Real-World ECM Success Stories

On my recent book tour, I presented some real-world examples of successful UCM strategies. It included some tips and warnings that Andy and I used to help us write the book... and shared some hard return-on-investment numbers from existing UCM clients. I uploaded the presentation to Slideshare, for those of you who were interested... or the lazy can just view it below:

I spent some time talking about the basics... what problems does ECM solve? What causes initiatives to fail? How do you define and measure success? And what are some tips for ensuring success? This is more strategy than technical, so hopefully everybody on your ECM team will get something useful out of it.

The hard numbers for cost savings came from the Survive or Thrive With UCM talks that Oracle has been touting recently. There's a lot of good information in those webcasts, which I won't repeat here. I'll just strongly encourage you to check them out.

Naturally... the people who had the best success to report were those who were the most disciplined in taking metrics. How much less paper are we printing? How much time is saved because the process is now automated? How much easier is it for employees / customers / partners to find the information they need? How much faster can you deploy new web sites? How much faster can you perform comprehensive audits? How much extra revenue can we credit to the system? How can you prove value to your boss?

If you don't ask the hard questions, and make measurements before and after, it will be difficult to ever quantify success...