Governance for ECM, How do we do it?

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is an emerging set of the technologies used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content and documents related to organizational processes; ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization’s unstructured information, wherever that information exists. It's not enough to "manage" content. Of course, the ability to access the correct version of a document or record is important, but organizations must go further. Content must be managed so that it is used to achieve business goals. Critical to this strategy, are the tools and technologies of ECM, which manage the complete lifecycle of content, “birth to death.”

Before choosing the ECM roadmap, an organization must strategize and evaluate – Business and IT alignment: their goals and objectives, how to solve business problem and ECM broader vision.

This call for standards, guidelines and recommendations, on how to establish ECM Governance Program (ECM-GP). It can capture invaluable know-how and best practices that the organization has gained over the past several years, which will allow company to avoid mistakes that have been made by many organizations.

Key challenges for ECM-GP implementation:
• Complexity of the applications
• Data readiness : quality and availability
• End-to-end accessibility and scalable performance
• Integration across enterprise entities
• Compliance to industry specific standards

ECM-GP team must involve various enterprise stakeholders including Top Management - Policy makers, Subject matter experts, Technology experts, Administrative experts, Operational experts, Customers, Partners and Suppliers.

Successful ECM-GP should address detailed scope and role of ECM, Governance team structure, roles and responsibilities, policies and procedures, data models, content owners, groups, access permissions, privilege control standards – do & don’ts.

Governance – implementation and adoption, is costly and time consuming affair. Enterprise must plan this in advance with involve experts at the early stage otherwise; it may have bigger business risk and impact thereafter.