The “small” web content management project The Portable Consultant has been working on has awakened the slumbering ECM giant within the client organization.

The manager with whom I have been working, was asked to present an ECM roadmap to key executives that would place our WCM project in the context of the full pantheon of ECM: document management, imaging, collaboration, digital asset management, records management, and a portal infrastructure.

This is a pretty tall order, even for an ECM consultant, but together with our project’s business analyst the three of us assembled a reasonable roadmap with Best Practices as our compass and some high-level organizational requirements as our guide. We packaged ECM as business processes wrapped around ECM tools, like the web content management system, and presented them in a logical sequence – well, a “reasonably logical” might be a better term given that WCM was, for historical reasons, the first ECM project out of the gate.

The challenge in a presentation such as this is to convey enough detail to get support at the executive level without getting bogged down in details, especially technical details.

As well as the logical (and stunningly beautiful!) Visio diagrams I prepared for the PowerPoint presentation we also gave out full colour copies of the ECM at WORK poster from AIIM, the ECM Association. As soon as I came across it I knew this poster was perfect for our purposes. It reinforced many of the points made in the presentation and highlights areas that might otherwise have been missed by our audience: Compliance, Collaboration, Cost, and Continuity. Three of these are difficult concepts to sell because they are often not seen as having a great deal of quantifiable value. The fourth section on Cost tells it like it is: “While ECM can be a costly initiative, what are the costs of not properly managing your content?” Our presentation could have used those words, but it means more when it comes from an industry association like AIIM.

Registration is required to download the AIIM ECM at Work poster, but registration as an “associate” is free and the site has a lot of very useful material for anyone interested in ECM.

Cheers,
-pmh

The Portable Consultant is working at a client site these days, helping with the strategic and technical requirements for a web content management system prior to preparation of an RFP.

One of my points has been that web content should be archived since it is one component of enterprise content and, as such, should be treated as business records.

Hearing that our WCM project might have something to do with archiving, Muyiwa dropped by to chat. His team is finishing off a Lotus Notes e-mail project that he felt should have addressed the issue of e-mail archiving, but didn’t. He is planning to pass that back on up the chain of command for management to consider.

This is great! A down-in-the-trenches employee passing along the message that this important issue needs to be addressed.

We need more like him.

Cheers,
-pmh