Recently, my colleagues and I have embarked on the expansive and at times mystical journey of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). “What is ECM?”, you may ask. ECM is about creating a work environment (technology, processes, and practices) that ensures all content within an organization completes a full life cycle from creation, storage and use, to archiving or deletion.
Organizations tend to be very passive when it comes to their information assets, which are usually created without a lot of forethought of what happens to them after they have served their immediate purpose. Content gets stored on shared drives, in email boxes, and servers, where stuff piles up almost indefinitely creating landfills that no one wants to sift through, putting unnecessary strains on people and systems. The enterprise content management approach has been offered as a solution to this problem.
The recent climate change conference in Copenhagen got me thinking about the similarities between this problem and the ecological problems we’re currently facing. More specifically, about the people advocating for responsible management and use of resources: environmentalists and enterprise content managers.
With a little bit of creative thinking and help from my colleagues, I’ve come up with few similarities between these two groups:
a. Not everyone believes that the problem they’re are trying to solve is a real problem
b. They’re trying to get people to think globally while acting locally
c. They want individuals to be more accountable and take responsibility for their actions
d. They’re concerned with waste
e. They look to caps as a way of limiting the volume of waste
f. They’re often perceived as being high and mighty do-gooders who are constantly pointing out everything that you’re not doing and should be doing
g. “Doing the right thing” is generally perceived as costly, inconvenient, and just a nuisance.
h. They advocate for appropriate use of technology
i. Since technology is part of the problem, they look to advancements in technology as part of the solution
j. They advocate for the sustainable management and stewardship of resources through policy and changes in individual behaviour
k. They’re trying to find the right balance between command/control and laissez-faire governance
l. They struggle in promoting a longer-term strategic value proposition in the face of pressures from divergent, short-term agendas typically based on money and politics – Thanks to D.A. for this one
Given these similarities, what can ECM learn from the growing pains of environmentalism? What environmental initiatives have brought about meaningful change and what is it about them that made them so successful? What environmentalist approaches have failed and what mistakes should ECM avoid repeating?
What other analogies can we come up towards a better and shared understanding of ECM?
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