Wouter: Great questions. I've been consulting in the ECM space for nearly 20 years and I have definite best practice for organizational structure. I also have clients who have found a nice balance between serving users and cost in their org structures. Question: is your ECM deployment mature or do you have a significant portion of the business that is yet to be rolled out? That will help guide my ideas for you. Jim

It seems to me you need a records manager (CRM) on your team, someone needs to represent the user and the information program. Way to many IT types on this team

What about information architects or content management specialists? Having at least a couple Information Management roles is vital in addition to the technical roles you mentioned. Technical roles alone won't get you very far. The technology is just a means to an end.

Interested in seeing what others have to say. We may also have the opportunity to restructure our content management organizational structure.
I am the supervisor of the Content Management Systems group at a company that has 6,000 employees. We have an ECM deployment with rececords management but it is not been widely adopted in the company. The records management (RM) group does not seem to have a lot of clout.
Records Management is a separate group in the IT division.
The content management system section is made up of 3 programmers, 1 Business analyst, one training co-coordinator, one help desk resource, one solution architect ( a relatively new position) and 2 support specialists who manage the servers.
SharePoint has also had a big impact on our group. It came in after we had rolled out our ECM solution. We are not using any Records Management components in SharePoint. Another IT groups supports the SharePoint servers and a group not in IT builds the SharePoint sites (shell) for end-users - so a distributed support model. The business analyst in my section has some initial conversations with users who want a SharePoint site for collaboration purposes but after that the users have little contact with us. We are hoping that the solution architect in my section can develop a more cohesive SharePoint support model.

Well, it depends (famous last words, I know). It all depends on where ECM will get the most visibility, recognition, support, and funding in your organization.

If your organization is in the public sector, or if it's publicly traded, I think the ideal reporting structure is through Compliance. If compliance is a significant business driver for your organization, that's where I'd put ECM.

If compliance isn't a big issue for you, then you may fit in better with IT. ECM is a big consumer of resources, and most of the major players in implementing ECM technology, e.g., DB administrators and project management, is in IT.

Bottom line, though, is that any reporting structure will work as long as your leadership cares about ECM and wants it to succeed.

Hi Wouter,

I think you need to take a step back first before you can answer this. I suggest that you look at questions like:
- What is your teams role within your organisation?
- What are you short term and long term responsibilities?
- Who within the business is/are your sponsor(s)?
- What is your own ambition?

For example if you are responsible for adoption then IT may not be the right place for your team and some of your current team members would be replaced by more business oriented roles. If you are responsible to maintain ECM systems and provide project resources for the development of new functionality to business projects then IT may be a good place. Based on your current team I would guess you are more in a supplier role at the moment, which is fine if thats what your role is.

Given the apparent level of maturity of your solution, you are reasonably well covered in IT, but you definitely need at least 1 information architect(s). Missing completely:
- Information (not technology) Risk and Governance. Not full-time, but someone in the organisation whose job it is to look after this. Company Secretary? Internal Audit? PR? Should NOT belong in IT.
- Change Management, Comms & Training: May be filled by another department (eg: HR), but you need a body dedicated full-time and exclusively to ECM, as part of the team.
- Content curatorship and editorial management: Not someone in the IT team, but definitely in the ECM team. May be spread acrossoperational units. Part of the ECM team, even if their work entails other stuff as well. If you have WCM in your stack, this would be the webmaster. If you have DAM, then someone in Marketing. If you have Document Management, you need a champion in every department where DM is deployed. For Records Management, the Company Secretary or compliance Manager, as delegated in terms of PAIA Act etc , as well as the Ops Director if you are using RM to drive operational efficiency and standards compliance. The list goes on, depending on what capabilities you have and are planning.
I want to caution VERY strongly that IT should NOT own or drive ECM. Probably the most often-ignored advice, but probably the most crucial to success of ECM.
Happy to discuss any of the above further off-line.