Since you can’t manage what you can’t measure, defining the metrics you’ll use to manage your EIM program is an important step in developing your EIM strategy. This post outlines how to get started.
1. Start by focusing first on program and operational metrics for your EIM program.
Over time, your program can evolve to capturing additional metrics that are closely tied to business solutions and the related value generated by those applications. But in the near term, as the EIM program gets established, consider capturing two categories of metrics:
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Operational metrics: measure the health and utilization of the EIM technology environment. In addition to standard operational metrics (such as service availability; downtime, etc.), this category should include EIM-specific metrics such as search retrieval performance and storage utilization.
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ECM Program metrics: measure the progress and performance of the overall EIM program. This should include metrics such as number of concurrent EIM projects, unit costs for EIM shared services, adoption levels, and user satisfaction levels with the program.
2. For both Operational and Program categories, the individual metrics will measure different types of data.
Specifically, each metric will be an indicator of one or more of the following elements:
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Performance: indicates how well a particular area is executing. For Operational performance, this equates to system availability, system responsiveness, etc. For EIM Program performance, this equates to how well the program is doing in terms of servicing customers effectively, improving adoption and utilization, etc.
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Quality: indicates the level of quality that is being achieved. For Operations, quality is focused on level of user experience and how well the platform helps users do their jobs more effectively and more productively. For the EIM Program, quality refers to the satisfaction levels users have with the overall EIM shared services platform and the applications built on the platform.
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Value: indicates a level of benefit or return achieved through the platform. For Operations, metrics may include utilization rates and frequency of information access. EIM Program value metrics may focus on factors such as cost per seat and other similar metrics.
3. Development of dashboard type reporting will require some manual gathering of information.
Some of the information needed for the metrics can come from EIM systems or monitoring systems, but other information will rely on manual information gathering. In this way, EIM metrics and dashboard reporting is no different than other areas of KPI (key performance indicator) and dashboard reporting your organization may be performing.