After the Sale
There is a myth among IT leadership that goes something like this. We’ve spent millions on software, and we have an enterprise solution. Only to find out that what they’ve done is to build silo’s around their information, and yes their million+ dollar investment has only replaced organizations shared drives.
I see this a lot, with companies I work with have an established ECM platform, and are not getting any appreciable value out of it. The question is simply why.
Many of the issues that they suffer from are:
- Finding their information
- Duplicate Copies
- Managing Records
- Low end user adoption
All of these concepts go back to the fundamentals. How do you expect to gain value from your ECM deployment? Many companies go forward without a strategy, heck they can’t even articulate what success is. When you haven’t defined your success criteria, what happens is your ECM “program” becomes a cost center, and is extremely hard to justify its value.
This industry is full of technologist selling and marketing fantastic software. They can hype the software to such heights, only to leave the company who just paid through the nose, to figure out how it dovetails into their business strategy.
I’ve stated before that the implementation of ECM is a program, it is not a project. There needs to be a clearly articulated vision, there needs to be plans and road-maps that show the progression of the program, and can be used to measure the success of program along the journey.
Tim
