Submitted by Alex Visser – AIIM Industry Advisor
You probably did not know this but I just bought a house and the first thing I did when I got back to my “old” house was look around and wonder what I should take with me and what I should leave behind, donate, recycle or burn on a bonfire. We all know that moving is probably the best and most mandatory time ever to clean up. This is not only true for me and you, but also for “the organization”.
Moving is not the best reason to clean up all those “old” documents that are laying around in the office but it can be a nice stick to push everybody along the already taken road of an ECM implementation. They do go together nicely after all, organising your document stream and cleaning up the old storage of documents in both the physical and virtual kind of storage. This was also a driver for a Dutch municipality to push harder to keep the ECM project on time and clean house and they are not the only ones that find the need to clean house as they move to newer building. (As a side note here, if any of the document managers has a chance to talk with the architect of that lovely new building, please take the time as all too often the need for document storage is forgotten or underestimated.) Isn’t everything digital nowadays? Well a lot of it is, but not everything, especially the old archives can be a big problem if no space is allocated for them.
So, this municipality started to clean house as part of the ECM implementation and the moving of buildings did contribute to this action, but that is only part of the story. Beside the clean-up, they were also looking at what type of tools they would want to use for the ECM implementation and have come to the conclusion that they would prefer to use open source software instead of the traditional closed source. The term open source has been heard more often in the ECM world of late and I do believe it has the potential to be an important element in the ECM landscape. Open source has always had some really great success stories. The most well know of these is the web server Apache but not all open source software products are of a high quality. Behind some of the open source ECM software vendors there are good and dedicated developers with extensive knowledge of ECM software.
While the potential for greatness is definitely there for the vendors, it is up to you to make an educated and intelligent decision on the best choice for your organisation. We all know off course that the purchase price of software is only part of the full cost of implementing but still it adds up. As part of the decision making process, remember that the low financial barrier to get started with open source will pull in both end-user organisations and system integrators (SI). Besides this, open source delivers the potential to prevent vendor lock in and the ease of customisation.
The perceived lower cost associated with open source makes it easier for SI to get started with ECM implementation, but in this is also the potential danger. A crucial element of an ECM project is not just the software but also the vendor who installs it. The skill sets they have, the quality of the support they can offer, the insight they can provide for the customer are all points of consideration. Going open source will make it even more important for the customer to pick the vendor or SI with care or alternatively make sure the in-house staff has been trained in both general ECM principles and the software’s specifics.
What do you think about the link between cleaning house and ECM implementations or about the push towards open source software? Please let us know. Don’t be surprised if I will come back to this topic in my next blog, because there is much more to be said. So again please let me know what you think so I can refer back to it next time.
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Alex Visser – AIIM alex.visser@aiim.eu
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