Gartner offers ECM deployment tips

Organisations should spend five years putting a new ECM system in place

IT departments are not giving enough consideration to enterprise content management (ECM) before its implementation, according to Gartner, which has published a set of best practice guidelines (see page two) to help companies achieve success.

The analyst firm said that IT departments often fail to take into account the extent to which a change in content management systems will affect users' working practices. Another problem is the lack of financial planning given to ECM projects.

"ECM is expensive, which is why a low percentage of knowledge workers in an organisation have access to ECM," said Toby Bell, Gartner research vice president.

"It is also too hard to justify the system for everyone based on unclear return on investment or other success measures. We recommend that for large ECM projects organisations spend six to nine months in the planning and vendor selection process."

Organisations should spend five years putting a new ECM system in place, according to Gartner, and expect software licensing costs to account for five to 20 per cent of the total cost in that period.

The analyst firm also warned organisations to be cautious when introducing new vendors into their portfolio, because they will have a much larger cost 'footprint' than the initial expenditure.

To aid the preparation stages, businesses should appoint "content strategists " to calculate the cost, value and risk associated with storage and the provisioning of content, Gartner said.

Other advice included the use of content service providers that extend beyond software to offer consulting and other services, and open source software to help drive down implementation costs.

Gartner pointed to how open source offerings have now matured, and said that the market has stabilised.