Organizations need enterprise content management (ECM) to play a more important role in business initiatives as video, social networking, analytics and other trends place greater demands on ECM applications. Gartner has revised its Maturity Model for ECM to reflect these new demands. Enterprise architects, information managers and leaders of ECM initiatives can use the model to assess where their organization is today and what level of maturity it must reach to achieve its business goals.

• Gartner's Maturity Model for ECM defines five levels of increasing ECM maturity: Initial (Level 1), Opportunistic, Organized, Enterprise and Transformative (Level 5).

• ECM maturity is about achieving the right level of ECM capabilities for a particular organization, and optimizing its investment. The majority of organizations are at the Opportunistic and Organized levels.

• At first, information governance occurs within the scope of tactical content management projects, which typically span two or three information silos. People perform governance roles informally.

• At Level 3, the ECM strategy supports organization goals, and ECM leaders use business metrics to measure their program.

• At Level 1, look for areas where content silos hurt the business and operations. Then establish governance to start bridging the gaps.

• At Level 2, work with business process owners to understand the role of content. Identify areas where ECM and business process management (BPM) suites can be integrated.

• At Level 3, survey the metadata schemas in use for content within the organization. Work toward normalizing and standardizing all metadata efforts across the organization.

Many organizations have invested millions of dollars to manage documents, presentations, rich media and other content. Now corporate executives under pressure to increase revenue and profit want to derive more value from all this content. They expect ECM to do more than simply increase operational efficiency and support compliance; they want it to help grow and even transform their business — an unfamiliar challenge for many who lead ECM initiatives. At the same time, new kinds of content and function continue to enter the organization, such as video, social media and analytics. In addition, alternative deployment models, such as open source, cloud services and shared services, make for more complex purchasing decisions. As a result of these trends, ECM programs need to attain a higher level of maturity. Accordingly, Gartner has revised its ECM maturity model to help ECM leaders determine what level of maturity they are at currently, what level they need to reach, and what steps they should take to get there (see Figure 1 and this document's predecessor, "Gartner Maturity Model for Enterprise Content Management").

How the Maturity Model Works: Our model describes five levels of maturity, from Initial (Level 1) to Transformative (Level 5). (We estimate that most Gartner clients are at Level 2 or Level 3.) For each level, we examine six facets of an ECM program:

• Business focus

• Information governance

• User experience

• Organization

• Process

• Technology

To determine your organization’s maturity, find the descriptions below that best match your organization's performance for each of the six facets. The maturity of most facets determines an organization’s overall level of ECM maturity. Organizations can be at different levels of maturity for different facets — for example, Level 3 maturity for business focus, but Level 2 for technology. Clients should also use our model to determine the overall level of maturity that their organization needs to attain in order to achieve its business goals. Not every organization needs to reach Level 5, although almost all need to reach at least Level 3. To prepare to move up to the next overall level of maturity, you should focus on improving the facets with the lowest maturity. Thus, the organization in the preceding example should improve its technology, which would otherwise handicap the ECM project when it tries to advance to Level 4. Finally, we recommend some general actions that clients can take to improve the maturity of their ECM programs. In some cases, IT leaders may also want to hire consultants to help with tasks that the organization lacks the skills to perform.

Individuals and departments implement new applications and repositories as needed, without realizing the problems that silos create, particularly the difficulty of sharing information and reusing content.

Business focus: Content management projects focus on improving the productivity of small groups. Project leaders measure success in terms of what makes sense to the group or the IT organization (such as megabytes of storage consumed).

Information governance: Each project manages information for itself, largely limited to the content created by its own applications. Information cannot be searched and used by people outside the project's scope. The organization lacks content standards.

User experience: Users often cannot find the information they need, and they have to navigate through multiple systems.

Organization: Individual departments within business units drive projects and seek resources from the IT organization as needed. The quality of work varies widely as the organization does not share best practices. Legal and regulatory requirements become painful to meet.

Process: Content management technologies address small steps within larger business processes. Project teams pay scant attention to how changes to one department's work affect other steps in the process.

Technology: The organization has many, often overlapping, applications, which tend to provide only basic functions. The systems may be tied to a specific business application and therefore not extensible. Content management focuses mainly on documents. File shares and email are becoming unmanageable. Project teams buy content applications primarily on the basis of functions and price. The organization does not realize that it has multiple contracts for the same vendor or product, or multiple vendors for similar functions.

What to Do to Move to the Next Level:

• Create an ECM program. Start by developing relationships with business managers to understand their goals and how ECM can help.

• Look for areas where content silos hurt the business and operations. Then establish governance to start bridging the information gaps.

• Inventory all applications for creating and managing content across the organization, including applications implemented by the business without the help of the IT organization.

The organization implements content management technologies tactically to address specific problems or to support business initiatives.

Business focus: IT leaders know about business objectives and have started to build relationships with peers on the business side.

Information governance: Governance occurs within the scope of tactical content management projects, which typically span two or three information silos (for example, applications handling customer information for the service department). Project teams set up common governance policies and practices for a given area, but users handle governance informally.

User experience: Many business users work with content management applications as standard tools.

Organization: The IT organization appoints project teams for each content management initiative. The organization develops best practices, though they are followed inconsistently.

Process: Content management has a part in the planning of business processes. Content management applications remain separate from business process management applications and primarily support users who must make decisions during a process. Alternatively, content management is tied to a specific process (such as invoice automation and case management).

Technology: The IT organization knows which content management applications are running within the organization. It starts to spot opportunities for consolidating overlapping deployments. It tries to expand current contracts where possible to achieve volume discounts, and it adds new vendors only when they offer unique functions.

What to Do to Move to the Next Level:

• Develop an ECM strategy and write a business case that focuses on business goals and identifies business metrics for measuring success. For example, if the organization pursues a strategy of product innovation, leaders should formulate metrics that show the effect of ECM on product development.

• Organize governance efforts into a steering committee staffed by IT and business users, including representatives of content owners. Identify best practices and try to extend them across the organization.

• Work with business process owners to understand the role of content. If applicable, identify areas where ECM and BPM suites can be integrated.

• Look for areas of technology overlap. For example, create a checklist of functions and write down all the content management applications that have each function. Consolidate vendors and applications where possible. Choose ECM suites for strategic purposes, rather than individual content management products.

The organization has an ECM strategy for tackling content management challenges across the organization.

Business focus: The ECM strategy focuses on supporting organization goals, and ECM leaders have identified business metrics to measure the success of their program.

Information governance: The organization sets up a governance committee with formal roles that is separate from individual content management projects. This committee starts to distinguish between content that is important to the organization, such as for compliance, and content that is important to individuals or departments. Users define life cycles appropriate for each kind of content.

User experience: ECM systems feed information to users within the context of business processes.

Organization: The organization creates a team to oversee the ECM strategy. The team includes representatives from the business units as well as from the IT organization.

Process: The ECM team has started to coordinate its work with efforts to improve business processes. It may have started to integrate content management technologies with BPM suites or to use ECM suites with strong process functions.

Technology: The organization has started to implement ECM suites, which integrate several content management technologies. The ECM team chooses products based on the integration of their components and the use of standards to promote the reuse of content. The ECM team has a long-term plan for consolidating vendors, products and repositories, but the organization still has half a dozen different ECM suites, as well as other isolated applications.

What to Do to Move to the Next Level:

• Report on the progress of your ECM strategy regularly to build support among business units. Work with business peers to align metrics for individuals who use ECM applications with organization goals.

• Survey metadata schemas in use for content within the organization. If the organization has a metadata management initiative, work with the leaders to include metatagged content.

• Where applicable, work with colleagues to integrate ECM and BPM as closely as possible, such as by re-engineering processes to better incorporate content and by implementing composite content applications, where available, to support specific processes.

ECM has become integral to the organization’s IT strategy, and all major business initiatives include ECM.

Business focus: All ECM projects align with business objectives, and ECM leaders can show a direct link between ECM and key performance indicators. IT staff work closely with business managers to formulate the ECM strategy.

Information governance: The information governance committee has established enterprisewide policies and practices, and people follow them consistently. The committee rationalizes the various metadata schemes in use within the organization. The organization may also implement taxonomies and ontologies to support information exchange.

User experience: Metatagging is automated as much as possible and has become a normal experience for users. They start to discover and reuse information they did not know existed.

Organization: The ECM team acts as a point of coordination for ECM projects across the organization. The team consolidates overlapping projects, promotes content standards and makes recommendations about which deployment models to use. Project teams still have leeway to tailor efforts to meet their specific goals.

Process: ECM has become integral to business processes, and the organization uses composite content applications to manage content for industry-specific processes. The organization chooses ECM and BPM suites in coordination.

Technology: The organization has consolidated systems and repositories into, for example, a hybrid content architecture. It supplements them with new applications from other vendors when they offer a competitive advantage. Leaders choose vendors whose long-term strategy best matches the organization’s ECM strategy.

What to Do to Move to the Next Level:

• Focus on making the organization more agile. For example, work with the business side to train the governance committee, ECM team and users to adjust to the continual adoption of new technologies and new sources of content.

• Develop an architectural reference model for ECM to maintain consistency of content and limit deployment of new applications to those that offer a competitive advantage.

• Set up a small group within the ECM team to proactively review new technologies that may help to support future business initiatives.

The organization uses ECM to change the way it does business.

Business focus: The ECM team provides input to enterprise strategy and shows how ECM technologies can make possible new business initiatives. ECM is championed by C-level executives and integral to the business.

Information governance: Extensive metatagging of important content and deletion of content that has reached the end of its life cycle foster wide reuse of content by people across the organization. The governance committee quickly adapts policies and practices to new content types.

User experience: ECM systems deliver the right content to users when they need it, in the right format, and with context preserved.

Organization: The ECM team has become a partner to the business in exploring new opportunities. The team proactively investigates new technologies so that it can quickly support new business initiatives.

Process: The organization adjusts business processes to take full advantage of content. Processes incorporate new sources of content, such as social and analytical content, with minimal effort.

Technology: The ECM team and business units expect to adopt new technologies continually. Change management and training have become routine. The organization helps its ECM vendors plan for new functions to roll out. The organization emphasizes content standards when it buys products.

What to Do to Remain at This Level:

• Turn partnerships with the business and with vendors into relationships for collaborating on future vision and planning.

• Develop the organization's competencies and best practices into institutions that function consistently at a high level.

• Continually evaluate emerging content management technologies for applicability and impact on the business.