Gartner offers ECM deployment tips

IT departments are not giving enough consideration to enterprise content management (ECM) before its implementation, according to Gartner, which has published a set of best practice guidelines to help companies achieve success.

The analyst firm said that IT departments often fail to take into account the extent to which a change in content management systems will affect users' working practices. Another problem is the lack of financial planning given to ECM projects.

"ECM is expensive, which is why a low percentage of knowledge workers in an organisation have access to ECM," said Toby Bell, Gartner research vice president.

"It is also too hard to justify the system for everyone based on unclear return on investment or other success measures. We recommend that for large ECM projects organisations spend six to nine months in the planning and vendor selection process."

Organisations should spend five years putting a new ECM system in place, according to Gartner, and expect software licensing costs to account for five to 20 per cent of the total cost in that period.

The analyst firm also warned organisations to be cautious when introducing new vendors into their portfolio, because they will have a much larger cost 'footprint' than the initial expenditure.

To aid the preparation stages, businesses should appoint "content strategists " to calculate the cost, value and risk associated with storage and the provisioning of content, Gartner said.

Other advice included the use of content service providers that extend beyond software to offer consulting and other services, and open source software to help drive down implementation costs.

Gartner pointed to how open source offerings have now matured, and said that the market has stabilised.

1. Pare down to the essential content

Eliminate old or duplicate content before 'standard' ECM, business process management and content-enabled vertical application implementations. Appoint 'content strategists' to calculate the cost, value and risk associated with storage and the provisioning of content.

2. Include a policy implementation when you develop a content architecture

A policy about documents takes the form of rules and metadata that allow some automatic categorisation and expiration of content. In particular, the policy can be used to separate 'content of record' from 'intermediate content'. It can also be used to clean up repositories and file servers.

3. Include a content service provider and open source in your strategy

Content service providers are vendors that extend beyond software offerings alone and offer consulting, implementation, outsourcing or other services. IT managers must take a closer look at vendors that compete with content services beyond traditional software, such as Xerox, EDS, HP, Iron Mountain, Astoria and Clickability, among others. Open source offerings have matured and the market has stabilised. Leaders regularly compete for government and higher education contracts among vertical markets.

4. Leverage your web channel

Organisations must stop wasting money on manual data and content transformation between customer-facing channels, and instead put in place a structured and unstructured master data system.

5. Explore the green benefits of an electronic workplace

There are various green initiatives that organisations can explore, such as moving to electronic forms and storing records electronically, eliminating redundancies (50 per cent of archived paper documents are duplicates) that are ultimately saving time, money, trees and physical storage heating/cooling.

6. Get out of the e-mail business

Gartner believes that the hybrid on-premises and hosted email services model will become increasingly popular for organisations, whereby some users (those without extensive mail and calendar needs) will use Outlook web access 'in the cloud' at a low price, while the company maintains a population of Outlook/Exchange users at headquarters (examples include car company executives vs. line workers, and retail store executives vs. store floor workers). Conversions from on-premise to hosted Exchange have also been significant in 2008-2009 with huge savings as a result.