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In my previous post (Part 3), I looked at how the desire to make more money (greed) and the desire to avoid negative outcomes (fear) are the two modes of typical organizational decision making that your ECM strategy will have to navigate in order to get funding. I also used the “cookie and slap” analogy to show that, in most cases, greed will win over fear. In this post, I’ll look at some specific ways you can cast projected ECM benefits in terms of greed to have a better chance to win over your executive decision makers.

Let’s begin with a short list of the usual suspects of ECM benefits:

• Increased efficiency
• Going paperless
• Process automation
• Stronger governance
• Lower compliance risk
• Reduced e-discovery costs

These are all what my colleague Rich Medina would call “motherhood and apple pie” benefits: who could be against any of them? But the more important question is who is willing to pay money and manage the organizational change required in order to gain them?

Given what I’ve seen at clients over the last 24 months, the answer is, almost no one.

All things being equal, if ECM isn’t directly and significantly lowering costs or increasing revenue, it’s going to be a tough sell at most organizations. Sure, you might find a CIO who’s gotten religion around ECM and has the clout to implement it without a developed business case. Or you might find a CXO who’s already done the legwork to justify some subset of ECM functionality to the larger organization (customer communication management, document management, web content management, and so on). But in 95% of the cases, if you and the team can’t show them the money, ECM is going nowhere at the organization.

The good news is that many of these motherhood and apple pie benefits have downstream revenue or direct savings impacts…if you know where to look for them. And while the specifics of these benefits will be different for each organization, here are some questions to ask to get you headed in the right direction:

• Increased efficiency: What will the saved time or increased capacity be used for? Can we reduce FTEs? Can we shift resources from one role to another (hopefully from a more expensive to a less expensive resource)? Will we free up time to do a higher-value activity (Implementations has more time, so Sales can stop doing their work and sell more)? Etc.
• Going paperless: What are the direct costs associated with paper for the activities that ECM impacts (cost of the paper itself, time spent moving paper rather than electronic files, etc.)? What are the indirect costs (off site storage and archiving, destruction costs, time and effort for audits, etc.)?
• Process automation: Other than automation, what does the organization gain? Increased efficiency? What will the saved time or increased capacity be used for? Better quality or customer experience? What will this impact positively (time to market, revenue, market share, margins)?
• Stronger governance: Are there legal mandates requiring the stronger governance ECM can provide? Is the organization subject to fines if this higher governance bar is not met? Has the organization already been fined?
• Lower compliance risk: Does the current compliance risk involve adherence to legal mandates? Is the organization subject to fines if these mandates are not met? Has the organization already been fined?
• Reduced e-discovery costs: What percentage of revenue does the organization’s e-discovery costs represent? What is the litigation profile of the organization? Are they involved in multiple, significant federal lawsuits every year?

Remember, none of these categories of benefits is worth paying for in and of itself…at least in the eyes of many organizations out there. You need to realize that the gains we think are important are, to executive leadership, only a means to some other end: increased revenue, higher margins, or cost savings. You need to tie all your ECM gains to these downstream…otherwise, that and a quarter will get you on the bus when it comes time to get the funding and executive support for ECM.