After so much waiting and planning, it’s finally here – your Enterprise Content Management solution! Having a brand new ECM solution is an exciting time full of new possibilities and opportunities, but it also comes with new responsibilities. While preparing for the arrival of your ECM solution is a good portion of the work, you’re not quite done when it’s officially up and running. As the caretaker of a new solution, keep in mind these best practices make sure you and your ECM happily work together and grow together:
Measure your success: This is important on a couple levels. First off, in order to make your ECM solution as effective as you can, you’ll need to know what’s working and what’s not so you can take action accordingly. You may find you have a bottleneck in your processes that can be easily fixed, or find a new function that could benefit from your solution. Second, having the numbers that support the success of your implementation will give credibility to your future projects, especially if you wish to expand your solution to other departments or processes.
Keep important information close by: Don’t let crucial information about your ECM solution reside only in the heads of a few people. Those employees may not be available in the future, so if it’s information you don’t want to live without, make sure it’s documented where other employees can reference and learn from it.
Have a recovery plan: While having your documents in a digital format makes recovery easier already, it’s always a good idea to be prepared for anything. Make sure to back up your data regularly (once a week is a good timeframe). Also, make a plan detailing steps that need to be taken in case of an emergency, and run through it to make sure there’s no holes.
Become a pro at your solution: Just like measuring and recording the effects your ECM solution has on your processes, learning the features it has to offer is important to ensuring you’re using it in the best way possible. A great way to do this is by attending training courses or user group meetings, or by becoming active in an online community of users with your same solution. If you inform yourself of its inner workings, you can make tweaks as your processes change and become less dependent on the help of another party.
Your Enterprise Content Management will work hard for you, but to get the most out of it, you’ve got to give some, too. By following these few suggestions, we’re confident you and your ECM solution will have a healthy, productivity-packed relationship.
Want to learn more about Enterprise Content Management? Check out our free guide to ECM below!
