TFPL's Martin Sanderson attended the EDRM in Practice conference at Edinburgh University on the 24th June. The speakers were all practitioners at different stages of designing and implementing EDRM in their organisations.
The conference highlighted the changing nature of the way organisations are going about implementing EDRM. Here are some of the key points that Martin reported back:
- Adrian Cobb (Chief Operating Officer for Objective, an EDRM supplier) said that the number of Invitations To Tender for corporate EDRM implementations issued in the UK had fallen dramatically over the past three years: down from 85 in a year to just 11.
- The demands of a corporate EDRM solution with its resource requirements, complexity and change managment implications make it a non starter for many organisations.
- EDRMS is just one tool amongst many in the battle to better manage an organiastion's information assets. What tools should be used depends on the context of the organisation and the required benefits. Business improvement and change were more essential than the tool chosen.
- A new model is emerging whereby instead of buying an EDRM for the whole enterprise, organisations are buying a system (whether EDRM or not) to address a specific business problem in a specific area of the organisation, to acheive specific benefits. If this proves succesful organisations then seek to extend the implementation elsewhere. The challenge here lies in designing the initial implementation to avoid creating an information silo, and to leave open the possibility, if required, of scaling up to a corporate wide implementation.
- A panel session in the afternoon explored the 'whys' and the 'why nots' of SharePoint - the expansion of which is taking on epidemic proportions in a changing marketplace
Overall this was a thought provoking day with lots of practical hints and tips for those embarking on an EDRM project
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