Why the Interest in ECM Center of Excellence Model?

Earlier this month I presented a Building an ECM Center of Excellence Foundation" topic at the IBM Inforamation OnDemand conference in Las Vegas. We had a very large attendance. Matter of fact we have some of the largest breakout sessions at this confernce for the past 3 years. What is the interest in this topic? I would like to hear from you on why you are interested in Enterprise Content Management Center of Excellence Model.

ECM COE Blog Under Construction - You can Help

I have some ideas that I plan on positing to this blog but I would like to start with the organizational planning of a ECM Program as one of my first set of topics: ECM Center of Excellence Model. I would really like to hear from you on the type of ECM COE related topics that you would like to hear more about. The thoughts I have currently are as follows:

1. Posting on How to Build the ECM COE Foundation - mulitple posting on each of the foundation blocks for the development of an ECM COE
2. Post links of other technology COE and write about the difference and simularities of that of the ECM COE model
3. Talk about establishing measurements for your ECM COE

What could I provide on this blog that would be of most help to you?

Why is organization planning not needed for a successful ECM Program?

I just don' t get it! I work with many customers that leverage various Enterprise Content Management (ECM) technologies (Imaging, document management, records management, Content Centric BPM, etc.) to meet various needs. I see is a lot of departmental implementations but not so many enterprise shared services implementations. For those that have or at least looking, few have developed an ECM Program Strategy. When they do it focuses on just the technology. Take the following ECM Program Definition:

“A management practice that provides for governance of an information management environment toward the goal of improving compliance, information reuse and sharing, and operational performance. An ECM Program is a structured approach employing methods, policies, metrics, management practices and software tools to manage the lifecycle of information and to continuously optimize an organization’s collections of information and information management processes.”

Source: Russel Stalter

If you look at it and technology ( software tools) is only one of many aspects of a ECM Program. You need an organization model that provides the methods, policies, metrics, management practices etc. to ensure the solutions that are developed provide business value. The model I promote is a Center of Excellence model. This model is an real or virtual organization where all the processes, skills, measurement are focused on the enablement of ECM technology services.

This is what I don’t get. When you bring in a new technology you get assistance from the vendor or partners to bring you up to speed on the technology. Why would you not do the same when trying to develop an organization to deliver, support those services? For some reason it is much easier to get folks sign up to bring in the expertise to implement/deploy the technology than it is to bring in expertise to help form the appropriate organization structure and management processes, funding, etc to deliver the ECM services. Why?