As your organization seeks to ensure that you are operating at peak efficiency to give your constituents the best service possible, you need to look at your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system.
Your ECM is responsible for all the information you use to serve the citizens under your perspective, as well as the communications you send between team members and that you share with other departments. The better you know how to use your system, the better your outcomes become.
But how do you measure how well you know your ECM system? An ECM Maturity Model can help you benchmark your current capabilities and decide where you may want to focus. If your current systems and processes are preventing you from being able to move forward, it can help determine where a technology uplift or change management initiatives are needed.
There are plenty of ECM assessment models out there, but perhaps the simplest to comprehend quickly is a Maturity Matrix. A maturity matrix calls out examples of operational capabilities, processes, information management, and business culture that help you benchmark your performance across key dimensions. Our matrix is designed with the government in mind, but it can provide insight into commercial and not-for-profit organizations as well.
By using the matrix to evaluate your organizational capabilities, you can determine how well you are leveraging your Enterprise Content Management (ECM) software and supporting technologies and systems and how they interact with your people and processes. If considering digital transformation, this matrix can highlight some of the step changes that the organization would need to make to achieve higher levels of mastery over their information management and ultimately, their service delivery.
By examining your organizations current state in different dimensions (rows), such as people, process, security, and compliance, you can see where your capability level falls on the maturity matrix.
To assess where you are sitting in each of these dimensions and levels of mastery, it is important to be objective when rating your organization.
The first step is to recognize your current state - both strengths and weaknesses. Examine each of the dimensions and decide where you fall in terms of your rank - the columns reflecting the level of mastery your organization has attained.
Do not expect each dimension to be at the same level. It is normal to have some variance here.
The second step is to decide what your ideal target state is. This is where it is important to realize that your organization does not need to attain a "Master" ranking to achieve success. It really depends on the organization's purpose and goals. Achieving "practitioner" mastery is usually a good objective if some of your dimensions are lagging. It may make sense to design a program of work to assist with transformation or focus on specific goals and establish a project around those goals.
To be clear, if your ECM usage is not yet at a Master level in any of the dimensions on this matrix, that is not necessarily a bad thing for your organization. Nor should it be taken to be a reflection on your team. It merely illuminates your overall operating environment and the opportunity you have to improve, balancing a budget, resources, and priorities.
Technology should be seen as an enabling force. The right technology, used the right way, leverages your organization's capacity to scale, to gain efficiencies, to reduce costs, and to reach your customers in new ways. Assessing your current technologies in place can help determine if a mind-shift is needed or perhaps an investment in new technologies.
Is it time to move to cloud-enabled technologies? Is it time to consider mobile apps for your frontline staff or field services crew? Does your information management extend to privacy and security tools that protect your intellectual property as well as client information? Whilst people and process are critical parts of a strategy to, enable business transformation or even just step improvements, we can definitely assist in a review of technology capability where it applies to increasing your organizational capabilities.
Give your team the tools to master their tasks, and they will thank you.
A Maturity Matrix is a tool designed to gauge where you are and show where you can go. From people to processes to collaboration to security to governance and more, your matrix gives you a picture of your organization’s past, present, and potential future.
But you may not know what you don’t know. So collaborating on your ECM maturity model with TEAM IM can take a muddy picture and make it clear as day. We can help you assess your current state. We can also help identify the right tools, processes, and methodologies to take your organization to the next level of mastery.
TEAM IM can also help you with your business case for an ECM or Content Platform see our Blog on Calculating ROI for your Content Platform and our Content Platform ROI Calculator.
Get the most out of your ECM and serve your constituents better by reaching out to TEAM IM today.