Here’s the funny thing about technology - I’ve mentioned before that technology should help current business processes, and that as far as possible, should not dictate the process. This article that was sent to me got me thinking about that. Short summary, it’s about how content management systems need to be customized to fit the processes, and not the other way round.
I do agree with the post, but as I’m working on a document-related project right now, experience teaches me that it’s not really as clear cut as this. In a lot of cases, the company actually needs technology to help them define the processes, because a process is either currently lacking, or needs to be improved.
Here’s my take - choosing an off-the-shelf (or an off-the-sourceforge) solution and deploying it as is into an enterprise is not very wise. The enterprise will definitely have current work-styles and processes in place that will not fit into the system, and forcing people into a box has always proven to be a failing endevour.
However, thinking about processes from a technology point of view (or rather a systems POV) will help identify gaps in the processes that needs to be fixed. And for that, some off-the-shelf features will help, because they fix a gap in the process that was ignored in the first place.
For example, if let’s say a Mandy wants to send something to her boss Joe Luddite to approve, but Joe does all his approvals through his PA… what is the system supposed to do? That’s a gap. Forcing Joe to do the approvals himself might not be the solution (lack of time, and practically speaking nothing will get approved if the volume of requests are too large). Giving the PA access to approve isn’t the solution either. So it’s a gap in the process but it has to be addressed.
There isn’t a clear cut solution to cases like this, and in most cases do depend on other factors (work-style, audit and governance concerns, company policy etc.).
Here, thinking of content management (and here I mean Enterprise Content Management in particular) as discrete products falls apart. However, thinking of ECM as a customized solution is also prohibitive - in terms of cost, configurability and variable quality - the customized solution in the wrong vendor’s hand is disaster for sure.
Instead, the system will have to be a bit of both off-the-shelf and still be flexible enough to customize to the way people work (people first and foremost before all else!). I’m hoping I’ve achieved a bit of that in what I’m working on right now.
