DOCUMENT Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 11)

MS MANAGE & STRATEGY & Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM f s hared services have long been considered a successful solution for many ECM-related technology concerns. But without the backdrop of business context to frame your transactional ECM initiatives, shared services won’t be shared by anyone. Forrester recently spoke with information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals at 30 organizations about their ECM initiatives and how they made the case to move forward. All were driven by the need to show hard cost savings associated with their enterprise’s ECM investments. Despite the priority and investment IT organizations make in ECM, many describe their initiatives as too costly, poorly adopted or just unused. They regularly point to systems consolidation, reduction of physical storage requirements and the removal of FTEs as justiﬁcation to invest in ECM suites. Sharing What You Already Have Every organization we interviewed recognized that they have multiple content technologies already in use. Some organizations want to migrate off of legacy ECM technologies onto a product from a single vendor that offers more ECM breadth. Other organizations simply want one trusted vendor for all future ECM investments — helping to reduce licensing, maintenance and administration costs. And this is certainly true for transactional content that includes not only scanned images but other incoming information from e-forms and faxes, print streams generated from back-ofﬁce applications and electronic records that for legal purposes must be kept for extensive time periods. Much of this content originates outside an organization from external parties — customers or partners — and relies on workﬂow or business process management (BPM) to drive transactional, back-ofﬁce business processes. This notion of providing ECM as a shared service addresses many of these concerns, and the concept is far from new. IT organizations have for years provided a set of common systems and functions that are provided with a minimum of variation and shared by one or more groups. ECM has been challenging in this regard due to the sheer number of ECM technologies and diversity of use cases. But the biggest issue is IT’s poor understanding of business context — how business people and business processes use content. Without this understanding, ECM implementations struggle to add sufﬁcient value to the business goals they support. Uncovering That Elusive Business Context The key to shared services By Craig Le Clair Uncovering business context involves interacting with subject matter experts and stakeholders throughout the enterprise, and on the surface, it looks like a daunting task. Our conversations with numerous enterprises about the development of ECM strategies point to seven steps that I&KM pros can take to understand business context and develop better ECM strategies. www.DOCUMENTmedia.com april.08 document 11 http://www.DOCUMENTmedia.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Document Magazine - April 2008

Document Magazine - April 2008 Contents Editor's View The Research Desk The Response Center BPM: Improving the Way You Process Contributing Writers Mapping Out Performance Build the Context Before You Move into the House of ECM Taking On the Big 3 The Human Connection Addressing Your Addresses Don't Call Us, We'll Call You The Mulitplying Image Recognizing Accuracy New Products Calendar Advertisers

Document Magazine - April 2008

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