The Future of ECM: The Elephant in the Room

by Hyland

Question: How do you eat an elephant?
Answer: One bite at a time.

I first heard this amusing question eight years ago from an enterprise content management (ECM) expert, Byron Aulick. He posed this in an educational video series while addressing the formidable challenge of rolling out an ECM solution across an entire enterprise.

Now, while this analogy helped explain how a massive ECM project should be approached (one small step at a time), it still left two important questions in my mind, all but begging for an answer:

1. Who actually wants to eat an elephant anyway?
2. How long would that actually take?

Unfortunately, this analogy likened the task of rolling out an ECM solution across an entire enterprise to be an unappetizing, heart-burn causing, time-consuming and ultimately overwhelming experience.

Now, I know that this was not Byron’s point. He was one of the earliest educators on ECM technologies and was certainly not trying to scare people off. His illustration simply addresses the reality of approaching any huge, enterprise-wide IT project, whether that project is ECM or anything else.

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