My previous post was a teaser, laying out both the upside and the downside of mobility – and the situation in which many organizations now find themselves with respect to management of content generated by their users’ many mobile apps.
To repeat the question: How do we win with mobile enterprise content management (ECM) – get the benefits while controlling the downside, i.e. the risks and costs?
I’m approaching it from an AIIM-ECM perspective rather than a mobile architecture or security perspective. The good news is that we can use what we’ve all learned from ECM:
- We can discern what’s similar from what’s different, what’s simple from what’s complex. The introduction of mobile resembles what happened when MFPs and radically distributed capture were introduced. Deploying “light” mobility to mature ECM applications like Accounts Payable is simple, while deploying “high” mobility to social media applications involving customers is very complex.
- We can also use solid methodologies from general IT and specific ECM. Insert mobile document management into the Program Framework approach that’s a best practice for enterprise ECM deployments. Do fast but rigorous Current State Assessments, Future State Recommendations, and Deployment Roadmaps that lead from one to the other. The picture I’ll be sketching out here shows a piece of just such a Deployment Roadmap.
So here are the six most important considerations if you are starting from an AIIM-ECM-focused stance and want to tackle mobile to optimize the upside benefits and control the downside costs and risks. Note that I’m sometimes saying ECM (enterprise content management) and sometimes saying DM (document management). I have something specific in mind here, where DM is a smaller subset of ECM – but you can ignore that nuance if it’s a distraction.
- How should we address our current state of mobile DM chaos? Calling it “chaos” makes it sounds like a Chicken Little panic attack, but the point really addresses your organization’s Current State with respect to mobility and the baseline level of adequacy you have to meet, no matter what you do strategically with mobile DM.
- How should we start adding mobility to DM? DM is going to be your foundation, so it better be solid. This point helps you standardize and “firm up” your ECM strategy so it’ll be a solid foundation for adding mobile. If it’s not solid, then address that first before getting ambitious about mobile.
- How should we identify and rank DM opportunities to implement? This point recommends three levels of ECM applications that are candidate for enhancing with mobility. They are lightly mobile mature ECM applications, moderately mobile enterprise social collaboration applications, and highly mobile vertical LOB applications.
- How should we address mobile DM inefficiency? This point addresses two problems. The first is the fact that most mobile technology isn’t ready for the prime time enterprise-worthy mobile DM. But that isn’t the big obstacle to efficiency. The big obstacle is that it’s really hard to optimize the twin requirements of participation and quality; you need all the relevant users to participate in mobile DM, but they have to provide adequate quality.
- How should we address mobile DM risk? Mobile DM ramps up the litigation and regulatory risks we know from digital environments – ensured retention is hard, and defensible disposition is almost out the window. But the other issue pertains to security, particularly data leakage.
- How should we address individual mobile DM projects within an ECM program? This last point explains how to incorporate your mobile DM projects into a sophisticated checklist or Program Framework that ensures that you address all the necessary conditions for rollout success.
So that’s my quick overview of the six considerations. Next post, I’ll begin discussing each in depth, so you can start optimizing the upside benefits and controlling the downside costs and risks of mobile ECM at your own organization.