James Allen

It is always a challenge when designing an ECM solution to group a business’ data effectively. Every business is different with every division having a variety of processes, workflows and mixture of operational and non-operational data. In many cases the ‘dream’ is to achieve Business Pricess Management, BPM or even the new kid on the block – Advanced Case Management, ACM.

There are a few high level steps we use when trying to spec out ECM repositories and itemtypes and model a business’ data to help streamline their operations.

1. Identify your data: List the types of documents in your business, their owners and what type of document they are
2. Divide your data in Operational and Non-Operational: Operational is that data that is workflowed, supports everyday business processes. Non-operational is generally material that is infrequently referred to eg, training material, research papers, reports
3. Sort data into ‘like types’: This is the difficult bit that is time consuming but worth discussion. Identify areas of commonality. Sort by media type, forms types, purpose, customer/internal use
4. Identify users and their access needs: Identify users and what they need to access at a basic level
5. Identify elements that might be searched for in each data type: Take a fresh sheet and only list the data types previosuly identified, now list beside each data type the elements that might be searched for and in the additional column the type of data and length
6. Hierarchies & Multiple values: This is easiest explained by an example. An address is likely to be made up of multiple values in comparison to a policy number. Identify those elements that may have multiple values.
7. Diagram data relationships: A more complete view of the model you want to build via a diagram. Diagram relationships especially were data is used repeatedly.

This entry was posted on July 30, 2010 at 11:41 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: adm, advancedcasemanagement, BPM, datamodelling, process, technicques