During my career of over 20 years in enterprise content management, I have had the opportunity to help organizations of all sizes with the analysis, design, implementation, training, and support of their enterprise content management (ECM) initiatives in order to help organizations change and improve the way people interact with the vast amount of information they send and receive.
At the same time, I have had the opportunity to experience how a lack of knowledge of ECM practices affects other organizations because they either do not have an ECM strategy, or the one they have has become a nightmare for the people in the organization.
Have you heard the saying: “Out of sight, out of mind”? Well, this is one of those cases where that is not true.
Not knowing or understanding the strategies, methods, and tools to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to your organization's business process can and will jeopardize your business continuity.
To make matters worse, I've heard some people say that “having a bad plan is better than having no plan at all.” Well, once again, I've seen clients implement an “enterprise content management” plan that ends up costing more than having no plan at all.
Such is the case with Citibank, which was fined $$70 million for violations and deficiencies in its compliance programs.
I have seen users return to old paper methods because capturing, managing, storing, and retrieving their content is too difficult due to poorly implemented technologies.
We must understand that ECM is not a “technology”, nor is it an initiative that should be directed and led by an IT department or a technical consulting firm.
“ECM”, according to AIIM's widely accepted definition, consists of: “the strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes. ECM tools and strategies enable the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information may reside.”.
As the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) explains: It is not enough to “manage” content. It is essential to have the ability to access the correct version of a document or record. Content must be managed in such a way that it can be used to achieve business objectives.
ECM is the systematic collection and organization of information to be used by a designated audience—business executives, staff members, clients/consumers, etc. It is not a simple technology, methodology, or process; it is a dynamic combination of strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver information that supports key organizational processes throughout its entire lifecycle.
Capturing can be summarized as entering the content into the system.
• Management is the next step to take so that the content can be found and used by the people it is intended for.
• Storing means finding a suitable home for the content within your infrastructure, whether that is a formal content management system or another information management solution.
• Preservation refers to its long-term care – archiving, if you want to call it that – the practice of protecting it so that it can be used, no matter how far into the future the organization needs it to be available.
• And finally, Delivering is precisely about putting information into the hands of the right people when they need it to be there.
Can you see how the lack of knowledge about these principles could affect your organization's ability to manage and control all information sent or received in its daily operations?
Do you understand how much the lack of a plan or a poorly implemented strategy will cost your organization?
Fortunately, we can help you learn these principles with AIIM training resources, available in Spanish.
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