Friday, January 15, 2010

Top ten challenges to implementing electronic content management programs


According to Jim Thumma, CP of Optical Image Technology, here are the top ten challenges to implementing electronic content management programs:

- Budgeting inadequately, as most do not include necessary funds for:
- planning, consulting, designing, testing, implementing, training, evaluating and improvement
- professional services fees for customization
- staff resources
- temporary staffing for back file conversion
- ongoing training expenses
- Failing to see things through from start to finish
- Dropping the ball, by not following plan
- Staffing inadequately, by not putting extra resources in place during implementation
- Interrupting with 1001 questions
- Cutting corners that compromise system performance
- Poor communication

-=Cheers=-

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

And then there are these other things that should be accounted for:

>> Backup and data recovery. Most often as the budget gets stretched the robustness of the backup is the first casualty. After all everyone knows hard drives never fail. Yeah I know you say you are backing up your data. But did you ever test the backups to see if they are real?

>> OCR index capture. Everybody wants it. Everybody over estimates the ability (or underestimates the cost) of good zonal OCR on their documents. Nobody accounts for cost the manual QA process for failed documents in the system. God forbid the automated system ever makes a mistake, finding that document is harder than finding a misfiled piece of paper.

>> Legacy data. Funny thing about stuff on paper, it lasts in a readable format for hundreds of years with no power or format translation required. You can have a great system, all successfully backed up to DVD on "archive quality" disks. But when you get a court order to provide a bunch of data that is only backed up to single sided 5.25 inch floppies from a 1980's era CPM86 system, how much will you pay to get that data back? Technology no longer changes over a few decades, it changes every few years. You have to ask yourself, how much will it cost to retrieve an aging, time degraded DVD when you need to satisfy a court order in 2025?