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Vendor Landscape Plus: Enterprise Content Management Suite

ECM: A vendor marketing concept, not an IT strategy.

Introduction

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is an important but potentially costly technology. Each vendor presents a different set of strengths and weaknesses.

Ultimately, ECM success is about fit with the vendors.

Use this research to identify appropriate ECM vendors for your enterprise. It will help you create a shortlist of vendors and introduce you to how these vendors present their strengths and strategies. Our goal is prepare you for the first four meetings with any

particular ECM suite vendor.

This research is designed for ECM project leaders and team

members.

Executives and line-of-business managers tasked with selecting an ECM solution.

This research will Introduce the core components of

an ECM strategy.

Identify how well different vendors address those components.

Introduce vendor positioning, strengths, and weaknesses.

Understand: What is ECM and why is it important?

Strategize: Focus on the key issues that drive ECM selection projects.

Compare: Explore the strengths and weaknesses of different offerings.

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Executive SummaryExecutive Summary

• ECM is a popular technology. Interest is being driven by an exploding volume of information and an increasingly complicated compliance and litigation environment.

• ECM initiatives are driven by three crucial considerations:

o Compliance and litigation concerns.o IT efficiency.o Business efficiency for both process and knowledge workers.

• ECM products differ by their ability to address these considerations. Only ECM Suites cover them all.

• Vendor fit is important. But it’s crucial to not over-buy.

Compare: Explore the

strengths and weaknesses of

different offerings.

Strategize: Focus on the

key issues that drive ECM selection.

Understand: What is ECM and why is it important?

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Understand: What is ECM and why is it important?Understand: What is ECM and why is it important?

• ECM is the strategy and tools to manage information within the organization across its entire lifecycle.

• ECM includes records management, document management, Web content management, and a variety of ancillary technologies.

• The low hanging fruit for ECM includes solutions that improve IT's ability to deliver business functions, collaboration, and business throughput.

The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) provides the following definition:

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) is the strategies, methods, and tools 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.

ECM is the strategies & tools to manage content

ECM strategy is implemented with a variety of technologies

The core of ECM is a pyramid of three technologies: records management, document management, and Web

content management.

ECM bleeds into a fringe of related ancillary technologies

like archiving and collaboration.

Dedicated ECM suites include both the core and fringe

technologies.

ECM projects are driven by many factors but a focus on IT efficiencies & niche technologies like collaboration, business process integration, and

search provide the best complexity tradeoffs

The whole point of implementing ECM is collaboration.

- Infrastructure Manager, Marketing Firm

“

For litigation, there has to be a process in place of going through things, organizing them, and making sure all of the right stuff is there. This is important, but not the key driver for our project.

- Infrastructure Manager, Marketing Firm

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”

Low hanging fruit

Poor risk/reward

Complexity

ECM costs vary drastically

Consider: A power generation and distribution company wanted to deploy an ECM solution to manage internal documents for 150 users. The team originally considered extending their existing SharePoint deployment. Their requirements were not, however, met by SharePoint given their needs for compliance-driven records management and their need to maintain engineering drawings. RFPs revealed a wide range in estimated costs.

Consider: A power generation and distribution company wanted to deploy an ECM solution to manage internal documents for 150 users. The team originally considered extending their existing SharePoint deployment. Their requirements were not, however, met by SharePoint given their needs for compliance-driven records management and their need to maintain engineering drawings. RFPs revealed a wide range in estimated costs.

Option 1:Existing technology (SharePoint Services)

Concerns:SharePoint Services was inexpensive. It could meet rudimentary business efficiency needs for knowledge workers but was wholly inappropriate for both compliance considerations and the needs of knowledge workers.

$6,000$0 licensing

Consulting 30% of total

Option 2:Existing technology (SharePoint Server)

Concerns:SharePoint Server was more appropriate for the project. The project team still had concerns about its appropriateness for records and for engineering drawings.

Option 3:RFP from leading ECM vendors

Concerns:The RFP responses varied widely in their quality and approach. The team was impressed, however, with the solutions built specifically for their needs and their industry. This domain experience was important for final selection.

$105,000$40,000 licensing

Consulting 50% of total

$250,000 to $1-million

Requirements are crucial. Poorly scoped projects create widely variable RFPs that are very difficult to evaluate.

Info-Tech Insight:

The first two months of an ECM project are about building the business plan, assessing organizational readiness, and estimating project costs

Establish the business need

Build the project team

Assess organizational

readiness

Determine approximate cost

Develop the Business plan

The first step in an ECM project is identifying the need. There must be some trigger for the process typically related to litigation/compliance, IT efficiencies, or business efficiencies.

Deliverable: A statement of direction.

It should include the executive sponsor for the team and have representation from the business units that will be affected by the project. Legal counsel is a crucial part of teams involving compliance/litigation. The project team will have an important role in both scoping the project and ultimately in product selection.

Deliverable: A team list.

Solutions may involve a great deal of technical and process complexity. Enterprises must ensure that they either have the appropriate resources in place or are willing to acquire or build those resources.

Deliverable: Appropriateness assessment.

If the preliminary requirements can be met by a set of products but those products are excessively expensive, then the enterprise must reconsider either requirements or approach. This cost can be difficult to quantify due to extreme range in quoted costs.

Deliverable: A rough-cut cost estimate that meets senior management expectations.

An important part of the project is to prepare a business plan that explores the potential benefits of a particular solution and how they will affect different parts of the organization. It should explore market dynamics and include both an opportunity assessment and recommendations.

Deliverable: Completed business plan.

:: Month 1 :::: Month 1 :: :: Month 2 :: :: Month 2 ::

Compare: Explore the

strengths and weaknesses of

different offerings.

Strategize: Focus on the

key issues that drive ECM selection.

Understand: What is ECM and why is it important?

1 2 3

Strategize: Focus on the key issues that drive ECM selection.Strategize: Focus on the key issues that drive ECM selection.

• ECM initiatives are driven by three crucial considerations:o Compliance and litigation concernso IT efficiencyo Business efficiency for process and knowledge workers

• ECM products differ by their ability to address these considerations. Only ECM Suites cover them all.

• It’s important to create an Enterprise ECM Profile that matches internal requirements with vendor deliverables.

The ECM business case depends on three interlocking factors: compliance/litigation, IT efficiency, and business efficiency

Dedicated ECM suites include the core and fringe

technologies.

Internal efficiencies encourage IT departments to support

ECM. But the real benefits for ECM lie within the business.

Compliance and litigation get the attention of senior

management and other key stakeholders.

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