C3 Associates Inc.

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.

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.

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.

C3 Associates Princial Greg Clark and Associate Pankaj Bhawnani presented at last week’s AIIM Western Canada conference. Panjaj’s topic was “How to Build an Information Management Strategy” and Greg’s was “What Success Looks Like – The Anatomy of a Successful ECM Program”.

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