10 ECM Pitfalls

Even with a bulletproof strategy and the right choice of technologies, several pitfalls await the unwary during enterprise content management (ECM) implementation phase. Following are the most common ECM implementation pitfalls: 1. avoiding scope creep and budget overruns, 2. getting derailed by politics and new budgeting cycles, 3. failing to achieve full return on the business promise, 4. failing to employ opportunities for reuse of technology and standards across business units, 5. overlooking process and organizational issues, 6. failing to properly understand and address differentiated or "high-value" content, 7. lacking proper consideration for taxonomy and metadata, 8. including a poorly defined business case, 9. underestimating the effort required to distill and migrate content, and 10. missing potential benefits associated with hardware and software consolidation. The ground-work for successful ECM implementation starts well before the project kick-off.