Top 8 enterprise content management challenges to avoid
As organizations strategize enterprise content management, challenges may arise -- like cost, security and storage. Careful planning can avoid these issues.
An enterprise content management system can optimize team collaboration, preserve an organization's records and form a key portion of its digital transformation initiatives.
However, various challenges can derail ECM implementations or limit their value to organizations, which content managers must remember as they consider strategies for ECM software. Digital asset management projects have more success if organizations plan for these pitfalls. While methods to address risks differ among companies, no content creation team or organization is immune to the potential effects of a failed ECM strategy.
Explore the following eight common ECM challenges that organizations and digital content managers face.
1. Getting end user buy-in
An ECM platform and the related business processes can often confuse end users, especially those used to paper documents or legacy file systems. Therefore, organizations should engage closely with users to learn about their needs. Ad hoc support opportunities, such as office hours, can help users learn from key stakeholders and build a dialogue and partnership between IT personnel and users.
2. Storage and migration
Without a proper ECM roadmap and strategy, organizations might experience some information management bottlenecks. For example, business-critical documents could be stuck in silos, such as someone's personal computer or an inaccessible file system. Legacy paper document management practices could also pose challenges.
Content managers must allocate adequate storage for ECM software. To do this, they should estimate the potential costs of storage employees' time. Project success and client adoption can influence these estimations, which content managers should occasionally revisit. While storage remains an expense, its associated costs continue to decrease, like eliminating the cost of floor space for paper documents that users can't access remotely.
Additionally, an organization might have to force software adoption and migration. If a company has an older ECM system or ad hoc ways to archive and share content, it could move valuable content to the new system. To facilitate this, content managers should find ways to minimize users' manual repetitious work and move from old to new systems and from disconnected to connected processes.
Carefully planning an ECM roadmap can help organizations avoid common pitfalls with ECM software.
3. Cost analysis
Even small ECM software projects can be expensive. In an organization's planning process, it should develop financial metrics that balance cost and benefits. These metrics show how customer satisfaction, information security (infosec), information digitization and other benefits offset the software's costs. In some cases, organizations can power down legacy systems and remove their associated hardware and software costs.
Even in this context, content managers must manage the costs of software and development personnel to ensure they stay within budget. Periodic cost-benefit analysis with finance and management teams can help content managers understand whether each project phase is worth the cost.
4. Infrastructure concerns
Each organization must assess its comfort levels with security risks, compliance and cost implications of ECM software and its associated technologies.
If an organization rolls out ECM in a cloud environment, it could save money on maintenance and infrastructure costs and have higher system availability. However, this makes organizations beholden to another company's goals and technical decisions because it can't customize the underlying cloud technology as well as it can with on-premises resources. Additionally, organizations can completely control security on premises, but they might not roll out ECM software as efficiently as a SaaS provider.
Ultimately, only the organization can decide the best ways to build a usable, extensible and supportable system to comply with its business rules.
5. Companywide communication
From the start of the project, content managers must listen to users, understand the pain points in their workflows and find ways to make their jobs easier. If content managers listen to issues and propose solutions, users are more likely to embrace the ECM system.
From the start of the project, content managers must listen to users, understand the pain points in their workflows and find ways to make their jobs easier.
Some users might prefer to manage paper documents rather than electronic files. Others may have electronic systems with overly complex legacy workflows. A radical listening approach with a small user base can help in these situations. This lets content managers be more attentive to customer satisfaction, address user needs and learn lessons to benefit future users.
If the project involves process automation, content managers can engage with their change management strategy to ensure they automate the right processes and don't simply replicate current -- and potentially less effective -- processes. As content managers talk with different teams, they can focus more on UX.
6. Taking on too much at once
While organizations want their ECM strategies and systems to address content challenges and opportunities across the entire business, they shouldn't try to do everything simultaneously. Content managers can find where process automation could improve workflows, productivity and other areas. Managers can then address those areas and bring use cases and user communities into the system.
Even small businesses have various content lifecycle opportunities driven by the needs of different departments, including management, finance, HR, IT, engineering, and sales and marketing teams. Content managers can tackle these workflow management initiatives one at a time.
7. Performance tuning
If content managers take steps one at a time and focus on adoption, they might find users taxing the system to its limits. A little adoption success can bring a carefully planned ECM system to its knees, slowing response times and frustrating users.
To avoid this frustration, content service managers should prioritize stress and load tests for their systems. What if all users log on at once and perform the most processor-intensive tasks? At what point does the system buckle under pressure? Managers should take their systems to the failure point, fix any resolvable issues, then add this process to the test suite to stay ahead of the system's adoption load.
8. Security issues
If an organization only considers infosec at the end of its ECM deployment process, it might have to rethink processes, workflows and interfaces. By delaying security considerations, an organization puts the ECM system and sensitive content at risk of theft or accidental disclosure. As content managers consider change management, adoption, performance tuning and migration, they should consider data security as an underlying element.
No system is perfectly secure. Content managers must balance usability and limit the risk of data loss, theft or leak. Too many controls can hamper usability and adoption, which could force users to take their content to potentially less secure tools and processes.
Key takeaways
Organizations shouldn't let ECM challenges overwhelm their digitization projects. If content managers remember the following key takeaways, they can more efficiently prepare to deploy ECM software.
If an organization takes stock of where it is, plans its project in incremental steps, engages with clientele and helps them through the change management process, it can better respond to technical and adoption issues.
If an organization monitors its system's performance, stress-tests it, and guides and automates user migration, it can manage user experiences as they migrate, limit manual work and provide a system as fast or faster than what they had before.
If an organization has an infosec layer, it can preserve or improve its content's security profile.
An ECM rollout requires careful forethought. With some comprehensive planning, organizations can avoid these common ECM challenges.
Editor's note:This article was updated to improve the reader experience.
Jordan Jones is a writer versed in enterprise content management, component content management, web content management and video-on-demand technologies.
