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.

So it shouldn't really come as a surprise that we can add records management systems to that list.  My Twitter pal and content management all-rounder Cheryl McKinnon (more on her later) provided me with some guidance on the short history of records management systems in Canada.

It is a little-known fact that three of the core records management components in the major ECM suites were originally conceived of in Ottawa.  PS Software Solutions became the core of the Livelink RM module after PS was acquired by Open Text in 1999, Tarian Software was acquired by FileNet (now part of IBM) in 2002 and Provenance Systems became Documentum Records Manager (now part of EMC), also in 2002.

But Canada's glories in the records and information management space are not all past tense.  The following is a very brief overview of a few prominent Canadians in ECM.  And I say brief because it is impossible to capture the contributions of every Canadian who has had an impact on the records and information management industry. The big risk with listing names is overlooking someone and I am certain I have done so, so my apologies in advance. If you think there is someone who deserves to be recognized as a leader in the Canadian ECM space, please let me know in the comments section below.

Tom Jenkins is the Executive Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer at Open Text, the company that helped define the ECM industry and make it what it is today. He joined the company as Chief Operating Officer in 1994 and quickly became CEO then Chairman.  He is one of the true champions of ECM and has helped Open Text become the largest independent ECM vendor in the world. Tom literally wrote the book on ECM and continues to actively promote the future of information through Open Text's support of the Canada 3.0 initiative and the University of Waterloo's Stratford Institute, a think-tank devoted to collaboration between digital media, international commerce and culture.

Cheryl McKinnon has been the Chief Marketing Officer at Nuxeo, an up and coming open source ECM vendor since 2009, but got her start in ECM 16 years ago following a graduate degree in Canadian History.  Cheryl has extensive public sector experience with Hummingbird/PC DOCS and following Open Text's acquisition of Hummingbird she managed the Livelink Collaborative Content Management line of business. It was in this capacity that she launched the Open Text Enterprise 2.0 strategy in 2008. Cheryl is one of my favourite Tweeters (or is that Twitterers?) for her insightful and relevant commentary on all aspects of ECM from records management to social media. She is a true thought leader in our industry and if you don't already follow her Tweets I encourage you to do so. 

Barclay Blair is an information governance guru who has written extensively on the topic. He is the author (along with Randy Kahn) of the Information Nation books, speaks and consults all around the world to Fortune 500 companies, governments and others.  Just in case you were worried Barclay would coast on past success, he was recently named a "SharePoint Guru" at SharePointGovernance.org, a peer exchange site sponsored by AIIM. Barclay is currently president at ViaLumina.

Ann Rockley is the founder of the Rockley Group, a globally-recognized content management consultancy.  Ann has written two books on the intricacies of content management, including DITA 101 and Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy,  which is regarded as one of the seminal books in our industry. Ann is also active in the content management  community; she is the OASIS co-chair DITA for Enterprise Business Documents Subcommittee and is a founding member of the CM Pros group.

Like I said earlier, this list is intended to highlight the contribution Canadians have made to records and information management. If you can think of anyone else who deserves recognition, please list them in the comments section below.

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.

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.

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.

I have been testing my search skills and trying to stay current with industry blogs and Twitter feeds but by far the best source of material has been from conversations with colleagues and clients. The AIIM ERM expert blog initiative is about presenting a “real world” perspective on ECM and what better way to do that than by talking with those who help make ECM happen in organizations throughout the world. My hope is that I can share their success stories and lessons learned to help you improve ECM within your organization.

If there is a topic you would like me to tackle or if you have a success story to share, feel free to get in touch at greg.clark@c3associates.com. I will be cross-posting my AIIM blogs here as well and will provide the blog address when it goes live later this month.