People, Manage & Technology plain old EDRMS?

Taking the combination of People, Manage and Technology, and assuming content that is primarily office documents (Word, excel, PowerPoint and e-mail) then this part of the model can be related to plain old electronic document and records management.

Not rocket science, but at the same time a fundamental piece of the overall ECM puzzle. It is probably one of the areas that is the easiest for organisations to churn out and RFP for but the hardest to get right because of the effect that the technology has on the people that need to deal with it.

Rule #1, never underestimate organisational change! Rule #2, refer to Rule 1.

What always disappoints me in the RFP process is that no matter how much you warn that Change Management is paramount there seems to be a general lack of real appreciation for how much is necessary for the organisation. It's like telling my daughters to eat their vegetables. They know it is the right thing to do but just do not want to do it. So to do organisations approach organisational change. Dealing with people is messy and time consuming, and some think it is far better to ram in the technology and deal with the issues later.

I have recently seen one organisation that is out for tender where the existing DMS system has a couple of hundred thousand documents in the DMS system but 2TB of other stuff in the file server. Maybe they are all JPG's and MP3 files? I think not.

This picture is really wrong but is reality. By nature if the "system" is too hard to use people will work around it and default back to the old behaviours. EDRMS is fine and good and useful, but know why you are doing it and make sure that change management happens well before the technology hits the desktop.