ECM Assessments

The challenges to improve the effectiveness of business processing are placing renewed focus on organizing and homogenizing critical content into a structured ecosystem. In response, many organizations are embarking on developing enterprise content strategies and infrastructures with focus on people, processes, and technology  in alignment with enterprise business and technology strategies.

How do enterprise decision-makers tackle this quandary and craft a successful content strategy and infrastructure design? One approach is to conduct an assessment with the key goal of discovering the information that supports the ‘what, why, how, where, and when’ of the organization’s current and future enterprise content handling and process-based decision-making activities.

Assessment Essentials 

Key enterprise content handling questions that require study and answers include:

1. Are content business and technical requirements identified, coherent, and accepted by stakeholders?
2. Are vital content systematized within a structured taxonomy, owned and managed, and accessed with a security and permissions scheme?
3. Are content vendor product capabilities, under consideration, been identified and understood?
4. Has content vendor / product selection criteria been developed?
5. Is there a business justification for employing a tiered content strategy with multiple vendors?
6. Is there an appreciation for the potential risks and changes for implementing and supporting a tiered content infrastructure?

Knowledge Compass Approach

Knowledge Compass helps clients access their content handling activities and develop a formal ECM strategy and plan with a structured and time-tested approach, as outlined below:

1. Conduct holistic review of the business environment:

• Establish current content handling policies, processes, and activities
• Identify content handling ‘points of pain’ and critical business impacts
• Identify critical decisions that require content support

2. Determine key user, functional and technical ECM requirements:

3. Design or redesign content handling infrastructure:

• Evaluate with industry ECM best practices
• Identify Gaps and mitigations

4. Develop strategy: acquisition, development, integration, deployment, and support of an ECM solution.

• Identify future ECM governance policies, guidelines, and procedures.

5. Establish ECM strategic business case, potential risk factors and probable organizational and cultural changes:

• Identify quantitative value and benefits
• Identify qualitative value and benefits
• Identify risk and exposures
• Identify change to existing infrastructure and impacts

6. Determine content acquisition, migration and population plans.

7. Construct next steps and timeline.

The Bottom Line

An ECM Assessment provides a consensus-based strategy and roadmap for designing, developing and implementing an integrated enterprise content management system. Key deliverables resulting from a successful content management assessment and strategy project include:

1. Concept of Operations

• User Content Requirements
• Functional and System Content Specifications
• Redesigned Content Environment
• ECM Strategy & Governance Plan

2. ECM Blueprint

• Logical Architecture
• Information Architecture
• Content, Conversion & Migration Plan
• Implementation Plan

3. Supporting Analyses

• ROI – Return on Investment
• CDB – Cost of Doing Business Analysis
• Risk and Change Analysis
• Best Practice Gap Analysis