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Best Practices for Enterprise Content Management:
Advice from the Trenches
By Gerard Cannie, AIIM ERM Master, and Scott ‘DJ’ Wilson, CDIA+,
Optical Image Technology
(Note: This article was originally published in the March 2008 edition of
ECM Connection)
When you are immersed in day-to-day business operations, optimizing
your content management strategies doesn’t necessarily fall high on your
list of priorities. It is often difficult to know where to start and—equally
as important—where to expend your resources. That said, however,
the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality is no longer a valid approach for any business that
hopes to remain competitive.
Enterprise content management (ECM) involves much more than going paperless. According
to AIIM, ECM involves “technologies, tools, and methods used to capture, manage, store,
preserve, and deliver content across an enterprise.” At the heart of ECM is your organization’s
ability to access, monitor, and process your information as efficiently as possible. Included
below are some recommendations for success from professionals who, between them, have
almost 25 years of experience developing and implementing ECM solutions.
Communication: The cornerstone to a successful ECM implementation
Without extensive communication, ECM implementations are often doomed. Successful
implementations involve people from all levels of an enterprise as part of their planning
strategy. This ensures proper alignment of business and IT goals. Including representatives
from different areas of your enterprise will also allow you to set protocols for effective
indexing, and to develop the criteria that differentiate records from other business documents.
Having representatives from different areas of your enterprise will also help you to document
specific processes. Eventually, you will need to communicate the complex nature of your
processing details to an ECM vendor.
The project manager should provide a detailed picture of the implementat