Since joining Vamosa in 2001, Nic has helped transform the company into a sector-defining software and solutions company specializing in the emerging area of Enterprise Content Governance (ECoG). Nic has led the expansion of Vamosa in the US, while continuing to work closely with the UK team on Vamosa's strategy and vision for the recently launched suite of products.
8 things that always worried you about legacy content, but you were afraid to ask about
1 -- Your content is probably not in the best shape.
One of the reasons why you are implementing your new ECM system is that you want your content to be better managed than it has been up until now! You will need some "tough love!" – you have to lay down the law. "Governance" is the watchword and it calls for the 4 Cs of content governance –content needs to be clean, it needs to be classified, it needs to be correct and it needs to be credible.
2 -- You probably have a lot more content than you need.
Most legacy content stores are littered with duplicate content; with content that is no longer relevant to your business or contributing to the cause. But how do you work out what’s "correct" and what isn’t? You need to do content discovery to identify duplicates (and near duplicates, or versions) of web pages, Office documents, PDFs and images. You then need to establish what stays and what goes. This act alone can reduce your content volumes by 40%-60%. The benefits are significant costs savings and collapsed project timescales.
3 -- No matter how shiny your new CMS is, your content can trash it.
Your favorite systems integrator -- or maybe your best project team -- have been tasked with building this crystal cathedral to corporate content. Look at the project plans: where is the work plan to find out where the legacy content is hiding, what it consists of and who is using it? More often than not it is pretty far down the priority list -- many times it is an afterthought. Some pretty huge ECM implementations have looked great on paper, but have failed to deliver because they have overlooked the content they have to manage.
4 -- Your content authors are human – and it shows!
The actual content may range in quality from A+ to an F. Plotted on a graph showing the content’s quality score against corporate, technical and compliance criteria your legacy content might be lucky to get a C+. But that is worrying: if your content gets a pass, but only just, how prepared would you be for a real "content crisis?" If you were hit by litigation, a product recall, or a corporate scandal, would your content hold up to scrutiny?
At times like these you will wish you had implemented the content governance model you just didn’t have time for in the project plan. Failing to cover content compliance (an establishing policy if you don’t have one) when looking at your legacy content is simply replicating your existing problems in your new system.
5 -- We can do this the hard way or the easy way.
Do you really know what you actually have out there? What is published, what is stored, and what is "invisible" because it can’t be found using the search engine? Similarly, how can you find out what is published and what is also being used, as opposed to just sitting there burning fossil fuels? Do you know what your existing metadata implementation covers (and more importantly what it doesn’t)?
Short answer: you really need to carry out a thorough and in-depth analysis of it all - content, storage, logs, metadata, information architecture, links – the whole nine yards. You can’t measure what you don’t know.
6 -- Where are the tactics and what is the strategy?
This is where it can get really interesting. If your IT or project guy comes to you and says "I know how to get this content into the new system – I want to build/buy a content migration tool," then you should start to prepare for that sinking feeling. Migration should be seen as being part of the governance thought process, not an excuse to acquire a "tool" to take content from one place and put it somewhere else. "Lift and shift" is the fastest route to replicating your current bad habits in your new system. Legacy content has to have new life breathed into it, and it has to be crafted to maximize the benefits afforded by the new system. Otherwise it’s back to business as usual, and in another two years time you will be looking to move your content again.
7 -- Don’t let the tail wag the dog - your legacy content can give you a great deal of insight into best practice.
In many instances, the old system can expose what you did right, and what you did wrong. Don’t rely on default values for your system configuration. Default values may be the easiest choice, but they can be storing up a whole heap of pain for the future. For example, it may seem very reasonable that your new ECM has a default value of 60 characters for the content description metatag. But will that suit you? What if half of your existing content has a description field greater than that? Do you truncate? Do you break the description at the complete whole word before you hit the maiximum? Do you ask your content owners what they want to do?
The answer is a quite simple “No” to the above – you need to use ALL of these values at a level that suits your needs. Sounds obvious? You would be amazed at the number of international companies that get caught out by simple concepts such as this.
8 -- You may have got away with it up until now, but that was probably just dumb luck!
Your public-facing content is your shop window to the world – the WHOLE world. You control it (you hope) and you have total responsibility for what it says – in good times and in bad. Your web sites and all of your documents are indexed and maintained for internal use – but when the lawyers call, you want to be prepared. Under the federal rules of civil procedure (FRCP), the discovery process is there to ensure that the parties are not subject to surprises. What is actually sitting inside your legacy content could be a ticking time bomb. So try to eliminate the surprises by ensuring that this legacy content gets transformed in such a way as to make you litigation-ready, and (hopefully) there won’t be any surprises!
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The following ECM implementation-related topics may also be of interest...
- 8 things you need to know about content classification and ECM
- 8 ways to increase user adoption in an ECM project
- 8 things to look for in a document management service provider
- 8 ways to reduce your storage and bandwidth costs for document imaging solutions
- 8 things to consider when looking for ECM consultants
- 8 Steps to Avoid Process and Organizational Problems when Implementing an ECM System
- 8 things to remember when managing ECM applications
