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Why ERM System Developments Have a High Impact on your IT infrastructure.

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The introduction of an ERM system into your organization often has a high impact on its IT infrastructure, with major changes required for key infrastructure components.  The impact is high for several key reasons:

• ERM often changes fundamentally the way people work and interact with systems, records, documents and other people.  Such fundamental changes need to be supported by an underlying IT infrastructure.

• The scope of an ERM program is often wide and usually constitutes a major change program by itself. 

• It results in the need for:

1. New, or additional, IT infrastructure implementations or upgrades.  ERM programs can also result in an IT infrastructure rationalization exercise and can be viewed as an opportunity to address other organization-wide infrastructure issues as well as addressing the basic ERM IT infrastructure needs; and
2. New, or improved, service levels.  Service Level Agreements (or SLAs) need to be understood early in the IT infrastructure planning process. Sometimes what can appear as a small change in an SLA results in large impacts in infrastructure requirements.  For example, the retrieval time for a record search may be set at less than 3 seconds in a call-center environment and this may quadruple the bandwidth required across an IT network.  This in turn may necessitate a physical network upgrade with significant project effort and associated costs.

• And the final reason is because, frequently, key aspects of IT infrastructure operations management need to change and this needs to be supported with both new infrastructure operations management practices and changes to the physical IT infrastructure environment.  For example, a new requirement may be identified where electronic records, which were previously not stored, now need to be backed up on a daily basis and electronically archived to an off-site location to be held for a period of years.  Such an example would need key changes to the IT infrastructure operations management processes, operational management physical environment and potential acquisition of new off-site archive facilities and equipment.  Each of these components would represent significant infrastructure investments by themselves.  It is important for IT infrastructure to be included early in ERM requirements planning to ensure that the full impacts of any ERM system is understood and factored into plans.

An ERM system often has a significant impact on IT infrastructure, and that infrastructure needs to be considered early on in any ERM change program or journey.

What has been your experience with infrastructure issues in implementing an ERM system?

What are your success stories in dealing with infrastructure issues?

This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International