoft-sharepoint-part-2-of-2/ http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/enterprise-content-management-at-a-crossroads-the-case-for-microsoft-sharepoint-part-2-of-2/#comments Fri, 21 May 2010 21:06:24 +0000 Greg Clark http://www.c3associates.com/?p=532 This is the second of a two-part series that summarizes the main points in the ongoing debate about the impact of Microsoft SharePoint on the ECM community.  Last week I reviewed several reasons why traditional Enterprise Content Management vendors will continue to thrive despite Microsoft's push into the ECM space.  This week, it's Microsoft's turn.  As before, my goal is to summarize the key points in the discussion about the impact of SharePoint and allow you to draw your own conclusions.

   Please leave your feedback or comments below, drop me a note on Twitter or feel free to contact me directly at greg.clark@c3associates.com.

   Here are a few reasons SharePoint may become the dominant force in the Enterprise Content Management space. 

   1. SharePoint 2010 is more than just basic ECM.  Where SharePoint 2007 could still be considered "basic content services", SharePoint 2010 has addressed most of the shortcomings that prevented this platform from competing head-to-head with traditional ECM tools.  A couple of months ago I summarized the eight reasons SharePoint 2010 is a true ECM system and based on the feedback I have heard from several of my clients, most feel that SharePoint has reached the tipping point where they will start to seriously consider shifting their ECM platforms over to SharePoint.  For most organizations considering a net-new ECM implementation, SharePoint is often the only candidate, especially where the organization is already committed to the Microsoft stack.  Microsoft has invested heavily in building out key ECM functionality like records management and has significantly improved SharePoint's ability to handle metadata and very large lists, among many other improvements.  The list of functional differences between SharePoint and traditional ECM systems has become so small that traditional ECM vendors will have an increasingly difficult time differentiating their products from SharePoint.  
   2. SharePoint is the silver bullet of user adoption.  User adoption is a challenge that has dogged the ECM industry from the very beginning.  Many organizations feel the only thing preventing ECM from becoming truly successful is a poor user interface that limited user uptake (for an excellent summary of this question, read the wisdom shared by experienced ECM practitioner Mike Alsup, who reminds us that user adoption is about far more than a slick user interface), it seems that everyone wants to believe that SharePoint 2010 is the answer to all of their prayers.  Whether it is or not seems almost beside the point; perception is reality and that poses a big problem for traditional ECM vendors.  The fact remains that SharePoint offers an excellent user experience. To Microsoft's credit, SharePoint has been designed with the information worker in mind.  The tool "thinks the way the worker thinks" and user uptake of SharePoint tends to be quick and requires minimal training. This can pose a problem where the implementation is unplanned, leading to a rapid  proliferation of SharePoint sites and some would argue simply replicating the shared drive mess in SharePoint. However, as integrators and Microsoft partners learn how to plan and govern SharePoint deployments, the intuitive user interface will help SharePoint dominate the ECM space in the same way that MS Office has dominated the desktop.  
   3. Size matters. The sheer scale of Microsoft poses a big problem for traditional ECM vendors.  They clearly can't outspend Microsoft on marketing and Microsoft's partner ecosystem is unmatched anywhere.  In the first part of this two-part series I said that one key advantage for traditional ECM platforms is their strong vertical story. This could be quickly eroded by many of the partners who have built and continue to build tightly integrated solutions suited to nearly any industry you can think of.  Yes, traditional ECM vendors have a head start in this area but Microsoft and their partner are hot on their heels.  Further, there is a wealth of SharePoint information freely available from MSDN, Codeplex and the many thousands of SharePoint MVP and partner blogs and websites.  It seems that if it can be known about SharePoint, it will be available somewhere for free and this will lead to rapid innovation and an improved product.  
   4. SharePoint has a strong social story.  SharePoint started life as a collaboration platform and has evolved from this into a social computing platform. As the demands grow to provide Facebook-like tools in an enterprise context, SharePoint is very well positioned to meet this need. SharePoint may not be best of breed but many enterprises seem comfortable collaborating using a platform from a know n quantity such as Microsoft. To date, the efforts of traditional ECM vendors to "socialize" their platforms have not received widespread adoption and there are questions about their continued desire to play in this space in light of stiff competition from Microsoft.  
   5. SharePoint is much more than just ECM.  SharePoint is a portal, a document management system, a business intelligence tool, a records management system, a social networking platform, a web content management system, development platform and an enterprise search tool.  Many established ECM vendors can say many of these same things, but the Microsoft story is especially compelling for organizations already committed to the Microsoft stack.
   6. Microsoft will win because they're Microsoft.  The intangible advantage that Microsoft has is based on their history. Whenever Microsoft sets their mind to do something, very little will get in their way.  Remember the early days of the relational database wars?  Ask yourself when the last time was that you came across a Sybase database and you have some idea what that might mean for some traditional ECM vendors.   And if you don't think Microsoft is targeting traditional ECM vendors with SharePoint 2010, think again.  With SharePoint 2007, Microsoft started the process of embedding SharePoint into their core Office suite but was clear that most organizations still needed a traditional ECM system for the higher ECM functions. For more on this, see my blog post outlining some of the functional gaps between SharePoint and traditional ECM. With SharePoint 2010, Microsoft has changed their focus from partnering with traditional ECM to trying to out-compete them (of course they won't say this officially but their all-out marketing push at the 2010 AIIM show is a clear indicator).

   I hope this short series has been useful. I'm sure there are other reasons why SharePoint may or may not dominate the ECM space and I am keen to hear your perspective. 

   Please leave your comments below and I will reply as best I can.

   ]]> http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/enterprise-content-management-at-a-crossroads-the-case-for-microsoft-sharepoint-part-2-of-2/feed/ 0 http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/enterprise-content-management-at-a-crossroads-the-case-for-traditional-ecm-in-a-microsoft-world-part-1-of-2/ http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/enterprise-content-management-at-a-crossroads-the-case-for-traditional-ecm-in-a-microsoft-world-part-1-of-2/#comments Wed, 19 May 2010 01:22:42 +0000 Greg Clark http://www.c3associates.com/?p=511 After death and taxes, there are two other things in this world that seem to be a certainty;
   1. If you want to start a debate in the enterprise content management (ECM) community mention SharePoint, and;
   2. I’m really bad at predictions.

   Evidence for point #1 is all over ECM blogs, countless conversations at conferences like AIIM and ARMA, and countless sleepless nights for traditional ECM vendors as they try to think of ways to fend off Microsoft. As for the second point, let’s just say that after I picked my Calgary Flames to win the Stanley Cup they missed the playoffs entirely. Nice call on that one.

   The purpose of this post is to list some of the reasons why traditional ECM tools might survive (or even thrive) in the face of Microsoft’s full-court-press into the ECM space. I will leave it up to you, my colleagues in the Electronic Records Management (ERM) community, to expand on this list, tell me where you disagree and have a good discussion about the future of Enterprise Content Management. Next week I will make the case why SharePoint might be the future of ECM.

   So, here goes.

   1. Records Management is not optional. Many organizations wish it was, but it isn’t. Although SharePoint 2007 introduced some records management capabilities and SharePoint 2010 seems to take this to the next level, the critical role records management plays within an organization means it is not something that can or should be done half way. Traditional ECM tools like EMC Documentum, Open Text Content Server (formerly Livelink), Open Text eDocs (formerly Hummingbird), IBM FileNet and open source tools like Alfresco have a several-year head start on Microsoft. This means there is a significant body of best practice built up within the vendor and partner channels associated with each tool. There is a very good chance the issue your organization is dealing with has been seen somewhere else and that you can call on these resources to help get you where you need to go. Can you say that about SharePoint RM? The tool and best practices may eventually develop, but do you want to go first?
   2. The vertical is steeper than you think. Whenever a client or colleague would ask whether I thought SharePoint 2007 was a viable replacement for their existing ECM system, it was relatively straightforward to explain why most organizations needed to continue leveraging their existing investments in traditional ECM suites. I summarized some the shortcomings of SharePoint 2007 last year, and have found these points to be a very useful “elevator pitch” when discussing the differences between SharePoint 2007 and traditional ECM suites. Admittedly, this discussion gets as lot more muddled with SharePoint 2010. Many if not all of these points have been addressed in one form or another, except for one very important area; solid, mature solutions in industry verticals. ECM vendors have spent the better part of the past two decades developing, deploying, supporting and improving their solutions for specific industries. Will the life sciences industry trust their complex regulatory approval process to SharePoint any time soon? Will the architecture, engineering and construction industry be able to manage multi-billion dollar projects that generate millions of AutoCAD files and tens of millions of facility tags in SharePoint? Speaking in strictly technical terms it is possible that SharePoint can handle the volumes, but for these use cases and others like them, ECM suites offer mature tools that support complex business processes and as above, the vendor professional services and partner networks have extensive experience in implementing these tools in a variety of industry verticals. Although there is a perception that ECM should primarily focus on replacing shared drives, my suspicion is that most ECM is targeted at solving business problems in core operating areas, and it is in these areas that traditional ECM players hold a significant advantage.
   3. A suite of tools from one vendor increases accountability. Whenever someone questions the ability of SharePoint to meet a particular business need using the product as-is out of the box (as is often the case when discussing the vertical business requirements noted above), the response is usually that a Microsoft partner either has or will provide a module that meets this need. While that may be true in many cases, most organizations end up with many different modules from many different vendors. There are a couple of downsides to this; the testing required each time you need to upgrade goes up exponentially and, if and when things do go wrong you will not be able to hold a single vendor to account. This is often referred to as the “one throat to choke” argument (although my friends in the vendor community prefer to call it the “one back to pat” argument). Although the “suite” approach taken by traditional ECM vendors usually means that some of the individual components are not best of breed, the ability to hold a single vendor to account for their product is a significant benefit, and one that SharePoint cannot offer.
   4. If Microsoft CRM didn’t kill SAP, why would SharePoint kill traditional ECM? Although there has been a lot of talk about SharePoint overtaking traditional ECM players, why has Microsoft not overtaken SAP in the CRM space? Is there is a case to be made that SharePoint is akin to Microsoft’s CRM offering; a tool targeted at the mid-market, mass-market space but not really suitable for true enterprise deployment?

   I hope these questions provide a good starting point for a good discussion about the future of ECM. Next Thursday I will make the case for SharePoint to live up to the hype and change the ECM landscape as we know it.

   Until then look forward to your comments.

   Cross-posted from my blog on the AIIM ERM Expert User Community.

   ]]> http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/enterprise-content-management-at-a-crossroads-the-case-for-traditional-ecm-in-a-microsoft-world-part-1-of-2/feed/ 0 http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/measurement-matters-and-the-important-ones-may-not-be-what-you-think/ http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/measurement-matters-and-the-important-ones-may-not-be-what-you-think/#comments Wed, 05 May 2010 04:41:32 +0000 Greg Clark http://www.c3associates.com/?p=503 For this week’s blog post I was going to provide my perspective on the recently completed AIIM show but there are already so many excellent summaries out there I’m not sure what more I could add. I thought Barclay Blair’s observations were particularly astute, especially as it related to Google’s perspective on ECM. Mike Alsup provided a solid list of nine observations (just to go one better than John Mancini I’m sure), Russ Stalters highlighted the big push by Microsoft to promote SharePoint to the ECM community and also commented on the evolution of cloud-based ECM offerings. Finally, the Big Men on Content gave their considered opinions on the impact and evolution of CMIS. Once you’ve read through these articles it will feel like you were there.

   My big “aha” moment at AIIM came in the speakers ready room. I got to talking with fellow Canadian Lewis Eisen about how to truly measure success when implementing information management. We discussed whether traditional measures of success like the number of documents loaded to the system, number of users, number of searches, etc. are really all that valuable. The short answer for both of us was a resounding no. These measures are peripheral at best, sort of like saying “It always rains when I go to Philadelphia for the AIIM conference, therefore I make it rain in Philadelphia”.

   So what metrics and measures are valuable? The answer to that question is another question; what is the mission for your organization? The main point of my AIIM presentation this year (“What Success Looks Like – The Anatomy of a Successful ECM Implementation“) was that there is nothing inherently valuable about an ECM implementation (at this point you’re wondering why I’m blogging about ECM…bear with me, there’s a point here).

   There is little doubt most organizations are dealing serious information overload problems and these problems are impacting their ability to succeed, but setting out simply to fix an information management problem without considering the broader objectives of your organization is a recipe for failure. Many (or perhaps most) ECM projects started out as IT-driven initiatives. Measuring the success of a project by the amount of content loaded to the system in the first year, or counting the number of users who have been trained, or even counting the number of new versions added by users will not tell you whether the system is a success or not.

   To truly measure success you first must establish key performance indicators (KPIs) for ECM. While that hardly ranks as the most earth-shattering bit of news you are likely to hear this week, it is amazing how often this basic principle is missed when implementing ECM. KPIs must measure outcomes that are important to the bottom line of your entire organization, not just your IT department.

   For example, if you are a sales-focused organization develop metrics within your ECM program that measure the impact on sales. The impact on the sales cycle from implementing good information management practices within the sales group is a good KPI (note: the amount of time it takes to find current sales collateral is not a valid measure; the amount of time it takes to convert prospects into clients is). This is obviously not a simple task and requires very close alignment with leadership in this part of the organization, and that’s really the point. If your ECM team is close enough to identify and measure KPIs within a business unit, your ability to design information architectures and work practices that support business objectives will increase exponentially.

   The last, and possibly most critical point is that you need to be committed to continually monitoring, reporting and evolving your KPIs. This continual improvement review should be formalized to be at least an annual process or perhaps even more often if you have met your objectives and need to set new targets (or equally important if you have not met your objectives).

   I am certainly interested in hearing about your experiences creating and measuring KPIs for ECM so please feel free to share your comments below.

   Cross-posted from my blog on the AIIM ERM Expert User Community.

   ]]> http://www.c3associates.com/2010/05/measurement-matters-and-the-important-ones-may-not-be-what-you-think/feed/ 0 http://www.c3associates.com/2010/04/from-records-management-to-information-governance/ http://www.c3associates.com/2010/04/from-records-management-to-information-governance/#comments Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:05:06 +0000 Greg Clark http://www.c3associates.com/?p=473 I want to make the world safe for records management.

   Scratch that. I want to make the world safe for records managers. Why? Because they don’t seem to get the respect they deserve and in most cases, neither does the information they help manage.

   Based on the fact that you’re reading this blog I’m sure you agree organizations should work hard to manage information well. Certainly most have taken a crack at it with varying degrees of success but regardless of their efforts we can usually predict which parts of our organizations will succeed or fail based on their organizational mission in life. For example:

   • If I’m in accounting I can usually dig up an invoice from a few years back if I really need to
   • If I’m in legal I can usually find a contract (or at least sheepishly call the company we contracted with to get a copy)
   • If I’m in marketing I usually wonder where the he*l that file went

   I’m generalizing to make the point that many organizations have failed to realize the full benefits of their enterprise information management programs because their efforts to date haven’t been truly enterprise. Information management within many (if not most) organizations has emerged from a series of point solutions deployed to individual departments, often on different platforms.

   So what are successful organizations doing right? How do they manage the ever-present tug of war between efficiency and process? How do they get buy-in from senior executives and how do they sustain the momentum of ECM initiatives to ensure they stay relevant?

   The answer is deceptively simple; they evolve. They move beyond managing records as valuable in their own right to governing information as a true asset of their organization. Easy to say, hard to do. Organizations that successfully navigate this transition usually do so because they establish strong information governance practices.

   What’s the difference between records management and information governance? In my opinion:

   • Records management is static where information governance is dynamic
   • Records management is reactive where information governance is proactive
   • Records management is focused on the retention schedule where information governance is focused on enabling the business to get their work done

   I am most definitely not saying that records management is not important (some of my best friends are records managers…). Organizations that successfully manage information across the enterprise (and this information includes records) realize that information is only valuable if it helps advance the cause of your organization. In the case of highly regulated industries or those with a high litigation risk there will be a strong focus on creating hard-and-fast rules for information retention and disposition. The challenge that most organizations face is that this is where enterprise information management begins and ends.

   Organizations with a focus on information governance realize the importance of creating a living model that puts appropriate structures in place to enable users to manage information appropriately. This means a risk-based approach to records retention, but frankly there’s nothing especially new or unique about that. What is unique are those organizations that establish mechanisms to efficiently support the changing information management needs of their users. According to IDC individuals (rather than transactional systems) create 70% of the information in organizations; this means organizations that provide simple, intuitive and, most importantly, flexible information management structures will be the ones that succeed.

   Information management structures (a folder hierarchy, metadata model, line-of-business integration, or custom interface) must make sense to the end users and fit easily into the flow of their work. This is no easy task and is only made more difficult when there is an overemphasis on command-and-control governance structures.

   My advice to records managers and information management practitioners everywhere is to focus on a thin layer of standardization, then provide “guidelines” and “principles” for managing information rather than hard and fast “must do” policies. Users are much more likely to follow good practices for managing information if they feel they have some flexibility to do it on their own terms. Yes, there is still a need for certain information to be managed with more rigour, but my challenge to the records managers of the world is to find ways to empower your users to manage information rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach. A little freedom might just be what your information, and your users, need.

   ]]> http://www.c3associates.com/2010/04/from-records-management-to-information-governance/feed/ 0 http://www.c3associates.com/2008/10/project-world-presentation/ http://www.c3associates.com/2008/10/project-world-presentation/#comments Thu, 30 Oct 2008 03:09:12 +0000 Greg Clark http://www.c3associates.com/?p=202 I’m back from Vancouver and my presentation to Project World. It was a good event and well-attended by people from throughout Western Canada and the Pacific North West.

   My presentation stimulated a lot of interesting discussion (well, interesting if you’re a PM or ECM enthusiast). Here’s a link to the presentation. Questions or comments are welcome.

   ]]> http://www.c3associates.com/2008/10/project-world-presentation/feed/ 0 http://www.c3associates.com/2008/09/interoperability-sharepoint-and-the-future-of-ecm/ http://www.c3associates.com/2008/09/interoperability-sharepoint-and-the-future-of-ecm/#comments Wed, 10 Sep 2008 18:33:47 +0000 Greg Clark http://www.c3associates.com/?p=66 There’s been an interesting convergence of opinion pieces and hard news over the past 24 hours that speak to the future of Enterprise Content Management as we know it. I know that sounds a bit melodramatic but I sense that we’re in the midst of a seismic shift in the way organizations view ECM applications and the way vendors are providing those applications.

   Yesterday, Matt Asay of CNet compared the recenty hype about Google’s Chrome browser to the quiet (or maybe not so quiet if you’ve been paying attention to the ECM blogosphere) reality of SharePoint’s massive expansion within the enterprise. His suggestion that Google has a long way to go to grab the attention of corporate IT groups and displace Microsoft is an understatement to say the least. He goes on to say that the trick for Google and others is to focus on interoperability if they have any hope of challenging SharePoint.

   Matt is either incredibly astute or just plain lucky because it looks like Microsoft and friends have beaten Google to that punch as well. Today, Microsoft, EMC and IBM, supported by other key ECM vendors including Open Text, Alfresco, SAP and Oracle announced the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard (see also the Yahoo Finance article on this).

   At this point in the history of ECM, I think Google Chrome and Google Sites are just noise from an enterprise point of view. Until we see significant adoption in the real world and some acknowledgement from Google that content has a lifecycle, I’m not going to consider Google tools as part of the ECM equation.

   And that equation, in my mind, includes both collaboration and control. All true ECM tools enable both but each tool does some things better than others. Traditional ECM applications like Livelink, Documentum and FileNet are very strong when it comes to controlling content but have not been noted for their ease-of-use when it comes to collaboration. SharePoint, on the other hand, is not the first choice amongst the records management community but provides arguably the best enterprise-ready collaboration platform on the market.

   Which brings me back to the CMIS Standard.

   My first impression about the impact CMIS will have in the ECM market is that it validates what I’ve been saying for a while. SharePoint will not be the video that kills ECM’s radio stars (hands up all you Buggles fans; be honest). CMIS allows organizations to legitimately pursue an “all of the above” ECM strategy and removes any impediments they may have in deploying SharePoint to supplement an existing ECM application. At the same time, traditional ECM vendors will continue to survive and thrive as they support content that requires more rigorous controls.

   Ultimately, as the news release announcing the CMIS standard says, this should be all about the customer. Of course we all know that vendors don’t do things out of the goodness of their hearts, there’s clearly something in it for them as well. Here’s hoping that the CMIS standard will help break down barriers to successful content management by providing the best of both collaboration and control to the benefit of everyone.

   ]]> http://www.c3associates.com/2008/09/interoperability-sharepoint-and-the-future-of-ecm/feed/ 3 http://www.c3associates.com/2008/08/speaking-at-projectworld-vancouver/ http://www.c3associates.com/2008/08/speaking-at-projectworld-vancouver/#comments Sat, 16 Aug 2008 20:20:30 +0000 Greg Clark http://www.c3associates.com/?p=65 I’ve got an upcoming speaking engagement on October 28 at the ProjectWorld Vancouver conference. My topic is “ECM Rescue – Picking up the Pieces from a Failed Implementation”. I’m excited about the opportunity to share some of my experiences in “rescuing” suboptimal ECM implementations and I’m sure I’ll learn a lot while I’m there as well. You can find out more about the event here. Hope to see some of you there.
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