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Join AIIM's Bob Larrivee for a fast-paced and informative one-day course focused on helping you get the most from your content assets. Bob's ECM Pre-Conference session is on March 31 and is the perfect way to kick off your #AIIM14 experience. Read on to begin your ECM journey.

Bob, AIIM's Director of Custom Content, is an internationally recognized Subject Matter Expert and thought leader with over thirty years of experience in Document Imaging, Enterprise Content Management, Process Improvement and Automation, Records Management, and the application of advanced technologies to solve business problems. Prior to his current position, Bob has held positions within the vendor community, as a Consultant/Analyst with iMerge Consulting, Kinetic Information and BIS Strategic Decisions. In the reseller distribution channel, Bob led Tech Data’s Knowledge Management Unit where, he set the strategic and tactical directions for the distribution of advanced and emerging technology products through Tech Data’s distribution channel. Bob entered the emerging technologies' industry with Wang Laboratories where he focused on imaging, workflow, and digital annotation and voice recognition systems. Follow Bob on Twitter: @BobLarrivee.

As information professional, you and your organization are faced with many challenges. You must deal with information of all types stored in many locations throughout your enterprise. You must address the need to better manage your information assets in ways that enable findability, productivity, collaboration, and discovery. You must find a way to eliminate duplication, reduce storage costs, and adhere to compliance requirements. You must assess and include mobile, social, and cloud as part of your infrastructure mix. As information professional, you are expected to wear many hats and take the lead in moving your organization forward.

In ECM, there are five key elements to moving your organization forward in managing your business information and maximizing its value. You can take the lead by addressing these five key elements of ECM.

Capture – the ability to identify and bring information that is of business value into a corporate knowledge base.

Manage – once the information is capture, you need a consistent way to manage it properly so it can be found when needed.

Store – elimination of information silos is one of the goals of ECM, so the ability to properly store your information in a secure yet accessible environment

Preserve - ensuring that your information remains available throughout its lifecycle by updating your storage media, updating file formats, and checking for media degradation.

Deliver – presenting information in ways that are conducive to your target audience and accounting for variable access methods like the Web, tablets, and smartphones.

Technology Isn’t the Answer
When dealing with ECM, technology alone is not the complete answer. There are three areas you need to address in addition to technology. These are people, process, and governance. All of these, when addressed properly and combined with technology, provide you with a strong ECM environment.

People
The people side of ECM seems obvious but it is also the most overlooked. Change management is a large part of ECM for without user adoption, your project will fail, or most certainly fall short of your expectations. User engagement is vital early in the project. Ask the users for their input about how things are done and how they could be done. Ask them about the content they use and the content they would use if they had access.

Process
Content and process are tightly related. If you change something in a process, you will likely have changed the way content is access, stored, or managed. If you change the way you manage content, you have inherently changed they way people work with it. Look at your processes and determine what content is needed, how it enters the process and how it exits.

Governance
The rules of how you work, what content is kept, where it is kept, and who is responsible for it are all part of good governance. This is not to say you have to create great number of rules, but you do need to set guidelines in place to get control and consistency over your content and processes. This in turn not only helps with content management, it also supports risk management in that you can prove consistent practices through a well planned, implemented, and monitored governance program.

The challenges you face in dealing with the capture, management, storage, preservation, and delivery of content can seem daunting at times. Today content is not only textual information, it includes graphics, digital photos, audio files, video files and under the overarching umbrella of ECM, physical items as well. How much paper do you have? Are you in an industry where physical samples, like geological or biological samples are kept as a business record? All of this needs to be managed properly and you are the person now holding this responsibility. There is hope. There is AIIM.

Let AIIM Help – ECM Pre-Conference
When you attend the AIIM ECM Practitioner pre-Conference training session, you will learn about people, process, governance, technology, and all of the elements needed to establish and maintain a strong ECM environment.  You will be attending the most widely recognized, internationally offered education program in our industry. AIIM's Enterprise Content Management course has provided over 20,000 information professionals with a solid understanding of ECM and a systematic approach to break down their information silos and manage their content across the enterprise. The course information is organized along these objectives:

•  Managing content in the social, mobile, and cloud environment

•  Creating, sharing, and optimizing content for staff/customer engagement, process automation, and information governance

•  Developing a business case and project plan for content management

•  Incorporating metadata models, taxonomies, and security in your plan

During this one day event, you will learn about the foundations of ECM, business drivers moving organizations toward ECM implementation, the relationship between ECM and information architecture, and about managing process and content. In addition to the learning experience in this session, you will also be given access to the online materials and the exam allowing you to test and gain your AIIM certificate as an ECM Practitioner. This online access will be made available to you for a six-month period following the session.