Johannesburg, 19 Sep 2016
Traditional enterprise content management, or ECM as those in the know call it, was firmly rooted in the processes and procedures around document and records management. Things have, however, come a long way and ECM, in its new role, is a powerful business tool to extract knowledge, automate procedures, and locate information to better serve your planning, and control processes. The challenge herein is locating and extracting that information.
To define the new roles of ECM, Johan du Preez, Business Unit Manager of ECM at EOH, took us through a few of the finer aspects of the process as it pertains to the 21st century business. "There is, of course, still the need for traditional ECM," says Du Preez, "but then there are numerous solutions that can be built on top of SharePoint, which are totally separate, and add phenomenal value to business."
Looking at traditional ECM can, according to Du Preez, be defined as a business consulting exercise. "This is the part of the process where types of information that need to be managed, and the mechanisms to achieve this, are identified which then leads to the setup of the processes and tools to achieve the task."
That said, the volume of information has, in recent years, grown exponentially, so finding out what information you need to manage has become far more important than just putting a technology in place to manage everything.
"This is where a big chunk of the value comes in when doing ECM properly today. You need to identify what information you have, understand how to clean it up, and how then to get that information into a system or tool that will help manage and control the data."
The process is, however, not a quick-fix, box-drop solution and can take years to refine, complete and implement.
"You must remember that this is a big thing - a wheel that turns slowly. Apart from your electronic information, there is almost always physical information. Companies will have mountains of boxes located at an offsite repository which they need to go through and separate the valuable data from the garbage."
When starting on the ECM efficiency journey, there are a number of things that need to be taken into consideration. The first step, according to Du Preez, is to do an assessment of what your information landscape currently looks like.
"You have to have some idea what your world looks like. You then need to identify what it is, exactly, that you would like to achieve. You may only need to embark on a specific compliance exercise, health and safety for example, which then negates the need to go full enterprise-wide ECM. The next phase involves a thorough clean-up process of the data on hand."
During this process you will need someone, either from within your organisation, or a third party, who understands how to get the job done. "There are many tools in the market that, in isolation, sound good, but if you don't have an experienced partner who understands how to drive and control the process, the tool will then just cost you a lot of money and, at the end of the day, you will have the same problem, just on another system. Essentially, it's like moving a crisis from one place to another - it's no use."
Typically, companies embark on an ECM revamp process for compliance reasons but, during execution thereof efficiency, efficacy, and productivity invariably shows marked improvement. "Once we put the ECM project to bed, the SharePoint solutions we do are purely productivity based and this is where we have seen our biggest growth over the past few years. We have gone to great lengths to figure out how to make something dull - like administrative processes - more efficient, easier to use and more practical for companies that have certain constraints, be they manpower or financial in nature. This is especially valid within the public sector, where there are numerous rules and regulations around how things are done."
According to Du Preez, while methodologies have changed over the decades, with technology coming to the fore, the core of ECM has remained the same.
"You need to manage information in a structured, controlled fashion to reduce risk and optimise efficiency. Process-wise, things are the same, technology, however, has become far smoother and aimed more at easing the route to finding information. Just think about it, when you want to know something in the 21st century, you go to Google, and people are expecting this in the corporate world as well. Ease of use is vital."
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