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In my previous post on this topic I outlined the benefits of an enterprise approach to implementing ECM and RM. Now I will cover key implementation steps you will need to make it a reality.

1. Develop a five year Strategic Plan.

This strategic plan should initially be for a five year period.  It will take this long to fully implement your enterprise solution and realize its benefits. You should also take into account that your Records Management solution must think in much longer terms - 500 years for "permanent" records.

Here is a sample outline of a plan:

1.    5 YEAR GOALS AND OBJECTIVES.

1.1.      Accelerated Rollout of ECM and RM.

2.    BACKGROUND.

3.    HOW DO WE GET THERE

3.1.      AUTOMATION

3.1.1.       ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE

3.1.2        ECM AND RM TOOLSET

3.1.3.       SCANNING MODEL

3.1.4.       DOCUMENT MANAGEMENT AND COLLABORATION

3.1.5.       EMAIL

3.1.6.       COMPLIANCE AND EDISCOVERY

3.1.7.       INTEGRATION WITH BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

3.2.      RETENTION SCHEDULES

3.3.      POLICY, PROCEDURES AND TRAINING

3.4.      INVENTORY

3.5.      DIGITIZATION STRATEGY

3.6.      PRESERVATION

3.7.      PERFORMANCE MEASURES

3.8.      LEGISLATIVE AND/OR POLICY CHANGES

3.9.      REPORTING

3.10.    FUNDING SOURCES

4.    ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGES

5.    CURRENT STATUS

This plan should become a “living” document that is updated often to reflect current status against the plan.  This approach informs readers that the plan is being followed and that progress is being made.

2. Perform an enterprise-wide Document Taxonomy study.

This study provides information for both the procurement process and for implementation.  Doing this up front, using best practices, helps achieve much better results. Ideally this should be done across the entire organization so that document types and index criteria can be normalized.  This will help make things consistent across the enterprise, eliminating duplicates and standardizing index fields and formats. If it cannot be done across the enterprise, then similar departments or agencies should be done together so that common document types can be addressed. 

This study provides all of the information needed to make decisions about what to keep in paper, what can  be destroyed, what should be scanned, what priority to address agency needs, and the requirements for a basic document and records management solution.  It does not address the full business process requirements for each agency – this is a much more complex and time consuming effort that should come in a secondary phase.

I very highly recommend that you focus on a basic storage and retrieval solution first, addressing workflow and other automation after this foundation is in place.  This is a very common mistake, and often organizations struggle for a very long time with complex business processes before figuring out that they should have done a much more thorough job on the taxonomy and capture processes up front.  The foundation of the solution is a critical success factor, and it is the most difficult to master.  Without this solid foundation, which includes scanning and other capture processes, indexing, and search tools, more complex applications will be very difficult to implement successfully.

Here is a sample outline of the deliverable from this type of study:

1. Objectives
2. Scope
3. Background and Current Environment
   1. Technical Infrastructure (Network, Databases, E-Mail, Servers, Web)
   2. Number and description of sites
   3. Legacy Systems
   4. Current System (if replacing one for this project)
4. Document Inventory
   1. Volumes by media type (paper, microfilm, microfiche, large format, electronic files)
   2. Active versus inactive
   3. On-site versus off-site
   4. Document Types
   5. Standards, Legal and Policy Constraints
   6. Definitions (Document, Page, Image)
5. For Each Document Type:
   1. Index criteria
   2. Search criteria
   3. Print and fax requirements
   4. Access control requirements
6. User Community
   1. Number of users per department or business unit
   2. Dedicated versus concurrent licensing
   3. Security and Access control considerations
7. Priority of departments if more than one is considered
8. Records Management Requirements
   1. Paper, Microfilm, and Electronic
   2. Retention Schedules
   3. Applicable laws and policies
   4. Physical vs. electronic records
9. Legacy system integration
10. Centralized vs. Distributed Scanning
11. Standard Performance Reports and Metrics
12. Backfile conversion requirements, volumes and constraints
13. Recommended Implementation Schedule 

More to come in the next post...