By Geoffrey Bock – Anyone who travels to a new place is bound to get lost without a map or GPS; similarly, organizations shouldn’t plan to deploy enterprise content management without a roadmap.

An ECM roadmap identifies the necessary operational policies, procedures and technologies to maintain an organization’s digital information.

Developing an ECM roadmap is an involved process, so organizations should understand best practices and steps to successfully create one.

An ECM roadmap depends on an ECM strategy, which links business objectives to identifiable results such as increased productivity, reduced costs and mitigated risks. An ECM strategy describes the why in terms of business benefits; an ECM roadmap charts the how in terms of investments in people, processes and technologies.   

An ECM roadmap operationalizes an organization’s ECM strategy and defines investment plans for an identifiable time period, such as the next 18 to 36 months. A roadmap sets priorities and like all plans, it needs to be reviewed on a periodic basis — at least annually — and updated in light of changing business objectives. Read On: