Doculabs

In my previous two posts (Part 1 and Part 2), I’ve taken a look a what it takes to “sell” an ECM strategy at most organizations. We’ve seen that it takes a lot–sometimes as much as 60% of the effort on a strategy project is devoted to selling the strategy throughout the organization. And we’ve also seen that the things a mid-level manager finds compelling are not typically compelling to corporate executives, the folks writing the check for all this at the end of the day.

The key is to push mid-level management thinking on ECM closer to executive-level thinking, because if you don’t do so, the risk that your ECM strategy will fail go up dramatically. In this post, I want to illustrate how executive and organizational tendencies impact decision-making.

The most important thing to realize is that there are two broad tendencies in an organization, the desire to make more money and the desire to avoid risk (or greed and fear, as Ian Miller put it during a recent workshop I participated in), and the first usually trumps the second.

We could lament the short-sightedness of the modern corporation: always out for profit, never willing to think long-term or consider the consequences of inaction, etc. But I think this misses the point, a very human point, behind the truth that greed trumps fear.

Imagine you’re sitting with your left hand lying palm-down on a table; in front of you is a plate of cookies. You’re told you have the choice between removing your hand from the table or eating some cookies–you cannot do both. If you leave your hand on the table, however, there’s a chance it will be hit with a ruler.

How you address this dilemma depends on lots of things (your pain tolerance, how good the cookies look/smell, whether you even like cookies, and so on), but what’s fundamentally at issue is that removing your hand simply keeps you in the same state you’re in now–nothing positive or negative is going to happen. Choosing the cookies, however, means a 100% guarantee that something positive will happen with only a chance that something negative may also happen.

Now picture that it costs you money to remove your hand from the table or take a cookie: which do you choose? Now imagine that, in addition to paying money, you have to do 100 sit ups to avoid being hit with a ruler…

When we try to sell an ECM strategy using risk avoidance as the driver, this choice between cookies and a possible slap is what executives are facing. The X million dollars you say they need to spend on ECM could be spent simply doing more of what they normally do to make money…which will make them even more money, which could be used in the event that the predicted risk comes to pass. Or, they could spend that money on ECM, which requires a huge amount of cultural change management, and in the end be guaranteed not to make any more money than they are now, solely in order to avoid a risk that may or may not come to pass.

Once you accept this reality, it gets easier to see the business case for your ECM strategy through an executive lens. And in my next post, I’ll examine some typical ECM benefits and see how they stack up in the executive world of cookies and slaps.