The nature of ECM or enterprise content management is – as the name reveals – to make data once worked on accessible to future projects in order for the organization to save money. At least if they’re not being misused for communication purposes dedicated to reaching out to the customers. There are better solutions out there for that.

One of the primary advantages should be that the access to information is easier than it would have been on paper.

While this proves to be true from a decentralization aspect and that the data is accessible even in the most remote branch office, a lot of organizations don’t or hardly dedicate time and budget on installing sufficient search servers in the system which make finding the information, once it’s been archived, easier or possible in the first place.

Another problem is presented to organizations through the lack of understanding by their team, who simply don’t acknowledge that value of adding search words when archiving the documents or – if forced to do so by the systems setup – will enter no more than rubbish just to get rid of the error message.

As to many problems I’m confronted with in my work there is no one-size-fits-all-solution out there; especially in context to the factor of human failure I’ve outlined above each situation is unique, as is the organization I work with.

However, some general advice would be that upon deployment of an ECM platform make sure that you’ve checked with the vendor and maybe with someone that knows their stuff around search engines (not necessarily your IT-staff) that the search engines included in the ECM are good enough to meet your needs.

Another important factor would be whether documents (PDF, Word files, etc.) can be search natively by the system and actually show up in search results. The alternative would be to mark the documents with keywords upon uploading them which bears the risk of employees not taking this seriously or important words not being included thus making the whole effort invested obsolete.

I’m thinking of dedicating a whole white paper to the whole corporate intellectual property management section in the future.

Let me know whether there is raised interest on this issue.

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The problem which corporations are facing is how to implement this breath of fresh and revitalizing air into their dusty ways of working to improve the value, not only to their companies in general.

The core question of the critics seems to be:“HOW do we achieve that without placing our intellectual property at stake?”

But that is the thinking of the weak. The real question is: How do we install it in the first place!

Realizing this tremendous value is the first thing that has to be achieved. Then we’ll go over and determine which product is the best for our organization. And the last phrase will have probably raised a lot eyebrows, right?

It’s not that hard, trust me. We start with the common palette of things. Everyone has heard of intranets before, right? That’s what we’re going to call the whole construct which we will be building upon. An intranet is nothing more than the closed internet of your corporation… ONLY! accessible to your staff with tough restrictions being applied so that no one from outside the organization can access what you’re working on! Either secured by not making it available to the outside world in the first place, giving hackers and other scum no chance in the first place, or through secure methods of authentication. (call me if you have further questions)

Ok – now let’s get to the value of the different instruments we can implement
Living in today’s world you will have most likely run across blogs, discussion forums etc. These can also be implemented in your organization to ease up internal communications. And best of all will make vertical communication a heck of a lot easier. Vertical communication is – by the way – the communication between “regular” employees and executive level. And since there are no real boundaries between these two “types” of people the executive level will not only be able to scrutinize what’s going on on his intranet but also actively participate in the current issues of the company. Be it that the menu in the kitchen sucks or important things. Get the point?

A blog in an organization is more valuable because people will be used to blogs and blogging. You won’t believe how many of your employees have a blog and generate damn good ideas on it! And you’re letting other companies utilize those ideas. Or worse, hire those people away from you.

And since your corporate blog will only be available on your intranet you won’t have to loose sleep over people from the outside world stealing your intellectual property.

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