I recently attended a seminar on the 10 Steps to Business Efficiency with Content, Collaboration and Process given by the good people at AIIM (http://aiim.org) all about ECM strategies and best practices. This was a free seminar, well organized and well attended by a broad spectrum of representatives from all types of organizations, large and small, new and old industries. The topics of discussion too ranged from the most effective way to digitize archival assets; to applications to better allow for federated search across various data repositories; and then there was certainly a lot of discussion around what has become the most ubiquitous of ECM type applications, Microsoft SharePoint.

There were of course the usual quotes and statistics from AIIM, Forrester and Gartner regarding information proliferation and management today: The amount of data being produced is doubling every 18 months; 80% of this data is unstructured and 90% of that is entirely un-managed.

An interesting quote that I will paraphrase here was attributed to Thomas Washington , "The pursuit of knowledge in an age of information overload is less about the process of acquisition than it is about a proficiency of tossing things out." And regarding the storage of all of this information another interesting fact was thrown out: while 1 GB of storage may now cost an average of 20 cents, it costs $3,500 to review that same 1 GB of data and start to make sense of it in the context of your business. (AIIM)

As I listened to the various presentations and vendors I was struck by one thing: none seemed to offer a unified solution for using taxonomy more effectively to structure, classify and categorize the content that was going into these vast data repositories. Certainly it was agreed that there was value to such a process, but it is something that many organizations have still not recognized as absolutely necessary to fundamentally improve the tagging, organization and discovery of information within these huge libraries of data, documents, and other media.

It is our opinion that the integrated use of taxonomy applied to ECM applications, as well as across the rest of the enterprise, using a centralized and standardized set of vocabularies for navigation, search, discovery, meta-tagging and many other applications is a necessity in moving towards a unified means of data normalization and discoverability. To achieve this we offer services to get companies started as well as tools like Synaptica with out-of-the-box integrations to tools like SharePoint, but also more generic means of integrating with external applications via simple APIs and Web Services.

As the proliferation of data only increases over time and the means of digitizing archival records or utilizing native electronic formats becomes more efficient, storage becomes less a matter of cost and more a matter of management. The efficient means of identifying, tagging, categorizing and sorting information will be key to the effective operation of any organization.

A couple months back, my colleague also wrote up the 10 Rules of Successful ECM Implementation after attending an AAIM seminar that we have found quite useful in talking to business and technology owners about content access strategies.

We see many of our customers at the forefront of addressing these issues and working with them, we continue to work towards providing better and easier ways for data managers and end users alike to find what they are looking for. We look forward to sharing some of these use cases as well as hear from you on your successes and struggles!

Image| Flickr | ul Marqa

Last week I attended AIIM’s ECM seminar on Automating Document-centric Processes – Is SharePoint Enough? It was a really interesting and informative event, with a few general sessions, several presentations of case studies, and product demonstrations from various vendors in the ECM realm.

AIIM President John Mancini closed the seminar with his 10 rules for successful ECM implementation:

1. Build a strategy.
   When implementing an ECM solution, winging it is a bad idea. Especially if you are implementing a solution as viral as SharePoint, you should have a well-defined strategy. You should define business requirements, think about governance, analyze content systems, and identify points of integration. Formulating a strategy will save money and increase the likelihood of a successful project.
2. Not all content is alike.
   You should think about the nature of the content you are trying to manage. Is it office-based content, transactional content, or persuasive/creative content? You need to pick a solution that matches your content.
3. Prepare for eDiscovery.
   Sector-based regulations aren’t just a flash in the pan. Just because your business hasn’t had to deal with eDiscovery yet doesn’t mean you won’t have to in the future.
4. Good enough is better than nothing.
   Doing something to get your content under control is better than doing nothing at all. You don’t have to start with the perfect solution.
5. Ripping out and replacing is not usually a good starting point.
   This is especially true for more mature ECM organizations. If you have multiple repositories, you have to deal with them and think about policy structure around the information. Think about how you can provide access to information in those various repositories. Look for a vendor who will help with the integration challenge.
6. Acknowledge the reality that this is a hybrid world.
   Paper is still part of the equation. Although we would like for everything to be digital, that is not the reality. Don’t get hung up on wanting everything to be digital—sometimes digitizing information can be too resource-intensive and unnecessary. Evaluate your strategy.
7. Be militant about ROI and deployment times when thinking about projects.
8. Consider alternate delivery models in your ECM approach.
   There will possibly be fewer IT people in the near future because of the economy. Consider hosted solutions as away to lower risk for management.
9. Spend some time on standardizing the front-end of your processes.
   Consider things such as are you figuring out how to digitize things that should have been digital to begin with?
10. Once you have something digital keep it that way.
    Why have a digital process all the way until you have to sign a document? Rather than moving from digital to analog and back to digital, consider processes that will keep content digital.

I found this list to be very relevant to some of the work I've been doing lately. Often I talk to clients who are implementing an ECM solution, but they haven't formulated a clear strategy yet. Organizations usually have content stored in several repositories, and employees don't know how to access that information, assuming they even know it exists. That's why we suggest an assessment prior to implementing a new solution. An assessment can be conducted internally if the resources are available, or our Taxonomy Services team can perform one for you. An assessment will help you identify your various content repositories and develop a strategy to access that siloed information.