What you do once you have successfully implemented EDRM?

On Wednesday I heard an extremely witty and informative talk by Ben Plouviez of the Scottish Government.  Ben is one of a select group of people who can say they have successfully implemented an EDRM system all the way across a large and important organisation.

Rolling out EDRM is a long old slog. You have to procure it; configure it; build your fileplan, your retention schedules and access rules; write your policies and procedures; pilot it; take it to every team, get their folders set up and get them trained.  By the time you've done all that you are three years older than when you started.

And what happens next?    Here is my summary of  Ben's advice on what to expect (or rather what not to expect)

• Don't expect a post -implementation party:  most of your project team will have found other roles in the weeks immediately before the end of the implementation project

• Don't expect much in the way of resources to manage and support the system:  Once you've implemented the system the organisation's attention, energy and resources will be diverted elsewhere.

• Don't expect to be able to find people with the multiple skill sets you need to support the system: your ideal support team understands the business and its operational needs; the technology and the configuration of the system; the organisation's records management policies, fileplan, access rules and retention rules; and the legal framework (particularly Data Protection and FOI).  There aren't human beings alive who combine all of these skill sets.

• Don't expect to know what is really going on in terms of usage of the system:  there are very few benchmarks out there for what constitutes good usage of an EDRM system.   Your system might be able to tell you that a certain team has saved a certain number of e-mails to the EDRM.  But what does that tell you? Should they be saving more than that? or less than that? Are they the right e-mails?  When you do come up with a good key performance indicator don't automatically assume that your system will be able to run you a report on it. 

• Don't expect the system to help with information overload: as the system grows and grows with more and more departments contributing to it and more and more documents on it, so the search results return more and more hits and the quantity of information overwhelms the quality of information.

• Expect technology to always move one step ahead of your EDRM:  How does the EDRM capture things like blogs, wikis and instant messages when these things were barely thought of when your implementation started?

• Don't expect your fileplan to survive organisational change unscathed: however hard you try to ignore the organisational structure when you draw up your fileplan, it will inevitably colour the fileplan and when the organisation changes the fileplan will need to be adapted to.

• Don't expect the work on the EDRM to ever finish!

Ben was speaking at Unicom's conference  'Preserving and protecting data and information assets'