Successfully Implementing Enterprise Content Management: Lessons Learnt from a Financial Service Provider

Information overload and content chaos are major challenges for organizations, as they have to deal with a high amount of unstructured content. With enterprise content management (ECM) systems, a technological solution is developed to deal with such challenges; however, these systems can only provide value to an organization if they are implemented in the context of an ECM strategy. In this paper the implementation of a new ECM strategy at a financial service provider is described to illustrate how organizations can on the one side design an ECM strategy that reduces information overload and content chaos and on the other side implement it successfully. The four keys for successfully implementing ECM based on the lessons learnt derived are an ECM team leading the change process, the acceptance of users by meeting the organization’s business needs, a metadata taxonomy enabling dynamic content delivery, and an effective change management from the outset.