Blogs

Discussions before, during, and after an ECM Practitioner class I led last week again reinforced just how hard we can make things for ourselves as we deal with content and process management technology. Just look at how much time we spend wrestling with vocabulary and semantics, and navigating the political sensitivities surrounding the way people create, use, and share information!

The thing is, none of that actually has anything to do with the fundamental business problems we’re usually trying to solve, which in Holly Group terms boil down to helping people work better and work better together. Using that as a touchstone – and then remembering to circle back to touch it every once in a while! – can really help unclutter our collective minds and distill the issues into a couple of key system characteristics to look for when deciding which way to go:

• Flexibility: the ability to accommodate changing conditions
• Scalability: the ability to accommodate more users, processes, locations, etc.
• Simplicity: the ability to be readily understood and exploited by end users and admins, businesspeople and techies alike

This practicality is central to our concept of getting Maximum Total Value from technology, and is a major theme of the AIIM Webinar I’m participating in on Wednesday. Come and join us if you’d like to explore this further – we’d love to have you along!