C3 Associates Inc.

Most conversations about enterprise information or records management  these days seem to involve SharePoint in one way or another.  Many organizations are finding that information management is not meeting their expectations and some are wondering if SharePoint 2010 as the answer to all of their problems.  Whether this push is coming from IT hoping to reduce costs, your portal team hoping for a new intranet or your user community hoping that that SharePoint will be easier to  use (or all of the above), there can be no doubt that many organizations are considering a move to SharePoint.

Microsoft has done a great job of driving this conversation through the functional improvements in SharePoint 2010 and also through some aggressive and effective marketing, but is SharePoint the answer for all of your content management needs? 

Here are eight things to think about if you are thinking about migrating your records and information management platform to SharePoint.

1. Customizations, system integrations and modules.  Most implementations involve at least some customization, and most include a variety of vendor or third party modules.  Because of this, considering a move to SharePoint is not a simply a matter of copying over your content.  You will need to think about whether SharePoint has equivalent or "good enough" functionality to replace these customizations, integrations or modules without breaking your business processes.  If not, you will need to think about the costs to rebuild an integration, re-buy a particular module (if it is even available for SharePoint) or change your business process. None of these things should be taken lightly and there can be a significant effort associated with each. 
2. How important is records management and compliance?  Yes, SharePoint 2010 has records management capabilities but this is relatively new within the application and there is a great deal of debate about whether SharePoint RM will truly meet your needs (James Lappin feels there are significant shortcomings in SharePoint records management, Mike Alsup disagrees).   This is a decision you will need to make in consultation with your content owners, legal team and regulatory compliance group.
3. Business drivers. It is important to consider why  you want to move to SharePoint. Cost savings? Usability? Spite? Okay, scratch that last one. As with any decision you need to think through your business case ahead of time. What is the value proposition for moving so SharePoint vs.  the cost of continuing to use your other system?  Is it feasible to integrate the two systems?  It is important to consider all of the potential benefits and pitfalls, efficiencies and costs for swapping out your system.  Try to be as realistic as possible and quantify both the costs and benefits; I find a good place to start is a simple SWOT analysis.  Once you have an understanding of what you hope to achieve, build measurable objectives and create key performance indicators (KPIs) to track your progress.  This is a standard process for the analysis and execution of any business decision but it never ceases to amaze me how often emotion comes into the picture when considering SharePoint.
4. Does your platform speak the same language as SharePoint?  SharePoint works in a certain way; sites are contained within site collections and everything can be tied together with custom metadata columns and content types. There is a large and growing list of add-on modules available.  SharePoint is considered by many to be a development platform and SharePoint also has some intriguing social, portal and business intelligence capabilities.   You need to consider the use cases and information architecture of your current system and determine how closely you want to replicate that system. More importantly, you need to decide whether SharePoint will let you or whether you will be under-utilizing the functionality of the tool if you try to copy your existing system too closely.
5. Content migration is no fun.  Once you've figured out how you will map your existing system to SharePoint you will need to plan the migration itself.  You will need to make decisions about which groups go first (it is unlikely that you will be able to do a "big-bang" migration) and about whether you bring across all document versions or just the latest ones (this will likely vary by group). How will you handle content from departed users?  What about URLs linked between documents and to other places? How about your security model? Who will update your information governance policies and practices? (You dohave information governance policies and practices in place, right?  If not, see here for a primer on the importance and challenges of implementing information governance).
6. Pick the right project team.  This is not, Irepeat notan IT project.  Managing user impact and business process change will be the biggest job for your project team.  Finding a team with strong information management skills is critical as they will understand the specifics of how information needs to be mapped between the two systems. At the same time, you will nee strong business sponsorship to provide guidance, set priorities and give you an escalation point when the going gets tough.
7. Are you ready to get social?   If information wants to be free (and it does), information really wants to be free in SharePoint.  SharePoint started life as a collaboration tool and although it now has a powerful security model, the system works best when most information is available to most people. You need to consider what capabilities the average end user will have; what will people be able to do with their My Sites? Can everyone blog? Who can create a new list, library or team site?  These are fundamental questions of SharePoint governance but be careful not to lock the system down too much. And these considerations are much more than just technical; there are cultural questions that need to be considered as well. This is true of any information management system but is especially important when working with SharePoint.  
8. Infrastructure. Are you a Microsoft shop? How up to date is your SQL Server environment? Do you have some 64 bit servers kicking around? What about Active Directory? Which version of MS Office are you running? The specific requirements for SharePoint 2010 can be found here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262485.aspx.  Although these are fairly high-end specs it really isn't out of the ordinary by today's standards. At the same time most organizations will likely need to upgrade at least some components. You will also need to consider how you will do the content migrations themselves. You will need a test environment to bring across the data and may need a tool to extract, transform and load the documents and metadata from your legacy system as well. 

The bottom line is that the benefits of moving to SharePoint are not automatic and may not be there at all.  Many of my clients are taking a hybrid approach; adding SharePoint on top of their existing information management platform.  Management of this hybrid solution begs many more questions, but may be a part-way solution if your organization is considering a move away from your current platform to SharePoint.  If you do decide to migrate, it is important to recognize that it will very likely be a long and complicated process.  Before you commit, it is critical to understand why, when and how you will complete the migration.

Not many people have heard of Duncan Stanners. Forget Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, Duncan was quietly plying his craft when the internet was but a twinkle in the DoD's eye. But make no mistake, Duncan Stanners has had the kind of success implementing knowledge management programs that most of us can only dream about. 

Duncan recently retired after 20+ years of service at Shell Canada  (which is now wholly owned by Royal Dutch Shell) and I recently had the privilege of joining him and several of our peers in the Calgary knowledge and information management community at a retirement luncheon in Duncan's honour.  In the true spirit of knowledge management, Duncan shared some of the lessons he learned from the successes and challenges he faced over the years. The summary below was shared in the context of implementing a knowledge management program but it applies equally to any RM, ECM or information management program as well. 

1. Go where the energy is. Duncan suggests that while there may be many opportunities to make a big impact with your initial implementation efforts, don't try to boil the ocean. When choosing where to focus, find the group with the most enthusiasm for your project, pick a problem and solve it. This not only builds goodwill with the folks whose problem you've solved, it also builds momentum and a positive reputation for your program team. 
    
2. If you can't find energy, create it.  This is easier said than done but by focusing on the value your program will bring their area of the business and to them as individuals you will gain their trust and enthusiasm.  Again, find a problem and solve it.
    
3. When talking to customers, don't talk about KM (or RM, IM or ECM), talk about their business.  This helps build trust and shows that you are there to help them solve business problems. It also has the handy side effect of helping your learn more about their slice of the organizational pie, which helps you apply your expertise in ways that are specific to their business context.
    
4. If you can't create a hard-dollar ROI, focus on real risks. There is seldom a conversation about information management that doesn't at some point come back to the question of value for money (and nor should there be).  But hard-dollar saving s from de-duplicating the shared drive and improving information access do not always offset the initial costs of your program. However, a risk-based approach that uses hard cost measures based on things that have actually happened will help make your case. Sell your program on the same basis that you sell a safety initiative; the benefits of working more safely are irrefutable , and once they understand the similarities between the two they will be supportive.
    
5. "You're already doing knowledge management. You're just doing it badly".  Duncan's point is that most groups within your organization are already doing knowledge management (or records, information or content management) but because they are using ineffective processes they are not managing their knowledge or information well.  Your job as an expert is to help guide them through the process to managing that knowledge or information better. Duncan suggests that you find cases where you have successful practices and repeat these until you succeed.
    
6. Tools won't sell the thing.  At best, tools and technology can facilitate adoption and at worst they can constrain it, but the best tool in the world will not help if you are not helping real-world business users solve real-world business problems.

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.

My two part series on the impact Microsoft SharePoint may have on the information managment marketplace was well recieved so I thought I might try another two-part article. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the characteristics of successful records management and Enterprise Content Management implementations; why can some organizations successfully deploy ECM where others struggle mightily?

Much of this has to do with organizational culture and the fit of a particular ECM strategy to the business problems faced by a given organization. Readiness is key as are executive buy-in and a well-chosen and well-implemented tool. But these things can be said for pretty much any software application; if the bosses aren’t onside and a good change management strategy isn’t in place, the implementation will fail.

Jeetu Patel of Doculabs recently summarized his perspective on why ECM implementations have high falure rates and what you can do about it on John Mancini’s Digital Landfill blog. I highly recommend you read the post and watch the associated slide show. I’m hopeful that my post is complementary to Jeetu’s perspectives.

So what is it that makes information and records management implementations so special? What challenges do these implementations present that other systems do not? In my mind, there are two big differences;

1.Information Management hits people where they live, for better or worse. At best, records and information management are tied in with business processes and improves them to the point where users can’t believe they ever lived without proper RM / IM and ECM tools. For example, scanning invoices and initiating an automated Accounts Payable workflow process will make any approving manager wonder why they ever thought hand-coding invoices and routing them in multicoloured folders was a good idea. Same for users of Business Process Management applications like insurance claims processing or engineers using a GIS map integrated with a document repository. On the flip side, ECM asks users to change deeply ingrained work habits. Most of us have been using “File / Save as…” then navigating 10 folders deep on a shared drive for as long as we can remember. While most users don’t like storing documents on their shared drives (often lovingly called the “S: mess”), most will take this over a different structure imposed by an ECM system any day (even when you can prove that it’s actually less work to store documents in the ECM system!). Add to this the complexity that many organizations add by expecting their user community to remember a complex records classifications scheme or other detailed metadata and you have a recipe for failure.

2.The other big difference with ECM tools is that they are largely optional. An accountant may not like the way the new ERP system works, but she doesn’t have much of a choice when creating quarterly financial statements. ECM systems, while core to many business processes, can often be worked around by users who insist on storing documents on local drives or USB keys. This isn’t always the case, but it crops up most often when phasing out shared drives with ECM systems and is related to the work habits noted above.

In my next post I’ll talk about what you, the budding ECM deployment guru, can do to overcome these challenges and give your implementation the best chance for success.

Cross posted to the AIIM ERM Communities blog.

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.