Shared Services Can Cut ECM Cost: Gartner

Organisations can save as much as 10 to 20 percent of their Enterprise Content Management (ECM) costs by moving to a shared services model, according to Gartner.

Gartner analysts said that shared services have become a practical way for enterprises to provide ECM services, and vendors under pressure from the economy are now willing to work with the shared services model as a way to drive business.

“Enterprises have long struggled with multiple ECM deployments which have, in turn, created information silos and caused enterprises to pay for separate sets of software licences, maintenance and support skills for too many ECM vendors,” said Mark Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner. “The troubled economy has forced many IT organisations to cut ECM costs, but traditional approaches to consolidating are slow, complex and costly. The shared services – or ECM-as-a-service – approach promises at least a partial solution.”

The shared services approach is a delivery model in which an enterprise purchases ECM functions centrally and governs the types of services offered, while granting users a degree of ownership. The enterprise itself, or cloud-based service providers, can deliver these functions over the Internet, much the same as service-oriented architectures (SOAs) make re-usable software procedures identifiable and callable. Shared services may also include support from experts on a particular topic, computing infrastructure and reference architectures.

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Gilbert said that information architects and business planners involved with ECM should consider the benefits and limitations of shared services, whether they are practical today and the steps involved in implementation.

Benefits of the shared service approach

The benefits of the shared-service approach include economies of scale, re-use of infrastructure, interoperability across the enterprise, speed of deployment, information sharing, and improved credibility for the IT organisation.

Limitations of the shared service approach

The limitations of the share-service approach include an inability to integrate existing information silos and the inability to provide enterprise-scale savings for advanced ECM functions needed by individual departments.

Are shared services practical today?

Shared services make sense if planners can identify basic functions that almost every department uses or needs — for example, secure repository services and content-centric workflows.

Five steps to implement shared services

It is important that the IT organisation and business units work together to implement shared services. Gartner has identified five key steps for implementation:

- Assess whether shared services make sense
- Standardise on a single ECM product or vendor platform
- Define packages of ECM functions, based on the specific needs of departments and the potential user base
- Establish a governance model for service and support
- Form a competency centre for ECM