Seven steps to make content management work

Many organisations have implemented enterprise content management (ECM) systems of some description, but few have realised the promised benefits. While generally difficult to quantify, they are more often than not utterly elusive because the platforms and technology in operation perform only simple information storage while adding maintenance and workload management requirements to the equation.

Making the achievement of ECM benefits more arcane is the fact that there are many systems available, with each vendor claiming to deliver true ECM capabilities. However, these offerings often fail to consider that each organisation is different and its ECM requirements are guaranteed to differ in some regards from those in any other organisation.

Here are seven critical steps to harnessing these much-desired benefits:

Organisation-specific ECM is not delivered as a single solution or platform. Sometimes, to achieve stated objectives, it is necessary to combine multiple platforms to develop a comprehensive solution; or to further develop and configure an existing platform.

Each organisation needs to assess its specific content management requirements according to a variety of cases. For example, content being stored for knowledge management will be different to that stored for compliance reasons.

As important as it is to assess content management needs, organisations must also determine their search needs.

Besides the given requirement that it should be possible to secure content appropriately according to user roles, it is also important to profile users and match content accordingly. While a user can still see all content, it is often necessary to prioritise the display of certain content above others depending on the user`s profile, and to ease their specific content consumption.

To achieve this, it is necessary to define a content classification system since the prioritisation is done quantitatively. This is best achieved through a sensible metadata or content classification system.

As the volume of content in organisations increases, so does the need to accurately plan and implement security profiles around that content. Security should be an up-front consideration from the platform vendor, not an afterthought. For example, just because a content item or node is not listed as available, does not mean that a user will not try accessing it manually if they know the content exists.

Each organisation needs to assess its specific content management requirements according to a variety of cases.

Grant Hodgkinson, sales and marketing director, Mint Net

Many content systems work according to named user access for security and functionality purposes. Often role-centric needs are overlooked. There are many different roles in an organisation, and each user in defined roles will have different needs from any ECM application and the accompanying information retrieval system. If the system cannot tailor the user`s experience, even in a slight way, long-term frustrations will arise.

Consider whether it is important for the organisation that the ECM platform being considered has been audited or certified. Remember, a vendor claiming that its solutions deliver certain functionality is a very different thing to their actually achieving certification from an independent body as confirmation that claimed functionality is really delivered.

One of the most significant areas in the ECM realm is search. Many organisations believe a full-text search tool is the magic silver bullet to solve all search woes, simply because of the success it has enjoyed as an Internet tool. However, it is difficult to replicate this same success in the organisation because a search system often needs to consolidate information from multiple repositories, each with its own proprietary data store and structure. Also, information security needs to be observed across all aspects of search.

Many ECM systems are delivered together with a search sub-system, but this addresses only one aspect. It is more effective to consider the overall content landscape in the organisation and how search must deliver across this landscape.

Remember that the implementation of an ECM and search system fundamentally shifts the way people work. Ignoring users and their real productivity needs can be detrimental to the project.