The allure of SharePoint is pretty compelling. It is radically cheaper to acquire, radically cheaper to implement, and boasts a radically better user interface – after all, it has great integration with the key set of productivity tools in Microsoft Office. So it’s easy to see why organizations of every size would look to SharePoint to handle their enterprise content management needs. Certainly, there are reasons why SharePoint is a great tool; however, there are also reasons why you can’t approach SharePoint from the perspective of a traditional content management system.
What Do You Think Of When I Say “ECM”?
Industry insiders, consultants, and implementers have developed an understanding of ECM systems as process enablers. Whether they are recording and filing invoices, contracts, or packing slips, ECM systems typically have been implemented in places where the number of documents – and the findability problem associated with those documents – is great.
It’s easy for most folks to remember rows and rows of file cabinets overflowing with paper. Locating a document in these rows and rows of file cabinets was done very rarely, because the cost of manually retrieving the paper was so high. However, this meant that important checks to determine whether or not the invoice had been paid, or the work was being double billed, were skipped, causing organizations to lose millions of dollars each year. ECM systems, some of which quite literally cost millions of dollars to implement, were implemented to improve the speed of filing and retrieval, and to reduce the amount of physical space required to maintain the records.
I once worked on an ECM project where the paper in the building was quite literally crushing the limestone foundation on which it sat. Simply managing the space that record keeping required had a tangible impact to the bottom line.
Due to the cost required to implement an ECM system, the technology has historically picked up small efficiencies in processes that have very high document volume. The sweet spot for ECM as a market has historically been these high-volume operations.
Similarly, because these processes often meant real money, the documents and their metadata were tightly controlled. Accounting decided what metadata would be assigned to invoices, and because of the relatively constrained set of people performing the ingest process, everything was relatively well controlled.
Expensive scanners and ingest tools meant that providing a centralized scanning facility was the most cost?effective solution to getting documents into the system. With a relatively small number of people ingesting documents, training was easy. The centralized facility generally meant a group of people who were dedicated to the process and who could be taught the importance of good metadata entry, proper scanning, and what happens when mistakes are made.
