Moving House and Moving Content

Moving house is said to be one of the most stressful things to do in life. First, you need to find the new house considering the requirements you need. A 3 bedroom or 4? A big yard or small? Lots of storage or minimal? City or country? Next, you need to negotiate the terms of sale and close on the house. Then comes the actual move. This is the part of the process where you go through the years of built up stuff and decide whether to be rid of it or not. This process often brings to light stuff you haven’t seen for years, broken items you’ve saved ‘just in case’ and some keepsakes. Overall, you are cleansing your household contents.

This same process applies when a corporation approaches its Enterprise Content Management (ECM) decisions. However, it’s a constant surprise these decisions are made without having all of the facts at hand. Knowing answers to questions, such as: how much content exists; how often is content accessed in a week/month/quarter/year; who owns the content; what happens to old content; what content adheres to today’s standards; and when changes are made, how does the change impact on the other content; is the only way to truly understand what is in a corporation’s household content and is an essential part any data migration strategy.

Many ECM novices and veterans most likely have a question mark over what is in the content inventory, so getting to grips with this is often the main problem and is only done when a move is in sight. But content tooling is available and should be used to not just manage content (which most ECM systems already do), but govern it on an ongoing basis. These content tools provide answers to all of the questions that should be known before a content migration is even considered, as you’ll then be better placed to decide on the necessary requirements for the new system.

You wouldn’t move house without taking inventory of your household contents and you shouldn’t make ECM decisions without this analysis either.