Unstructured Growth

Many times, I have seen how ECM implementation can go wrong and one of the most common mistakes is not having a designated ECM team in place. For a lot of companies, an ECM application is first deployed with a narrower focus of deploying to one specific department. During this initial phase, the manager of that department will take on the role of project manager and ECM team leader. When the initial implementation is successful, the manager continues on with other business issues within his/her own department and does not have other bandwidth to manage the expansion of ECM onto other departments.

At this point, the company has to realize that there has to be a central ECM team that can develop ECM deployment methodology and manage the roll-out process. A lot of times, it would make sense for the company to bring in ECM consultants who can design information architecture, user group structure, and permission model.

When this exercise is skipped and ECM is just handed over to other departments without proper roll-out strategy, the ECM implementation starts to take on an unpredictable journey. Most of the time, it is much more expensive to retrofit an unstructured ECM system than to invest early on for the proper design efforts.  ¶ 6/01/2006