Planning and Analyzing Your Information Life Cycle
Enterprise content management is a complex topic and it may feel overwhelming when you look at its vastness and intricacies. It may even lead to a feeling of project paralysis of sorts, a bewilderment of where to start—stalling the project before it even takes shape. When challenges feel too large with too many dependencies, I find the best approach is to simplify the challenge and break it down into manageable, achievable parts. In my first pass at simplifying enterprise content management (ECM), I divided this book into four main parts, and then I further divided each part into four chapters, laying an approach for where to start and how to progress through your ECM initiative, starting with establishing foundational knowledge and a process to analyze your content.
The chapters in this first part look at how to plan and analyze the information life cycle within your organization, setting the foundation to understand ECM concepts in general, as well as your enterprise content’s life cycle specifically, both of which the rest of the book will build upon. I start by describing enterprise content management concepts to establish a shared understanding, and then I introduce the content life cycle model I use in this book to analyze content and its relation to the organization. From there, I provide an overview of Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and its ECM features, and then I describe how to analyze your information life cycle. Finally, I guide you through how to take your content analysis and design your information architecture.
As you begin, I find it helps to create a roadmap to approach your enterprise content management solution design; a roadmap with a series of phases culminating into the entire scope of the ECM solution but divided into manageable and discrete iterative stages. You can use such a roadmap to plan an iterative approach that will eventually address your ECM needs, all through a series of smaller and focused project iterations. Your first iteration should be to understand enterprise content management itself, which is where I begin.