Doculabs

Well, not really. But it is the “devil’s advocate” position I heard at a client site recently, during a working session to build out the business case for ECM. Here’s how it went down.

We were all busily discussing how the solution packages we were building would allow business users to migrate off of shared drives and onto more manageable repositories, when one of our team members piped up, “Why, exactly, are we migrating folks off of shared drives?”

The silence was palpable. It was like asking why you’d want dessert or a paid vacation day: Everyone knows that shared drives are the worst way to manage your documents, and that moving them into an ECM system, SharePoint, or almost anywhere else is always a good thing. Period.

Once we all had a chance to recover our composure a bit, I stepped up to tout the merits of migration. I climbed up onto the soap box and launched into my best “smart guy” consultant speech about versioning, metadata inheritance, systematic disposition, and document-centric workflow, but before I could tie it all into Einstein’s theory of relativity and world peace, he interrupted me.

“I get all that,” he said, “but I thought we were building the business case for the ECM program. And given the fact that we’re in the midst of drastic administrative cost-cutting right now and have to compete against other initiatives by showing how we contribute to cost-cutting efforts better than the competition, what, exactly, do we get from migrating off shared drives? At the end of the day, what’s the ROI for migration?”

The silence was more than palpable–at this point it was deafening. So I tried another angle by turning it around on him. I asked him what he thought the ROI of staying on shared drives was, hoping that this might stop the madness…but it only made it worse.

“Well, the cost of storage for an ECM system or SharePoint will be more expensive than shared drives. Then there’s the software maintenance charges and the specialized resources required to care and feed the system. Add to that the time and money for user training to make sure they know how to use the system and governance to make sure they continue to use it correctly–that’s substantial money right there. And although you won’t get the impressive stack of ECM capabilities by staying on shared drives, couldn’t we avoid all these costs and get a ‘good enough’ result for things like e-discovery, records management, and general search using the Google Search Appliance, for a lot less money?”

What I realized listening to him was that he was bringing us the CXO perspective, which isn’t caught up in industry best practices, technical capability stacks, or the way things ought to be done; it’s concerned with how things can be done and in evaluating different options for doing them in terms of either revenue generation or cost savings. And by doing so, he reminded us that the success of an ECM program doesn’t depend on best practices or leading-edge software. Success comes from delivering more value to the organization than other programs or initiatives. Period.