Enterprise content management (ECM) best practices are essential for organizations seeking to efficiently manage and organize huge volumes of information. To get the most out of content, we have compiled these guidelines based on our extensive ten years+ experience in the field. Alongside leveraging leading enterprise content management software, implementing these recommendations will streamline your processes and enhance the effectiveness of your content management initiatives.
Typical enterprise content management best practices include defining a clear vision, conducting thorough requirements analysis, moving to the cloud, implementing robust security measures, establishing effective governance and compliance, enabling effective search, and providing user training.
To maximize the benefits of ECM, it is important to follow up with the latest ECM topics and take your time developing the most suited ECM strategy that will shape how your organization will control and manage all available content without jeopardizing security, accessibility, and user experience.
What are the key Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Best Practices?
Remember, these best practices should be customized based on your specific organization’s business needs and the challenges that you will face. It will surely evolve over time as technology and business requirements are constantly changing. We will keep on updating this list to align with the future of ECM.
The key ECM best practices are:
1- Define a clear vision
To have an effective enterprise content management implementation, you need to start with clearly defining the score and purpose of this initiative. This will give you a high-level summary of the project and help you get key stakeholders on board with how your organization should manage content.
In addition, you have to manage the expectations by clearly explaining the expected outcome of this ECM initiative.
Creating this strategy involves the planning, development, and deployment of processes and technologies that support the creation, storage, preservation, and delivery of an organization’s digital content. It aims to effectively manage information assets and improve operational efficiency, decision-making, and overall customer satisfaction.
2- Conduct thorough requirements analysis
Before the implementation phase of any ECM provider, you need to conduct a detailed requirement analysis of your organizations content management needs. This include identifying the key capabilities that will help you increase the success rate.
What I usually do is create an excel sheet having almost all the capabilities as rows and how important they are to the organization as columns and mark each appropriate capability needed in order to identify how the system should be implemented to cater for all departments and stakeholders needs.
You can have an idea about the Excel I usually use from the below image.
3- Move to the cloud
One of the most critical ECM best practices that you should make sure to follow is to ditch your on-premises implementation and move to the cloud. You need to make sure that your employees can have access to the content (documents, images, presentations, etc.) they need whenever they want to.
Not only that but moving to the cloud will decrease costs related to hardware maintenance, licenses required, constant security patches follow-ups. This will help you make resource utilization as efficient as possible while still providing content in the most optimized way to your stakeholders.
4- Implement robust security measures
Ensuring secure storage and delivery of content is another essential guideline to adhere to. It involves implementing robust measures such as user authentication, access controls, database and document encryption, and reliable data backup strategies.
By enforcing strict access permissions, you can ensure that only authorized personnel can view and download documents, preventing unauthorized sharing of sensitive information. Following these practices enhances trust in your company, presents a more professional image, and mitigates the risk of fines and penalties.
5- Establish effective governance and compliance
Depending on the industry your organization is operating in, there are several rules and regulations that should be followed. Some businesses might have to abide by laws and standards like ISO-9001, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, or GDPR. The rules for e-discovery and litigation holds must be followed by all enterprises.
Failing to adhere to these laws can and will put your organization in a situation where it needs to pay money as penalties and fines. ECM, have the power to manage the full content lifecycle from create to destruction.
ECM provide the infrastructure and tools necessary to establish and enforce compliance practices. By implementing document management features such as version control and document history, ECM enables organizations to maintain accurate records and demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements.
In addition, they include capabilities related to the automation of document disposition and retention schedules allowing enterprises to only keep documents for the allowed time.
6- Enable effective search and retrieval
The main focus of having an ECM implementation available in your organization is to make sure that employees can quickly locate any information they need without losing so much time.
As per Mckinsey, the knowledge worker spends about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information. So, in simple calculations, each employee costs the organization over $21.000 per year merely to search for information and that’s add up to $1740 per month.
Check this article if you are interested about discovering other ECM statistics.
To enhance search and retrieval, several techniques can be employed. First, metadata plays a crucial role in organizing and categorizing content. By associating relevant metadata with documents, this will make it extremely accurate to retrieve documents whenever you need to.
Another technique is allowing Full Text Search. This technique indexes the content of the documents and make sure that it can be searchable in a fast matter.
7- Provide user training and support
To minimize the risk of failure, it is crucial to foster employee confidence and proficiency in using the ECM application. As a general practice, prioritize regular training sessions to keep employees well-informed about the latest changes.
Additionally, maintain open communication channels to share updates, new features, and best practices, encouraging user adoption and maximizing the success rate of ECM. By prioritizing employee training and communication, you can enhance user competence and optimize the effectiveness of the system.
Conclusion
The future of ECM is bright as organizations will always need such technologies to help them manage their content and implement best practices.
