Enterprise Content Management has become a critical strategic business process, due in part to increasingly stringent legislation and aggressive litigation.
Canadian corporations must observe the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) which governs how personal information is collected, stored, shared, and used. While this is onerous enough, a Canadian company with US relations may also have to comply with America's Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and, depending on its industry, the US Patriot Act or Securities and Exchange Commission directives.
Further, American-style litigation, including the use of electronic document discovery, is growing increasingly common in Canada, such that a legal policy group, Sedona Canada, was formed to draft a set of national policies governing e-discovery legal issues. The Lawyers Weekly, a newspaper for the Canadian legal profession, observes, "You can’t put your head in the sand. It’s just not going away. You are going to have to be dealing, in every piece of litigation, with electronic records." (The Lawyers Weekly, November 2007)
To meet this challenge, some organizations take a do-it-yourself approach, letting their in-house IT department build an ECM system from scratch or using ostensibly cheap tools. Inevitably, this only complicates matters and leads to greater expense with an inordinate amount of time spent on research and development, testing and debugging, and on-going support. When ECM is viewed as a technology system and managed as an IT project rather than as a management-led information governance initiative, the resulting implementation may lack the necessary security features and functionality to ensure regulatory compliance and discovery protection.
This white paper will demonstrate why the preferred alternative is to seek the assistance of an experienced ECM consultancy. Such a resource will provide a thorough understanding of the factors affecting your industry in general and your organization in particular, saving you valuable time on research and development.
By deploying a pre-packaged application customized to your specific environment, an ECM consultancy will cut short the cycle of testing and debugging that typically plagues in-house projects. The result will be an ECM system that will meet your organization's governance and compliance obligations faster and at a lower cost than is possible with in-house developed applications.
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