I was reading a blog post by Seth Godin last week.  In upstream and downstream, Seth talked about how most people just think of their job as a set of tasks that takes place in a box.  He suggests that if we go upstream of what happens in our box and alter the stuff that comes to us, it is a lot easier to do great work.  He further suggests that if we go downstream and teach people how to work with what we have created in our box, the final product is better as well.

This is true in so many areas.  His examples included if a doctor can get people to change bad habits before they come in to the examining room,  the results are better.  Or if the doctor is able to get the people to do the things they advise after they leave the examining room, the end result will also be better.

The blog posting reminded me of a movie starring Michael Keaton called Gung Ho.  It was about a Japanese car company buying an American manufacturing plant and the clashes in culture that occurred as new ways of working were implemented.  I remember a scene where they were reviewing the quality of a car that had just been built and how it had a defect.  The reply from the guy who built it was that is something for the dealer to take care of.  Why should the dealer have to take care of a defect in the manufacturing process?  Is the dealer adequately equipped to easily make that repair, including parts and the right human resources?  Clearly this individual was not thinking of those downstream of their job.

There are a few parallels to this in the Enterprise Content and Records Management (ECRM) space.

The first one that comes to mind is in searching for, finding and reusing information.  Too many times an organization will not spend the time or invest the energy in creating a taxonomy or classification scheme and defining metadata to be captured with all content added to the ECRM repository.  They assume that the full-text or "Google-like" search will be "good enough" for their end users to search for and retrieve the relevant content.  The IT or Records Management group or ECRM implementation team isn't thinking "downstream" of their own job.  How many search results are users going to have to click through to find the right content?  How many times are they going to "give up" and recreate the content because there are too many results to review to find the relevant content?  If time is spent discovering how users want to search for content and ensuring that those items are captured as metadata or classified appropriately, search results will be improved as well as the downstream process by the end user.  The end users are able to retrieve the relevant content quicker and move on to the task that caused them to search in the first place.

Another area that I've seen overlooked or even ignored is the usability or user experience of capturing content or generally using the ECRM system.  The ECRM implementation team doesn't always look at the ways the user has to interface with the ECRM system from the context of their current workflow. Does it change the ways the user works in such a manner that the flow has become inefficient or cumbersome?  I remember some of the earlier implementations of some ECRM systems prior to the integration with end user tools such as Microsoft Office.  Some required the users to save content to their desktop or some other place first and then go into an application and upload the content.  And they had to do this for every subsequent edit as well.  How usable is that solution?  Are users going to embrace that new way of working and contribute their content to the repository?  Probably not.

I have also seen where ECRM is seen purely as a technology purchase, with little thought given to information governance.  We define information governance as those activities, policies, standards and measures developed and enforced to ensure information is managed according to its value to the organization. We also believe clear roles and responsibilities for all individuals that interface with the ECRM is a key component of information governance.  This scenario of a technology purchase only typically happens when IT is driving the process, with little input from Legal or Records Managers (This unfortunately happens more often than not.  See the 2nd statistic in this blog post on Thoughts from the AIIM ECM Industry Survey 2010.  Over half of the SharePoint implementations are either managed by IT with no input from Records Management, are managed on a departmental level or are completely out of control).  When systems are implemented in this manner, their is little thought given to records management or litigation holds - downstream processes that will suffer because the requirements for these functions were not surfaced before the technology was purchased.

Implementation of an ECRM program (note it is not a single project) requires a holistic view.  Our proven practices and methods ensure we look both upstream downstream of the actual repository to ensure that the final solution works for both the contributors and consumers of content, and all processes in between.