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This is the fifth part of our series called The Road to ECM Hell. Check out the start of the series here.

 

With good intentions, the implementation of an ECM system is carefully planned.  It is driven from within the CIO’s office – the office responsible for information management. So who is involved in the project?

 

AIIM suggests that planning is everything in a successful ECM project. So we have a well planned project; we have thought through our requirements, hired external consultants, chosen the implementation partners, and are going to test the new system out on a pilot set of users.  We have included the appropriate parts of the organization. Legal is involved. The Records team is involved. IT is involved. And we have some people from the user population, they’ll be using the system after all.  So we’ve recruited some users who have shown interest in the project.

 

Because pilots run for a limited time, and because the users involved are generally more motivated as part of it, is your pilot really representative of the general user population? The project pilot runs successfully with an extremely positive outcome (helped by the promise of the shiny new system of course). The project moves forward.  Will it be a success?

 

Did the pilot give us a false sense of security because of more motivated pilot users?  We all consider ourselves motivated employees. Surely everyone has the best interests of the organization at heart? Our motivated employees will adopt the new processes and procedures around our new ECM system. We have nothing to worry about….

 

Consider your own motivation, ask yourself how many times you have skipped, or used random data to fill in Web forms that are asking you for marketing or contact information. This is a perfect example of a scenario where you do want to do the right thing, but sometimes Web forms are a little too cumbersome, a little too intrusive, or just take too long. If the Repstor Contact Form is anything to go by, skipped or random data is the norm, not the exception. So how motivated are your ECM users when following a new process, or providing the correct properties about a filed item? Do they see it the same as a contact web form?

 

According to AIIM, the top reason for ECM deployment failures is user adoption, and top of the list of user adoption issues is persuading users to manage and share their information in the ECM system.

 

Over optimism on the motivation of the employees is another way to end up in ECM hell. We are all human after all.