About two months ago, our chapter relations guru, Jessica Lombardo, asked me to give a short presentation to AIIM chapter leaders about timely ECM topics. I’ve pulled the following list together from my reading, conversations, and audience questions/comments from our Wednesday Webinar series.
It is by no means meant to be exhaustive, but I’ve been using this as a mental crib sheet as I identify articles for our website. Am I off-base here? Missing anything?
The list is numerical, but is in no particular order.
1.SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint. Yes. I know. Duh. Still, no what’s important in ECM list is complete without it. However, I think it’s important more from a where it fits in YOUR strategy standpoint than anything else. Like any technology, you use SharePoint to achieve whatever content strategy your organization has. It’s not a strategy all by it’s lonesome.
2.Capture-themed topics. Distributed capture in particular. Anyone who has been in the industry for a while is tired of document imaging. However, it’s difficult to do correctly and continues to yield strong ROI.
3.Collaboration/Enterprise 2.0. How do you get folks to work together? What tools are effective? How do you change the culture to enable sharing and working together? Also, many of the tools are not being managed, creating a deja vu all over again scenario as occurred with email (i.e., employees started using the tool, it wasn’t properly managed, enter the lawyers and litigation). In addition to working together well and not recreating the wheel, the output of collaborative tools needs to be brought under the regular corporate governance umbrella.
4.Records Management/Ediscovery. These are separate, though related issues. Jess had asked for a list of 10, so I smooshed them together.
5.Retention planning. A component of records management, but it’s mentioned often enough that I thought it merited a separate mention. Whether you follow the Big Bucket theory of retention planning espoused by Gimmal’s Susan Cisco (and others) or something more complicated, planning for the ultimate disposal of your documents is critical. A retention plan is a (if not the) core component.
6. Search/Findability. After all, if you can’t find it, it’s not very useful. Strategies for making sure content is readily accessible across multiple repositories will save time and money for you down the road. And, yes, we can all continue to alternately thank and curse Google for setting user expectations so high for such a complex task.
7. Taxonomy. Again, part of search, but mentioned frequently in requests for more information from our webinar attendees. Having participated in a limited taxonomy creation as part of the creation of our print Buyers’ Guide, it is an intellectually stimulating and aggravating exercise in alternating minutes.
8. Change management. The IT industry always seems to forget to include preparing the ultimate user of whatever technology is coming their way that, indeed, something ECM/WCM/RM/Collaboration this way comes. If your end users don’t use the system; it fails. Too often overlooked as a focal point in editorial and technology discussions.
9. Governance/ECM strategy. The basic blocking and tackling of figuring out where all of the tools fit. Keeping consultants and analysts employed for the foreseeable future.
10. ROI – for 1 through 9. Fairly self-explanatory. The economy stinks. What’s this stuff going to do to make the bottom line fatter?
Any comments are welcome. Fire away either below or bduhon@aiim.org.
Bryant
