” A Danger Foreseen is Half Avoided”
There are merits to these words in the realm of consulting. One of the major efforts that I undertake with my clients is something that we refer to as an ERS. This is an Enterprise Roadmap Study.
The goal is to layout a strategy for each client using our methodology. This strategy is planned on a horizon of 3-5 years. The challenge is that this 3-5 year plan is generally out of an organization cadence. Which is why they are highly effective.
The goal of an ERS is to articulate what the needs of the business are, provide a model to prioritize projects, and combine a project road map with a product roadmap. Humm interesting philosophy, aligning the needs of the organization to the best products and the best release of a product.
Another useful item, is the start of a taxonomy framework. The goal is to identify the fundamental elements of an organizations taxonomy. In many cases companies piece meal their taxonomy together, and in doing so stovepipe much of their information.
The steps to an ERS can be summarized in 3 easy modules.
Making it Simple
The reality is, that each of these steps together create a cohesive multi-year plan. Personally i like to break things into discrete chunks. I think it helps people consume large amounts of information, but hey that is just me. I mean really do you eat the whole elephant all once or a bite at a time?
In any event if you look at how to develop a strategic plan that spans many months or even years you need to understand the WHY. This generally manifests itself into what are an organizations strategic requirements. What do they really want to get out of such an initiative, what is going to define success, finally how do these requirements tie into an organizations overall set of KPI’s? Ahhh, how does ECM enable the overall success of an organization? There are alot of things that go into this stage, but fundamentally you come away with an appreciation for how these projects will benefit your organization, and a methodology to define how to prioritize your projects.
Once you frame out the WHY, they you move onto the WHAT. WHAT is it that constitutes an ECM program? The major component of this stage is the aggregation of discrete projects and applying the prioritization you learned from the WHY phase. Further this allows you to define ROI measures per project and order them accordingly. In these stage you also start to define the structure for common elements across your program, such as common terminology, common taxonomy, etc. Your really starting to identify the need for these things and how to go about defining them. Note: that these are typically significant efforts.
Finally you get into the HOW, which is the culmination of the first to stages, tied directly to an implementation plan. This plan, shows the dependancies necessary to stand up an ECM program, ala common infrastructure, software, and other initiatives such as defining common definitions and taxonomies. All of the elements come together to define how to move forward.
As indicated in yesterday’s post, this is all about the evolution of ECM, going from building applications, to defining solutions and truly adding value to an organization.
The following links gives more detail regarding the the value of Enterprise Roadmap Study.
After all if you can leverage someone’s knowledge and methodology, then you should forsee many dangers, and avoid them!
Tim
