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Business cases for ECM

Yesterday, I was in London for the AIIM Education Advisory Board on ECM and ERM. I think it is a good thing to have an education advisory board come together on a regular basis. It shows that you want to keep an active link to your community. You get feedback and are able to, in turn, learn from your students and other experts from the field.

The day in London was one of sharing insights and information on what changes we as a group had seen in ECM and ERM over the last 3 years and what trends we saw for the coming 3 years. Endulging myself in thoughts and reflections, I like nothing better.

AIIM’s vice president, Atle Skjekkeland, did the kick-off using his favorite comic figure, Dilbert, to show what to me is still one of the biggest challenges in ECM: finding compelling reasons for the business to do what we believe to be the right thing. The essential problem he touched is that the benefits of an ECM program are often reaped by some other department than the one that is taking the pain.

Now why is that? Basically I believe this is because you create information not for yourself, but for another party: the audience. And we have forgotten about the audience. Mind you, when writing directly for The Internet, things are different, but if you are safely tucked away in some internal department, any audience you might have is almost completely invisible.

So there you are, sitting at your desk creating and managing information. Unaware of who that information is eventually touching. You do not get the reward of applause or appreciation. Are you really surprised that these people cannot be moved to tidy up their shared drives, add metadata or care about information quality? Or were you the one kid on the block that voluntarily tidied his room on a daily basis?

To get them to care about information quality you need to move the ECM business case away from IT and to the owners of information. They do not care about getting down costs. It (or more particular IT) costs too much anyway and you’re asking them to do something they don’t see the benefits of. But once you show them their audience, you get to a different ball game. This is what they do care about. Show them where all their information is popping up, who is using it and what they are accomplishing with it. Wouldn’t you find it more cool to sit at a party and tell how you actually publish information on 20.000 websites than that you write specs for some type of cable nobody knows of?

One step further is having the audience talk back directly (hey, isn’t that what all the 2.0 stuff is about?). Maybe not the first thing you think about, but when syndication partners start demanding information quality, your ECM business case is a piece of cake. DHL e.g. demands the highest rates if you cannot provide them with accurate descriptions, dimensions and weights for the packages you send. Need I explain further?

So this was the first slide of an entire day. Many topics were discussed and my list of topics to write on has grown quite a bit again. I am looking forward to the next AIIM Eduction Advisory Board meeting!