Lesson 8 — Implementation, Culture & Information Governance
ECM is organizational change
A platform can be installed faster than people change habits. Users may continue storing uncontrolled local copies, emailing attachments, bypassing Metadata, or ignoring new workflows unless the operating model changes with the technology.
Readiness should assess:
- current document/records practices;
- repositories and content volumes;
- legal/regulatory obligations;
- technology and integration;
- sponsorship and skills;
- user needs;
- process/cultural readiness;
- migration complexity and risk.
Common failures include weak policy/process design, rushed migration, poor stakeholder communication, lack of training and tool sprawl.
Hero-culture risk
If one librarian, records specialist or administrator “knows everything” but processes are undocumented, the organization has weak repeatability and auditability. Governance should institutionalize the capability.
Information Governance
Information Governance supplies enterprise:
- policies and standards;
- roles and decision rights;
- cross-functional oversight;
- accountability for records/content classes, vocabulary, retention and disposition;
- legal-hold initiation/release rules;
- official-copy decisions;
- sensitive-content classification/protection;
- required Metadata fields;
- resolution of local vs enterprise taxonomy conflicts.
Chapter 9 emphasizes senior sponsorship and cross-functional governance because legal, records, privacy/security, business, audit and technology interests all intersect.
Technology does not equal governance
An ECM platform with no retention schedule, content owner, Metadata standard, legal-hold process or adoption is not a complete Chapter 9 implementation.
Source: implementation/governance sections, approx. pp. 320–326.