Small to medium enterprises (SME) must not underestimate the level of planning required when implementing enterprise content management, a Gartner analyst has warned.
In Sydney for the Gartner Symposium, analyst Kenneth Chin, spoke to Computerworld Australia on where SMEs go wrong when implementing ECM.
“Over 40 per cent of small to medium sized enterprises underestimate the process and organisation issues associated with implementing enterprise content management (ECM) due to poor planning, that’s one of the biggest challenges we see is that they don’t plan for it appropriately,” Chin said.
“Another challenge we see is that more than 50 per cent of large enterprise content management projects, those that are half a million dollars or more, fail if the organisation doesn’t spend the sufficient time planning, in terms of product and vendor selection.”
Chin noted many SMEs don’t assess what specific requirements are needed before trying to find a solution.
“For small- to mid-sized organisations, I think they need to take a look at what their requirements are and then to find the right solution,” he said. “What we find is they often look at larger vendors like IBM or EMC, key vendors in the space, but they have solutions that may be much more than what the organisation needs.
“I would recommend for small- to mid-sized organisations to take a look at their needs, determine what kind of content management technology they need, instead of procuring a high-end solution that may be more challenging for them to implement and maybe more costly for them to implement.”
According to Chin, the demand for ECM technologies is increasing as a result of content growth.
“At Gartner we see content growing at roughly 45 per cent on a worldwide basis based on the demand for storage technologies and the growth of storage,” he said. “A lot of that drives these technologies as the whole point of enterprise content technology is to make it much more effective to manage content.”