How to develop an ECM strategy and roadmap
- Updated on: 2022-05-05
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Anyone who travels to a new place is bound to get lost without a map or GPS; similarly, organizations shouldn't plan to deploy enterprise content management without a roadmap.
An ECM roadmap identifies the necessary operational policies, procedures and technologies to maintain an organization's digital information.
Developing an ECM roadmap is an involved process, so organizations should understand best practices and steps to successfully create one.
Why is an ECM roadmap important? An ECM roadmap depends on an ECM strategy, which links business objectives to identifiable results such as increased productivity, reduced costs and mitigated risks. An ECM strategy describes the whyin terms of business benefits; an ECM roadmap charts the how in terms of investments in people, processes and technologies. An ECM roadmap operationalizes an organization's ECM strategy and defines investment plans for an identifiable time period, such as the next 18 to 36 months. A roadmap sets priorities and like all plans, it needs to be reviewed on a periodic basis -- at least annually -- and updated in light of changing business objectives.
Any organization where users share information online has an ECM strategy. But some strategies are accidental and inefficient, while others are deliberately designed to achieve particular business purposes. An ECM roadmap identifies key steps for streamlining operations by making it easier for users to get work done, such as: Perform a content audit. Identify how users are currently storing and sharing files within their organizations. This includes both files stored on network file shares as well as within formally defined databases or info bases. Determine existing naming conventions or categorizing criteria to assign file and folder names to items. Consider whether these naming conventions define underlying organizing principles. Develop one or more controlled vocabularies based on these principles and organize these vocabularies into taxonomies of related terms. Chart the organization's content lifecycle. Be sure to distinguish between works-in-progress and published files. List the roles and responsibilities for users who create and modify content drafts. Identify the tasks and activities required to review, approve and publish final form content. Determine how published content is filed and stored for long-term retention. Categorize content by relevant terms that the content audit initially determined. Clarify archiving and disposition processes. For example, what happens to drafts? How does content age? When is it deprecated and removed from a current collection? How is it ultimately destroyed or digitally shredded? Identify mandates and guidelines for content governance. Consider user security, operational risks and regulatory requirements. Determine the people and computational processes that have access to various types of content. Identify user roles within an organization for accessing (viewing, modifying and/or creating) different types of content. Assign security categories to these different types of content.
An ECM roadmap does not exist in a vacuum. It's important to plan for the long term by anticipating future business needs and changes in the ECM market. For example, modern ECM systems automatically categorize content based on predefined terms and taxonomies. Organizations should anticipate how advances in AI and machine learning are going to affect this virtuous cycle of content enrichment. Organizations should invest in ECM projects that they can complete within a discrete time frame. This time frame should be within a year, but organizations can frequently complete an ECM project within three or four months. Once the organization implements the ECM system, it should assess results, reinvest in new efforts and plan for continuous improvements.
