If you are like most of us – I am sure you are facing the same problem – there is not enough money to implement full Enterprise Content Management program. Programs like this, require substantial amount of money, multi-year commitment, strong executive sponsorship and so on. Even if there is some money allocated to some of ECM initiative, the fact that duration is usually longer then 12 months alone make such initiatives vulnerable to changing fiscal environment within the organization and external markets.

Recent Garter’s research among CIOs found out that organizations will be spending less on IT initiatives through 2015. This means rationalization of IT assets, delivery efficiency improvements,  and business process optimization. When you think about this – lot of these initiatives could be supported by decent information management, however it is not clearly visible and most of IT managers, CIOs and CFOs look for hard benefits.

So what could be done to continue with information management projects in such uncertain times? One is obvious – develop information management strategy and roadmap, and then constantly build support and sell new IM projects. The other – ‘guerrilla approach’ is to push information management foundational initiatives as part of other projects – even if their primarily goal is not directly related to information management. For example – to deliver Enterprise Information Architecture – look for current projects that need to develop such piece as part of the project. By influencing – some of these initiatives could be expanded to include informational assets scans in particular business area, existing information management processes, metadata, procedures and so on. Gathering these together could become beginning of EIA and help with developing of governance. To be successful with this however, there should be a group of people driving this, and which has some visibility and influence over the existing projects. In larger organizations – perfectly suitable is IT Architecture group. Most of the projects require their services, and they could influence the scope of the projects. Obviously it requires lot of sensitivity and balance to execute properly, and architects must be sold on the concept.