Sizing Factors That Impact The Cost Of Ecm Solutions

By Author: Varad Kamini
Total Articles: 2
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ECM project managers always face a challenge to size the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) implementation projects and estimate the value of efforts using the size measurement. While focusing on the user requirement, we can identify the key parameters that affect the sizing effort of implementing and ECM solution. This particular blog post is based on study conducted while developing the lifecycle methodology for an ECM implementation project, which is broadly categorized into four groups namely

Business process
User activities
Solution capability and Integrations
Content characteristics

Business Processes


All the business houses run various processes that create or reference various documents. The creation and maintenance of accurate documents and making them available on demand is an important ECM function. For sizing requirements of this category, parameters of influence like Regulatory business rules/ compliance, procedures to manage content life cycle, business process workflow and available content management products are taken into account. Security and access ...
... rights are derived from business process requirements and the complexity depends on the degree of business process automation.


User Activities


User activities include the size of the users. This encompasses the content producers as well as the content consumers. Frequency of user activities like editing and multiple review sessions and working hours on the Enterprise Content Management solutions are also taken into account while determining the sizing operation. While assessing the above parameters, the growth rate over the period of the expected life of the ECM solution implementation should be kept in consideration.


Solution Capabilities and Integrations


Implementation is highly dependent on the ECM product capabilities and the features the CM product provides for integrating with other systems, like SAP, CRM, CAD, & other authoring/ workflow tools. This also means that functional and technical requirements have to kept in mind. A high end product and a complex ECM solution would need more implementation time. The integration capability of the ECM solution also plays a part in the time of implementation. This majorly impacts the sizing factors and directly affects the cost.


Content Characteristics


Finally, the 'content' itself influences how easy or how difficult the implementation may be. The several types of content, like word documents, spreadsheets, Data files and drawings, graphics, sound or video need to be processed and ingested in the content management solution. This affects the complexity of the process and directly influences the time. The amount of content also affects the time of integration. Migration, collaboration, reporting and publishing, security and user training, all these factors affect the implementation methodology and have to be taken into consideration while sizing process that ultimately influences the cost.
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