This is a blog post
that summarizes the presentation I delivered on March 19 at the AIIM Conference
2015. The link to the presentation slides on SlideShare is included below.
For years, enterprise content management (ECM) solutions were adopted primarily for two main use cases. The first was to achieve compliance, and many early adopters of ECM continue to successfully use it to address various regulatory requirements. Compliance provided functionality for records management, archiving, and information governance. A while back I wrote a blog post titled What Features Ensure Compliance? that elaborates on the functionality required for compliance use cases.
The second use case was around team effectiveness with
functionality such as collaboration, document sharing, and social capabilities.
Collaboration is subject to frequent changes in direction as every new
technology promises an easier and more compelling user experience—from mobility
and social software to file sync-and-share. The frequent feature churn in the
collaborative use cases doesn’t go well with the compliance requirements that
often need the system to remain unchanged for several years (validated
environments, anyone?).
ROI and Dependency on the User
Not only were the two primary use cases not really well aligned in their feature requirements, they had two additional challenges. Neither use case provides a very strong ROI. Sure, we marketers always calculate the savings in storage and government fines that compliance solutions help you avoid. But let’s face it: preventing penalties is not exactly a hard ROI and storage is cheap (or at least everybody thinks it is). The collaborative use cases are even worse—measuring the ROI here is fuzzy at best and often impossible.
Not only were the two primary use cases not really well aligned in their feature requirements, they had two additional challenges. Neither use case provides a very strong ROI. Sure, we marketers always calculate the savings in storage and government fines that compliance solutions help you avoid. But let’s face it: preventing penalties is not exactly a hard ROI and storage is cheap (or at least everybody thinks it is). The collaborative use cases are even worse—measuring the ROI here is fuzzy at best and often impossible.
The second challenge was the dependency on the users to do
the right thing. For the compliance use cases, users were expected to diligently
file their documents, weed out their inboxes, type in the metadata, and apply
the right retention policies. Obviously, users are not very consistent at it,
even if you try to force them. In the case of collaboration, users were
expected to share their documents openly with others, comment in a productive
way, and stay away from email and all the other collaboration tools around them.
As it turns out, this type of behavior very much depends on the culture of the
team—it works for some, but it will never work for others. The adoption of any
collaboration solution is therefore usually very tribal.
So, is there any hope for ECM? Can we get an ROI and get
employees to use it without someone watching over their shoulder?
ECM: Part of the Process
As it turns out, there is a third type of use case emerging. It is the use of ECM as part of a business process. Business processes are something people already do—we don’t have to force anyone. That’s what companies and working in them is all about: everything we do is part of a business process. Business processes are also important, relevant, and very measurable. There is an ROI behind every business process. Every instance of a business process includes the context, which can be used to populate the metadata and to select the right policy automatically. Business processes can handle the automation of content management and don’t have to rely on the end user to do it.
ECM: Part of the Process
As it turns out, there is a third type of use case emerging. It is the use of ECM as part of a business process. Business processes are something people already do—we don’t have to force anyone. That’s what companies and working in them is all about: everything we do is part of a business process. Business processes are also important, relevant, and very measurable. There is an ROI behind every business process. Every instance of a business process includes the context, which can be used to populate the metadata and to select the right policy automatically. Business processes can handle the automation of content management and don’t have to rely on the end user to do it.
But business processes don’t live in ECM. Sure, the process
artifacts usually reside in a content repository, but it would be a stretch to
claim that the entire business process happens in an ECM application. Nor does
it live in the BPM application, even if that application may be the primary
application for some users. In fact, there is usually a master application from
the structured data world that rules the business process: enterprise resource
planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), product lifecycle
management (PLM), supply chain management (SCM), etc.
That’s why it is important for ECM to connect with the
master applications through the business process. This is not just a simple way
to link data sets or to hand over data from one system to another. Using
modern, REST-based technology, it is possible to achieve integration that goes
much deeper and involves users, roles, permissions, classifications, and of
course the user experience.
Deal with Content Chaos
ECM addresses some very important problems that every organization has to deal with. Given the volume and relentless growth of content in every enterprise, it has to be managed. Yet ECM struggled to be adopted widely because of lack of tangible ROI and a difficulty to attract end users. Tying ECM to a business process through a master application addresses these challenges. It may not solve every problem with content in the enterprise and there will still be content outside of any business process, but it will go a long way to dealing with what AIIM calls “Content Chaos”.
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