I’ve been at Doculabs for 13 years, long enough to have been inside hundreds of client organizations representing a wide range of industries, and everywhere I’ve seen the serious business problems presented by the increasing volumes of unstructured content: all the word processing files, email, spreadsheets, web content, images, graphics, and other digital assets that our clients’ employees create and use in the course of their business processes.
In those same 13 years, I’ve seen the software industry step up to provide the technologies to manage this content: imaging systems, products for document management, workflow, web content management, etc. Then the solutions themselves became more integrated and their functionality even more robust, until now it would appear that any organization ought to be able to roll out an ECM system enterprise-wide and solve all its content-related issues.
But they can’t – or not without a struggle, at least. So the question: Why is enterprise management of unstructured content so difficult? I have a lot to say on this topic, so I’m presenting it as two blog posts: 1) How We Got to the Current State, and 2) How to Get to the Desired Future State.
And for all too many organizations, we’re talking just basic, content-related problems, like limited search capabilities, or the lack of a standard classification of information, or the need for more efficient review-and-approval processes, or a better way of knowing which version of a document is the current one. Never mind the content-related problems that people in Legal or in Records Management would like to see solved – problems like costly manual processes for legal discovery of electronically stored information, or the lack of policies and procedures for managing electronic documents as records, even though most of the business content created today exists primarily in electronic format, not as paper.
The fact is, many organizations deployed some kind of an ECM solution once upon a time within one department – say, an imaging solution in Accounts Payable – and that’s been the extent of the footprint of Big ECM in the organization. Then a few other departments saw how well it was working in AP, and they went out and put in place a little imaging solution of their own, or they found a little workflow tool that allowed them to route documents and distribute work inside their department more efficiently. Maybe Legal got desperate and put in its own ECM application, one with a focus on legal document management, and tweaked it for its own exclusive needs.
What was missing from the start is an enterprise vision of content management – and a recognition that the enterprise really does benefit from taking an enterprise approach, as opposed to a departmental approach, to getting all this burgeoning volume of unstructured content under some kind of control.
The ECM vendors themselves didn’t help matters any by selling departmental deployments. Yes, sure, they’d have preferred to ink an enterprise deal with an enterprise license for their software product. But in many cases the strategy going in was to get one department to bite off on their product, and then depend on positive word-of-mouth for other departments to climb on board the ECM wagon. And it just didn’t work out that way. That initial deployment probably got customized for the applications required for that particular department, and those applications weren’t at all what other departments needed. Then the original department found that keeping current with the upgrades for its customized applications got too costly, and they decided to limp along on what they had; besides, their users were familiar with it – why throw something else at them? And in the meantime, the other departments got their own departmental solutions, for their own applications – and the cycle repeated itself.
So this is how it happens: a technology environment in which various individual components of ECM technology have been put in place to address various business problems within various departments. But it’s an approach that is increasingly untenable – for a number of reasons:
- First, there’s the sheer volume of unstructured content. Even a small business with less than 50 employees now generates a significant number of documents; large, geographically-dispersed organizations have that much more, and in multiple repositories. The inability to search and retrieve from these vast stores of content has a significant impact on business process efficiency.
- For another thing, business processes tend to cross departmental boundaries – and so do the documents that support those business processes. There are good reasons to provide individuals from multiple departments varying levels of access to content.
- Then there’s mobile access. If the stuff is electronic, you ought to be able to give your knowledge workers access to it on the road (or in the field, for your sales guys/gals).
- But along with the volume issue comes the retention issue. Outdated digital content – and digital content that the organization is not legally required to retain – ought to be systematically purged from the organization’s repositories to reduce risk. And in the event of litigation, the revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) now mandate that you be able to collect and produce the relevant documentation, whether that documentation exists in electronic or paper format.
Organizations are starting to come around. We see it in organizations of all sizes, representing all industries. There’s a growing awareness that an enterprise approach to content management is what’s needed. So they’re looking to buy the ECM tool that, they are told, will make all these problems go away.
But there’s more to an enterprise roll-out of ECM than just throwing the technology at the problem. There are other reasons enterprise ECM has been a challenge – some of which involve people, some of which involve process, some of which involve the simple fact that ECM encompasses multiple technologies — which means that how IT goes about rolling it out can have a significant impact on the success of the overall, enterprise-wide initiative. It’s why Doculabs advises any organization that’s going to deploy ECM to multiple business units to do so as part of an enterprise ECM program, with a defined future state for how users throughout the organization will be using the various components of ECM in their business processes and an overall strategy for rolling out the software that gets you to that future state.
And that’s the topic I’ll take up in my next blog post: How to Get to the Desired Future State.