Forget the Gap: Mind the Fundamentals!

File these under the heading of “what you don’t know CAN hurt you!”

• “We have ‘search’ so we don’t need taxonomies or metadata to find things.”
   
• “We keep everything so we don’t have to worry about records management.”
   
• “Our IT people have all our SharePoint sites under control.”

These statements are representative of the kinds of things we hear every week that strike fear into our hearts – along with questions like:

• “I have to use up my budget by the end of the quarter/half/year. Can you help me buy something?”

• “I can play CDs that are 20 years old, so why wouldn’t my archives still be readable 20 years from now?”

• And everybody’s favorite, “What, exactly, is a record?”

We fear because we worry, and we worry because we know that the people who say such things are setting themselves up to fail unless they mind the business-side fundamentals that really make ECM, BPM, and the rest of our alphabet soup sing.

Fundamentals like: technology basics, policy pitfalls, requirements definitions, change management … in short, all the all the under-the-covers stuff whose presence or absence in a program plan will determine a solution’s ultimate value.

To be fair, it’s easy for the uninitiated to view content and process management as big pieces of shrink-wrapped software – after all, don’t they run on our computers like Word or Salesforce.com? (“Whaddya mean, Salesforce runs in the cloud? What the heck does THAT mean?!”)

But whatever the reason – intentional disregard because the work is hard, or merely omission due to ignorance – skipping the basics results in but one outcome: diminished or even negative returns on an ill-advised investment.

And that may be the most fundamental, and important, lesson of all.

Want to brush up on your fundamentals? Attend my AIIM ECM Practitioner Preconference Course at Info360 next week in Washington, DC!