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We are also as familiar with the impact on the business from such false starts: technology ending up as 'shelf-ware', implementations that run on for years and way over budget, and so on. The result can range from wasted money to red faces, and even embarrassing news headlines about crashed and burned projects, or scathing Select Committee reports if you're in the public sector. The hard-learned lesson is plain - businesses should learn to adapt quickly, or the project runs a high risk of de-railing.

DON'T IGNORE THE HELPING HAND
But is there something wrong with this apparent wisdom? By over-focusing on doing everything up front, investing huge amounts of effort into planning in order to make sure your DM solution will be fault-free when introduced, you may end up preventing technology helping you at all.

The search for perfection can mean businesses hold off implementation because they are chasing the larger benefits they want to be in place from go-live. But by delaying implementation in favour of more and more design and front-end work to achieve strategic lift-off, customers can lose out on the simpler, tactical benefits the technology could be providing for them from much earlier on than your 'Big Bang' approach will allow.

Here's an example of what we are discussing. A smart, savvy Financial Director we work with authorised the purchase of a new piece of document management software. He was very happy with his purchase, but decided it needed to remain on the shelf until he completely smoothed the way for it.

What was the thinking process here? This experienced and smart business exec carried the scars from previous IT projects that had crashed and burned - and as a result he was convinced that the best use of resources was to reform business processes to ensure they were 'just right' for the new system to seamlessly start supporting.

By our reckoning this customer spent the best part of a year to a year and a half - and considerable time and cash - redesigning his business processes. Doubtlessly, all this good work has had a positive impact somewhere along the line. But here's the rub: why go to market in the first place to buy software to manage these problems?

THINK AGILE
The motivation is to do it once and do it right. It's a very good and solid approach. The problem, of course, is that ECM is not an exact science. Current industry best practice, in fact, very much encourages moving away from the 'waterfall' style of project development we're talking about here. The new delivery method - as in Agile - is all about flexibility and quick wins, not the Big Bang theory or a state of nirvana at the end of 24 months.

The current advent of modern, SaaS or Cloud-based IT solutions are more often than not brought in to help you address one part of a problem. Then, based on that 'quick win,' you move forward via a process of incremental successes. You experiment, adapt and extend; it is, after all, far easier to improve your processes once a helpful ECM solution is in place to do some of the heavy lifting for you.

A recent AIIM study ("8 reasons why ECM implementations experience high failure rates and what to do about it") of ECM project success in a multitude of highly regulated and complex industries shows that problems arose when customers tended to over-customise their implementations, believing they were totally different from the rest of their industry peers in the ways they use information. But if most organisations focused not on meeting 100% of their needs with ECM and instead aimed for more like 70%, the cumulative benefit accrued would be far greater than trying to achieve all your business objectives all at the outset.

It's all about the low-hanging fruit, to quote an over-used metaphor: experience shows that even implementing a simple electronic document management system, what you gain straight away is that employees are able to communicate and rely on electronic information instead of paper. Which is to say, they benefit from audit trails, being able to start to identify bottlenecks in the business, as well as gain more visibility and a centralised interface so they can eradicate any delays in processes.

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