Collaborate Preview – Living in the Trenches: Best Practices for Successful ECM Projects
ECM projects run the gamut of length, complexity, resource utilization, rousing successes and epic failures. Most of you have probably heard or been witness to ECM projects that never were started because of the assumed complexity involved to see the project through. Others may have experienced projects that were never successfully completed because of shifts in technology or business priority.
All of us probably have actual or anecdotal cases to share regarding ECM projects that have either completely failed or at least failed to meet expectations. The key with these failures though, hopefully, is that we can move forward to our next project having new knowledge of the do’s and don’ts, gotchas, and tips and tricks, so that ultimately we can build best practices around our projects and share them with our peers. This will be the focus of one of Billy Cripe’s presentations at Collaborate 2011. Billy is Fishbowl’s VP of Marketing, and he has over 10 years experience implementing, integrating and consulting on various ECM systems, including Oracle Enterprise Content Management. He has been in the ECM trenches, so to speak, and has developed and vetted ECM best practices including the one he will share at Collaborate in just a few short months.
This best practice has more to do with utilization than it does with adopting standards, or developing roadmaps, or even mapping users needs/requests to the appropriate ECM product. Billy will focus on specific ECM capabilities that have been underutilized yet hold great potential when realized. This starts when companies begin to view ECM as part of their key infrastructure and not just a content store. In doing this, companies find that specific ECM features, such as document imaging, not only provide immediate automation gains for the most paper-intensive business areas (accounts payable), but can also be utilized in other areas as well (human resources). Effectively, viewing and implementing ECM as Infrastructure enables companies to easily roll out ECM features and functionality more efficiently and cost effectively than deploying point solutions in each business area.
To do this, companies have to develop an ECM program plan, which includes brainstorm sessions on where and how ECM can be utilized within an organization, as well as the systems it could potentially be integrated with. This could be integrating ECM with CRM (customer relationship management), BI (Business Intelligence) and Portal systems. In this example, the ECM system provides the information infrastructure, storing and managing all enterprise content, while providing workers the necessary tools to do their jobs (web content management, invoice processing, etc.) However, it would also provide the necessary integration points to ensure that content created in a CRM system can be stored and accessed in the ECM system. Furthermore, it would leverage the capabilities of BI software to deliver and publish critical information coming out of other enterprise systems so that it can be surfaced to managers through a management dashboard. Lastly, it could be that all this information is presented within a portal, providing a one-stop shop for this information while providing a rich user experience. So in this example, ECM represents the central system that optimizes the information supply chain within an organization. The alternative to this would be managers printing and reading reports or emailing reports as attachments – decreased efficiency and increased risk.
Please plan to join Billy in this session as he gets down to the “brass tax” of laying out an ECM program plan where ECM is the foundation of the plan.
Title: Living in the Trenches: Best Practices for Successful ECM Projects
Time: 1:15 to 2:15 p.m.
Session ID: 101
