Enterprise Content Management and Business Process Management are not merely IT projects. Ascending on an ECM/BPM path requires meticulous planning, execution, and measurement. For all stakeholders, it is essential to internalize that such an initiative will definitely alter the way the organization executes its business, positively.

ECM/BPM is about business transformation. It is about aligning people, process, and content with business priorities. So, it is essential for an organization to define how this alignment can be achieved. Any organization that is serious about content and process management must define an ECM/BPM program.

ECM/BPM Program

A program is mandatory for any organization contemplating ECM/BPM. Putting a program in place does not mean that the organization should look at executing the program in a massive way. The organization need not, and in many cases should not, proceed with a big bang approach to ECM/BPM. At the same time, projects should not be executed in isolation thus creating silos within the organization. Defining a program helps the organization in setting the direction of the ECM/BPM journey. Even if the execution approach is small and tactical, a program will let the organization align such steps in the same strategic direction.

An ECM/BPM program involves four steps:
• Articulating the objectives
• Planning
• Executing the plan
• Measuring the program itself

Objectives

It is essential that the organization understand what the objectives of this program be. Such a program will be deemed to fail unless there is buy-in from all key stake holders in the organization. The top management, functional heads, line managers, and all employees of the organization should be prepared well for the change and its benefits.

The commonly achieved benefits of such a program are:
• Improved organizational efficiency and effectiveness
• Better control of the operations
• Increased collaboration between functions
• Better customer satisfaction levels
• Ability to scale up operations better
• Cost reduction

While all or many of these benefits can be achieved in an ECM/BPM program, it is paramount to identify the primary potential benefits. The goal for potential benefits is unique for an organization, so the first step of such a program is to identify them. The most important potential benefits will be the objectives of the program.

Defining the objectives will be an exercise where representatives from all key stakeholders participate. Potential benefits can be defined only if current pain points are enumerated and analyzed. This is a vital exercise since a solution cannot be arrived at before understanding the problem in detail.

The outcome of this step will be clearly articulated organizational objectives for the ECM/BPM program that are endorsed and internalized by the key stakeholders.

Planning

The previous step defined what the program will bring to the organization. The planning step will define how the objectives will be met, who will make it happen, when and where the benefits can be realized.

The first step will be to put together a team who will manage and monitor the planning and execution of the program. The proposed team should have representation from the top management, business units, user community, information technology, compliance group, and other support functions.

This phase will flush out more details about the individual group pain points and areas of improvements. Besides, the step will define tactical and strategic approaches in dealing with the problems in hand. The most significant part of the planning process is to put together a potential organization-wide roadmap for achieving the objectives.

The last priority for the planning phase will be to prioritize the tactical initiatives that are achievable in the shorter timeframe and identify potential execution plans.

Execution

The execution phase will focus on identified and approved tactical plans. It will involve looking at these tactical plans, defining the problems in detail, identifying potential solution, identifying necessary technological improvements, getting internal or external teams to bring execution capabilities, and finally carrying out solution projects.

Execution phase is a long-term process and will involve a multitude of internal teams, technologies, vendors, and administrative functions. The program team will play a significant role in this phase to ensure that each tactical plan execution is fully aligned with the organizational objectives defined for the program.

Measurement

The most important and the most neglected step in an enterprise wide program is measuring. An organization should have a clear understanding of the ROI (Return On Investment) at every step of the program. ROI is nothing but a quantification of the objectives. Objectives are easy to enumerate, but difficult to quantify. In most cases, measurement and monitoring are lost in the execution step.

The program team will need to define measurable matrices for each tactical plan. These parameters are to be reviewed during and after the execution of the tactical plan. The findings are then to be incorporated into future tactical plan execution and approvals. This will ensure that the ROIs are accrued in the right direction throughout the program.

IT and business groups within big organizations haven’t had the best cohesion ever.  This is a much debated topic in various books, blogs, discussion forums, seminars, and workshops. The existence of such a divide is well acknowledged and accepted. Why do I want to talk about it again? I believe that many of the discussions around this topic were too theoretical. But it is time we look at the issue through a much simpler pair of lenses. It is important for this blog because, any discussion about enterprise BPM or content management will not be complete without understanding this particular issue.

Why don’t IT and business groups talk to each other in the same language? I would say, in many organizations:

• They don’t take the trouble to understand each other
• They have their own respective priorities and budgets
• There may not be anybody whose job is to ensure that these groups talk to each other
• The thinking is so compartmental that people fail to see beyond their immediate problems and tasks
• Bridging this gap is pretty lower in the priority lists of the executive management

There could be another hundred such reasons that can be enumerated. The simpler fact is, we are talking about people! They like to be in their comfort zones, as long as there are no major incentives to break through them.

Historically, companies created innumerable inefficiencies within their four walls. The hierarchies, process controls, policies and the bureaucracies associated with them hamper the smooth sailing of organizations. They could afford to ignore such issues till recently. But, times are changing. The current economic scenario puts a lot of pressure on organizations to cleanup their acts. With the workforce shrinking and pressure to perform in difficult market conditions increasing, businesses have to look at better and smarter ways of doing things. So, it is paramount that companies try to bridge this divide.

Is there some magic to solve this issue? If there were, somebody would have succeeded by now. I have more questions than answers:

IT is a support group within companies. So, why do they need separate budgets? Should they derive their revenues from their internal customers? Why would a company year on year set aside x amount of money only as a cost budget? If there is a customer-vendor relationship between IT and business groups, will there be improved interactions between them? How many companies out there tried and tested such a model?

Do companies follow a process of discussing about newer IT initiatives to all business groups within the company? Are there initiatives to share learnings from one group’s experience with the rest?

Did anybody try to create a bridge group with leaders from IT and business, thus forming a small team with the sole responsibility of formulating IT solutions for business problems?

Has any organization tried to utilize the skill levels of IT services vendors in bridging this gap?

Imaging is one of the oldest forms of ECM solutions. Since the 80s, many vendors built products and systems to digitize and manage paper documents. Later these vendors added workflow capabilities to the imaging systems and made organizations realize the power of electronic documents moving seamlessly to complete business transactions. While the western world has gotten used to imaging and workflow systems for a while now, emerging countries are still looking at the problem of handling paper documents. Though players in the ECM market no longer choose to call an imaging system by that name, the need for such systems is higher today than for any other ECM sub-system. In fact, an imaging solution implementation is considered as the first step towards putting together a content-enabled organization.

Imaging is nothing but scanning paper documents into an electronic format. Typically paper is scanned to a TIFF image or a PDF document. A set of metadata is then associated with the scanned image and sent to a repository application. The process of associating metadata to images is often referred to as indexing. The repository application stores the images and the metadata and maintains the relationship between them. Users are allowed to search for the images using the indexed metadata. This is the simplest form of ECM and does scan, store, and retrieve of paper based information.

Over the past two decades imaging systems also went through many makeovers. Many early systems had tight integration between scanning and repositories, over the years these systems got separated. In fact they became separate lines of businesses for many vendors. Scanning systems graduated into Capture systems with the additions of capture workflows, manual and automated indexing modules, centralized and distributed processing capabilities, and support for multiple repository products. Repositories got complex as well with scaling and robustness enhancements, serving content on the web, and increased security and access control mechanisms.

Of late I have been involved in many ECM implementations where the thrust was on scanning paper documents and making them available within the extended customer organization seamlessly. Though the terminologies used for these systems now are Information Capture and Content Management Systems, the principles remain the same as what was envisaged in the 80s.

There are umpteen products out there which are capable of handling the challenges posed by a modern day organization. But it is the lack of professionals who can apply common sense that is crippling many of the enterprise implementations. Implementing a Content Management System is still an art and there are not many such artists available in the part of the world that I live in.

This blog is all about ECM (Enterprise Content Management). I got into this domain accidently about 12 years back and stuck with it almost forever. Like any other technology vertical, ECM also has far too many facets. My comfort zones are content and process management, records management, and digital assets management.

AIIM, the premier ECM industry association, defines  Enterprise Content Management (ECM) as the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists.

ECM, according to me, is all about managing unstructured information and making it available to business transactions. Structured information is data that is defined with attributes and are kept in transactional information systems. Plainly, all the data you can put into database tables and search for is structured information. Anything else could fall into the unstructured category. This could include paper documents, office documents, emails, faxes, images, audio, video etc. Statistically, about 20% of all information that an organization deals with fall into the structured category. This means that a huge load of information lies in unstructured format and it is always difficult to search for and retrieve. ECM fits right there.

ECM is a matured industry with thousands of players present across market bands. While the small and medium segments are crowded with plenty of product vendors, the enterprise segment saw major consolidations in the past couple of years. The discussions in this forum is aimed primarily at the enterprise segment which is dominated by IBM FileNet, EMC Documentum, OpenText, Oracle, Interwoven, Vignette and of course Microsoft SharePoint. Other interesting options would be Alfresco and SpringCM.

ECM technologies and products are always complemented by Capture, DW & BI, and DRM. It would be interesting to hear from experts on how these technology solutions can co-exist with ECM.

If you are interested in contributing to these discussions, please post a comment and will be more than glad to invite you as an author.