Forrester recently spoke with information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals at 30 organizations about their ECM initiatives and how they made the case to move forward. All were driven by the need to show hard cost savings associated with their enterprise’s ECM investments. Despite the priority and investment IT organizations make in ECM, many describe their initiatives as too costly, poorly adopted or just unused. They regularly point to systems consolidation, reduction of physical storage requirements and the removal of FTEs as justification to invest in ECM suites.
Sharing What You Already Have
Every organization we interviewed recognized that they have multiple content technologies already in use. Some organizations want to migrate off of legacy ECM technologies onto a product from a single vendor that offers more ECM breadth. Other organizations simply want one trusted vendor for all future ECM investments — helping to reduce licensing, maintenance and administration costs.
And this is certainly true for transactional content that includes not only scanned images but other incoming information from e-forms and faxes, print streams generated from back-office applications and electronic records that for legal purposes must be kept for extensive time periods. Much of this content originates outside an organization from external parties — customers or partners — and relies on workflow or business process management (BPM) to drive transactional, back-office business processes.
This notion of providing ECM as a shared service addresses many of these concerns, and the concept is far from new. IT organizations have for years provided a set of common systems and functions that are provided with a minimum of variation and shared by one or more groups. ECM has been challenging in this regard due to the sheer number of ECM technologies and diversity of use cases. But the biggest issue is IT’s poor understanding of business context — how business people and business processes use content. Without this understanding, ECM implementations struggle to add sufficient value to the business goals they support.
Uncovering That Elusive Business Context
Uncovering business context involves interacting with subject matter experts and stakeholders throughout the enterprise, and on the surface, it looks like a daunting task. Our conversations with numerous enterprises about the development of ECM strategies point to seven steps that I&KM pros can take to understand business context and develop better ECM strategies.
Step 1: Engage Librarians and Records Managers
A common characteristic shared by many enterprises that are more satisfied with their ECM endeavors was the inclusion of nontraditional IT resources in ECM strategy teams. Corporate librarians and records managers were key members of these teams, as they:
>> Better understand how the business uses content. Having historically been responsible for finding and gathering information for businesspeople, corporate librarians (sometimes referred to as knowledge managers, taxonomists or research specialists) have a good working knowledge of the content used by different roles in the organization. In addition, records managers often have direct knowledge of what content — specifically corporate records — gets produced and used by people and business processes.
>> Have connections with important business subject matter experts. “The [corporate librarian] knew exactly who we needed to talk to,” claimed one IT program manager at a life sciences firm. Historically, corporate librarians and records managers have been in operational roles supporting lines of business and other corporate functions, such as marketing, finance and research and development (R&D). As a result, they often know which subject matter experts the ECM teams should engage to understand business context for specific roles and business processes.
Step 2: Identify Business Operations Subject Matter Experts, and Focus on Roles
Teams responsible for developing ECM strategies and implementations must have sponsorship from senior leadership. But senior leadership often doesn’t have enough direct knowledge of what their people do or which processes they participate in to help I&KM pros define effective ECM strategies. Instead, I&KM pros should seek out the subject matter experts that businesspeople, in their various roles, rely on to get their jobs done. These subject matter experts often:
>> Work in an operations capacity. Many of the ECM team members we’ve interviewed worked with people in sales operations, marketing operations, HR operations and other operational positions to understand how different businesspeople and processes manage and use content. Directors and managers in these operational positions provided ECM teams with important insight into how businesspeople in lines of business and/or functions work with content.
>> Have a working knowledge of the content technology in use by different roles. People in these operational positions also had a good understanding of which tools and technologies businesspeople use. They can often describe the technology’s use by role, such as sales manager, account manager and sales support, in a direct sales organization. More importantly, the subject matter experts often understand the shortcomings of the tools in use and know if businesspeople would be willing to change what they’re doing as a part of an ECM implementation.
>> Understand how the better use of content will impact business objectives. People in operational roles understand what makes a particular line of business, department or function tick. With that knowledge also comes a good understanding of how better use of content can help the organization achieve its objectives. For example, according to an IT director at a consumer packaged goods company, a line of business VP understood the importance of content, but the directors in marketing operations supporting different brands knew exactly how the use of content would affect specific business objectives.
Step 3: Identify Content Attributes and Questions Best Suited to Your Organization
Organizations we’ve spoken to and worked with used questions covering a combination of six different content attributes to help them understand business context.
Step 4: Take an Objective, Data-Driven Approach to Gathering Business Context
ECM project teams should engage in a formal process of gathering input from identified subject matter experts throughout the organization. The goal is to develop a broad yet data-driven view of the varying business context for content, organized by line of business, business function and, most important, by role, such as R&D manager, program manager, researcher and engineer. Organizations have taken two approaches to gathering business context from subject matter experts:
>> Informal surveys help target large audiences but may not uncover finer points. Web-based surveys or forms can be used to help gather business context from subject matter experts or larger audiences. These tools can provide a quick way to gather data from large populations, but because of their informal nature, they may limit an ECM team’s ability to uncover the finer points associated with the organization’s ECM needs.
>> Formal interviews take more time but lead to qualitative findings. Interviewing subject matter experts to uncover business context can take 30 minutes to more than an hour. Larger organizations with numerous subject matter experts knowledgeable about specific roles and business processes could face weeks of interviews; however, interviews do allow ECM teams to ask more probing questions to better understand the business context of a role. Often, interviews are done in group settings to speed the process.
Step 5: Segment Businesspeople’s ECM Needs Based on Gathered Input
While the content needs of different roles, lines of businesses and functions may vary, they are not all unique. Analyzing collected information for similarities across roles, for example, will help ECM teams develop a model that places different roles in the enterprise into segments that share common characteristics. The more diverse an organization’s roles, lines of business and functions are, the greater the number of segments they may identify. Example segments include research and advisory roles, outreach roles, field roles and administrative roles that all create, manage and use content differently.
Step 6: Identify the ECM Technologies Needed to Address Segmented Business Needs
After completing the segmentation exercise, ECM teams can more confidently identify, from the superset of the transactional, business and persuasive ECM technologies in the market, what would be appropriate to help address each segment’s business context. This step helps I&KM pros look beyond core ECM technologies — such as document imaging, document management, WCM, records management and content archiving — and take into consideration other technologies that help address business context. This step also helps ECM teams avoid missteps, such as assuming that an employee portal based on document management will be used by businesspeople that spend the majority of their day in email and calendaring systems, like Microsoft Outlook.
Step 7: Develop Investment Plans and Road Maps
With a better understanding of business context, ECM teams can now focus on ECM investment strategies and plans. Usually, ECM teams must identify a shortlist of vendors that can meet their needs. With business context as a backdrop, the project team can move beyond feature- and function-based evaluations and look at vendors based on how the vendor’s technology will fit the segmented needs of the enterprise. Instead of asking vendors if they support a specific feature — such as parallel workflow support — I&KM pros can ask vendors, “How do you support this role and segment’s business context?”
ECM technology is important, but it’s not always the root cause of poor ECM adoption within an enterprise. Avoid frustration and disappointment in your ECM initiatives by putting greater effort into understanding business context. Follow the examples set forth by organizations that are more satisfied with their ECM initiatives.
>> Build the ECM investment case using IT and risk contexts. The tangible nature of both IT and risk needs from ECM can be used to build a solid business case for investing in ECM.
>> Let business context drive your overall ECM strategy. Understanding business context will go a long way toward avoiding large amounts of unused ECM licenses.
>> Get to enterprise-wide usage by focusing on one role/project/department at a time.
>> Get librarians and records managers involved. These two roles have a good working knowledge of how different roles and business processes within the enterprise manage and use content.
>> Make the business case to leaders in operational roles. Leaders in operational roles — such as marketing operations, HR operations, sales operations and others reporting to the COO — often have a good grasp on how better management and usage of content can affect business objectives.
Craig Le Clair is a senior analyst at Forrester Research, Inc. He is a leading expert on information management and enterprise content management (ECM). For more info, visit www.forrester.com.
