Develop an Enterprise Content Management Strategy and Roadmap

Organize your documents and files to make your content findable.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

Good content management empowers digital transformation

Unstructured data – content – makes up over 80% of all our business data. It includes contracts, invoices, resumes, financial agreements, student transcripts, architectural and engineering drawings, recordings, emails, and marketing images. It’s a wide assortment of information types and value. There’s an ever-growing volume with more places in the information landscape for it to live and move.

Remote work has made digital formats like videoconference recordings and online chats a core part of the information deposit. Chats and recordings, along with email, are subject to audit, record retention laws and eDiscovery. Critical records are no longer contained in a central controlled chamber. It’s imperative we understand our increasingly complex information environment and manage it.

That content also holds rich insights and valuable assets – if recognized and made accessible.

Every business process generates and revolves around information. With the arrival of digital transformation, business partners and customers expect answers to their questions instantly and from anywhere. It means untethering our information from individual applications or business units and treating it like the valuable corporate asset it is.

Andrea Malick
Director, Research & Advisory, Data & Analytics Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Content is a key part of internal workflows and external touchpoints.
• An enterprise content management (ECM) capability manages the quality, findability, delivery, and risk of your content across organizational processes.
• The need for an ECM strategy, either on its own or as part of broader information management, is increasingly apparent in organizations everywhere.

Common Obstacles

• The volume of organizational content continues to grow exponentially.
• The Digital Revolution is accelerating market disruption and forcing organizations to transform or die.
• The lack of an ECM body of knowledge for developing ECM strategies and capabilities makes defining a roadmap a challenging, if not impossible, endeavor for non-experts.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Set the scope for your ECM strategy. Understand the four major forces (ECM use cases, content-centric processes, external parties, and compliance and risk) that define ECM operating models. Identify the current priorities within each. Tackle manageable slices of your ECM solution – build foundations while fixing real pains.
• Understand the root causes behind your ECM improvement opportunities. Systematically review the in-scope elements of your ECM operating model to generate a comprehensive list of potential improvements. Transform this insight into a future-state vision for your ECM capability.
• Build an ECM roadmap collaboratively. Leverage the input of stakeholders from across the organization to determine the work required to cross the chasm from your current to future state.
• Invest in change management. Current content management capabilities are powerful and customizable for a positive user experience. But those capabilities mean a shift in how we relate to our information and do things (e.g. using metadata instead of folders and subfolders). Ensure users and stakeholders are consulted and informed early and often.

Info-Tech Insights

• ECM is critical to organizational survival. ECM underpins effective information management, which is vital to surviving and thriving in the Digital Revolution.
• Engage many hands to make light work. Changing your ECM capabilities is about changing organizational behavior; take an all-hands-on-deck approach to make the most of information gathering, create a vested interest, and secure buy-in.
• ECM is a living, breathing thing, and world-class ECM capabilities are not built overnight. Be realistic about what you can achieve in this iteration based on your organization’s maturity.

Frame the problem

This research is for:

• CIOs charged with mandates for innovation or digital transformations.
• Information, records, and content managers charged with optimizing information management practices.

This research will help you:

• Systematically scope out the focus of your ECM strategy.
• Engage with stakeholders to understand your current ECM operation.
• Develop a vision for your ECM capability.
• Build and gain buy-in for your ECM roadmap.
• Coordinate the execution of your ECM roadmap.

This research will also assist:

• CEOs looking to get the most out of ECM investments.
• Heads of lines of business (LOBs) looking to drive higher quality and risk management from their content operation.
• Process owners looking to increase efficiency through improved access to and delivery of content assets.

This research will help them:

• Understand the importance of an ECM capability to long-term organizational success.
• Prepare for and make the most out of information-gathering sessions required to assess current operations.
• Contextualize their role in the ECM roadmap.
• Bring to life and sustain an effective and strategically aligned ECM capability.

The data journey

Effective data management requires a cross-functional approach that engages both the business and IT.

What is content management?

Content is everywhere in the business

ECM can look very different for different organizations and use cases. It can be focused on storing documents for reference and findability. Or it can be managing complex information sets through workflows for regulatory compliance, from when files are scanned and digitized to when they are archived.

ECM is a comprehensive set of capabilities and tools. Your job is to find the right mix of these ingredients to make a solution – both tactical and strategic.

Definition: Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

“Enterprise content management is the systematic collection and organization of information that is to be used by a designated audience – business executives, customers, etc. Neither a single technology nor a methodology nor a process, it is a dynamic combination of strategies, methods, and tools used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver information supporting key organizational processes through its entire lifecycle.”

Definition: Content

“Content is information produced through editorial process and ultimately intended for human consumption via publication.”
(Source: Barker, 2021)

This description of content is important because we are designing ECM experiences for different groups: the content author (or manager) and the consumer.

“Content is information produced through editorial process and ultimately intended for human consumption via publication.”
(Source: Barker, 2021)

This description of content is important because we are designing ECM experiences for different groups: the content author (or manager) and the consumer.

Different types of content

ECM includes documents, records, digital assets, and web content.
Each of these types of content requires different practices and technology solutions.

Information management model

Case Study

INDUSTRY - Municipal Government
SOURCE - Info-Tech Research Group

An ECM roadmap allowed the City to obtain buy-in from senior management for an upgrade of its ECM capability

The City of Cambridge

The City of Cambridge, located in Ontario, is one of three cities making up Canada’s Technology Triangle. Canada’s 38th largest city, Cambridge is home to 130,000 residents. The City worked with Info-Tech to develop an ECM vision, system requirements, roadmap, and execution toolkit.

ECM Initiative

Faced with increasing volumes of content to manage and pain points with legacy content management processes, the City decided to develop an enterprise-wide strategy. Having used an ECM system to manage records, the City was considering how it could use technology to improve other content management operations across the organization. However, the need to represent perspectives of seven departments with over 75 unique divisions and services would require a well-thought-out plan.

Results

Working collaboratively, the City’s IT and records management divisions assembled a project team and conducted operational assessments with key stakeholders from other departments. With stakeholder input, they defined a future-state vision, built a roadmap, and assembled an execution toolkit. The ECM project team was able to present a confident plan to executives to secure project and budget approval.

The Digital Revolution is (finally) upon us

The advancement of organizational process and technology from analog to digital has been underway since the 1980s. Today we have reached the tipping point.

Three mega-innovations drive organizations toward digital transformation:

Digital Revolution

• Powerhouse Computing
  • Scalar CPUs
  • In-Memory Databases/SSD
  • Neural Networks
  • Massive Computer Arrays
  • Quantum Computing
• Seamless Connectivity
  • 5G Network
  • Global Internet
  • Four Billion Connected Users
  • One Trillion Devices
  • Zero Distance
• Extreme Automation
  • Robotics & Autos
  • 3D Printing
  • Digital User Experience
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine-to-Machine (Internet of Things)

Info-Tech Insight

As the innovations of today diffuse more generally into the global economy, Info-Tech sees two massive impacts:

Accelerated Large-Scale Disruption

We will see a rapid emergence of newer, faster, and more direct models of design, production, and delivery. Pioneering businesses will displace legacy organizations (think Netflix and Blockbuster) and industries (think Uber and the taxi industry). Leaner workforces will produce exponentially more output, leveraging intuitive cognitive systems and outsourced or subscription-based services. Higher-order skill sets will be demanded as automation takes over in physical, clerical, analytical, professional, and creative labor markets.

Cultural Transformation Is Required to Survive

Since 2000, 52% of Fortune 500 companies have disappeared from the market (Capgemini, 2015). Surviving the Digital Revolution requires organizations to go beyond localized process automation to enable a culture of innovation at every level and in every facet. Highly consumerized next-gen software- and platform-as-a-service (SaaS and PaaS) offerings will put process automation (and even application development capabilities) directly in the hands of users, and the traditional role of IT will be increasingly a shared organizational responsibility.

IT departments can no longer just lead digital innovation, they must actively enable it at every level of the organization

IT departments play a critical role in shepherding organizations through their transformation and in empowering organizations to thrive in the long term.

Democratizing innovation requires rethinking the traditional departmental role of IT.

Companies that are best positioned to weather, survive, and thrive in the Digital Revolution are those that understand the potential crowdsourcing has for innovation discovery and that proactively enable an “IT mindset” for as many end users as possible. Info-Tech identifies three functions IT departments can adopt to democratize innovation in their organizations.

Managing content effectively is a prerequisite of a successful enterprise information management operation

Enterprise content management (ECM) is an important building block in establishing potent enterprise information management (EIM), and strong EIM is a steppingstone to unlocking higher-order information capabilities that power innovation.

Info-Tech’s Hierarchy of Organizational Information Capabilities

Info-Tech Insight

This blueprint provides a methodology to build out your ECM capability. For guidance on other information management capabilities, including enterprise data management, please see Info-Tech’s EIM resources:

• Information Lifecycle Management
• Master Data Management
• Data Governance
• Data Architecture
• Data Quality
• Data Integration
• Artificial Intelligence

An effective ECM capability enables content quality, findability, delivery, and risk management across the information lifecycle

As a concept, ECM is the strategies, methods, and technology used to manage electronic and physical documents and files to support organizational processes.

Info-Tech’s ECM Information Lifecycle Model:

Info-Tech Insight

As organizations shift from analog to digital, content operations must transform from paper to paperless. Very few organizations have actually adopted the paperless workplace. While remote work has decreased printing and scanning significantly, 56% of workers are still printing and 50% are still scanning even while working from home (O’Reilly, 2021) As your organization shifts to paperless processes, behaviors will fundamentally change (e.g. manual to automatic, carbon-based to silicon-based), affecting decisions and actions at every stage of the information lifecycle.

Effective ECM capabilities are built on and supported by well-informed ECM system architecture

ECM technology is mature, blending together many functions across the information lifecycle.
ECM system offerings include:

• Version control
• Document & records management
• Automated workflows
• Access controls
• Metadata management
• Mobile
• Search
• Capture channels
• File conversion
• eDiscovery audit trail
• Co-authoring

Info-Tech Insight

Refer to Info-Tech’s SoftwareReviews categories for ECM software and document management systems for the latest vendor scorecards based on user experience.

From an organization’s perspective, there are two broad categories of ECM use cases that must be addressed

Effective ECM capabilities are built on a strong understanding of the organizational use cases they support.

(1) Depending on organizational needs, preservation ECM may be viewed as a third ECM use case.

Info-Tech Insight

Harnessing your content has never been more vital. Exponential data growth isn’t expected to plateau anytime soon; yearly data creation reached 64.2 zettabytes in 2020 (IDC, 2021). Remaining still in the face of this growth is a recipe for disaster, and in the Digital Revolution, taking a casual approach to ECM is ill-advised. Organizations must truly understand their specific ECM use cases to develop optimal ECM information architecture, flexible information governance, and informed system definition and selection.

Effectively address your ECM use cases with an integrated, programmatic ECM capability

Master the six subdisciplines of ECM to unlock true content management excellence in support of mission-critical and operational use cases.

Info-Tech’s ECM Capability Conceptual Framework:

Info-Tech defines an organization’s ECM capability as six interrelated concepts working together to enable superior content access and delivery for an organization:

• Information architecture, which enables content findability within ECM operations.
• Information governance, which enables content management quality assurance, security, and risk management.
• Process management, which enables content to move through processes and workflows.
• System architecture, which enables automation of content management.
• Change management, which introduces new ECM capabilities to users.
• Capability governance, which sustains and provides continuous improvement to the entire ECM operation.

Info-Tech Insight

Get with the program – start building out an effective ECM capability as soon as possible. Focus on your current business needs and prioritization, such as digitizing legacy content or focusing on incoming content first. In an AIIM survey, 43% of respondents said they were figuring out what to do with the content they already had and 57% were figuring out what to do with new content coming into the organization (AIIM, 2020).

ECM success can be measured by process efficiency, resource efficiency, and risk mitigation

In its own right, ECM plays an important role in running an intelligent, efficient, and lean organization.

What you can achieve with an ECM strategy largely depends on your current maturity

The transformational journey to unlock ECM excellence is a very hard one. Set realistic executive expectations with a roadmap aimed at achieving “innovator” status through gradual advances in your ECM capability maturity.

Info-Tech’s ECM Capability Maturity Model

You need a systematic approach to connect ECM roadmap work initiatives to your organization’s objectives

Info-Tech’s three-phase ECM strategy development methodology enables a systematic and comprehensive model to assess ECM operations and identify, evaluate, and prioritize roadmap work initiatives in accordance with organizational need

Info-Tech Insight

Ensure your organization is among the six in ten whose ECM projects succeed. Roughly 35 to 40% of ECM projects fail (Moore, 2021), which is explained by failure to involve stakeholders and lack of a strategic plan. Ensure you are on the winning side of history; take a systematic approach to building out your ECM capability, leveraging Info-Tech’s ECM strategy development methodology and tools.

Develop a highly detailed roadmap to coordinate the work to build and maintain your ECM capability with Info-Tech

Info-Tech’s ECM Roadmap Creation Tool provides three levels of project planning insight, enabling easy creation, communication, and coordination of tasks that will bring your ECM vision to life.

Level 1	Level 2	Level 3
ECM Project Phases	ECM Work Initiatives	ECM Action Plans
Displays timing for major project phases.	Displays ordering and timing for specific work initiatives.	Displays work initiative activities, stakeholder resourcing, inputs, outputs, risks, mitigations, success factors, and related Info-Tech resources.

Developing the roadmap is only half the battle; motivate and mobilize project stakeholders with a roadmap execution toolkit

Don’t let your ECM project plan sit on the shelf. Minimize the friction and effort required and secure executive buy-in by providing well-designed templates and tools to help execute each ECM roadmap work initiative.

Refer to Info-Tech’s ECM terminology and acronyms table for additional clarification

The following terminology and acronyms are commonly used throughout this document; refer to this slide as needed as you work through each step in developing your ECM strategy and roadmap.

Insight summary

Overarching insight

The modern enterprise content management environment is a business solution, driven by and overseen by the business. Where once ECM communities were highly contained and were administered primarily by IT, they are now designed to be integrated with and responsive to business operations. This is a cultural shift requiring a new way of interacting with technology, with information, and with each other.

Insight 1

To survive and thrive in this tumultuous time, organizations everywhere are moving toward more intelligent ways of unearthing, communicating, and acting upon insights in the formats desired by the people in their organization. At the foundation of strong information management is an effective ECM capability on which process and system automation can be built.

Insight 2

ECM is a huge concept; be realistic and do not bite off more than you can chew.

Consider your organization’s ECM capability maturity, in addition to ECM objectives and resource constraints, to create a realistic vision for what you can achieve with this current iteration and what will have to wait for future releases.

Insight 3

An ECM capability is a living, breathing thing; plan to upgrade it over time with new releases.

The ideal ECM capability is the result of mastering all the capabilities of ECM, such as governance and information architecture. However, mastering all of these simultaneously is extremely difficult for most organizations.

Tactical insight

Tailor your ECM program to meet your organization’s needs, beginning with cataloging content as critical, valuable, regulatory, and other. This will help manage the work and the sense of overwhelm, and it will help apply the right weight of governance to where it’s needed. We can’t and shouldn’t try to govern everything to the same degree. Focus on what really matters for the business and for compliance.

When it comes to rolling out an ECM program, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Don’t try to buy a ready-made information architecture off the shelf. It takes time and expertise up-front and must engage users in the solution –
but the result is transformative.

Blueprint Deliverables

Each step of this blueprint is accompanied by supporting deliverables to help you accomplish your goals:

Key deliverable:

ECM Strategy Roadmap

Business Capability Map

ECM Strategy Roadmap Creation Tool

Use the ECM Strategy Roadmap Creation Tool to identify focus areas and work initiatives and drill down to a detailed plan with timelines and assigned responsibilities.

ECM Use Case Framework Template

This template takes you through a business needs-gathering activity to highlight and create relevant use cases around the organization’s information-related problems and opportunities.

ECM Strategy Development Project Charter

Use this template to document the scope and key roles and responsibilities of the ECM strategy development project.

ECM Information Flow and System Architecture Template

Use this template to understand your information landscape with users and build a future state.

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.”

Guided Implementation

“Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.”

Workshop

“We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.”

Consulting

“Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Develop an ECM Strategy and Roadmap: Project overview

Contact your account representative for more information.
workshops@infotech.com 1-888-670-8889

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is between 8 to 12 calls over the course of 4 to 6 months.

Workshop Overview

Phase 1

Understand Business Context and Drivers for the ECM Project

• 1.1 Understand and Align to Business Drivers
• 1.2 Build High-Value Use Cases
• 1.3 Define the Scope and Vision of Your ECM Strategy Project

Develop an Enterprise Content Management Strategy and Roadmap

“When business users are invited to participate in the conversation around data with data users and IT, it adds a fundamental dimension — business context. Without a real understanding of how data ties back to the business, the value of analysis and insights can get lost.”– Jason Lim, Alation

This phase will guide you through the following activities:

• Identify your business drivers and business capabilities
• Align content management capabilities with business goals
• Define scope of the ECM strategy

This phase involves the following participants:

• Content management lead/information management lead, CDO, data lead
• Senior business leaders
• Business subject matter experts (SMEs)
• Content owners, records managers, regulatory subject matter experts (e.g. Legal Counsel, Security)