A few years ago, Greg Clark posted on AIIM’s Community blog
called, “
Creating
an ECM Organization Structure…” He divided ECM structures into small,
medium, and large organizations. At the end of the two part blog, he talks
about the need to have a “Change Management” role in the mix for all company
sizes. Although he provided structures were are static in terms of growth, most
cases small companies grow and evolve.
Understanding how ECM structures go from small to medium and
medium to large, as well as the deformed nature of most ECM structures is the
goal here. Let’s work through change management at the management level, not
just the application level of a typical healthcare IT organization.
“You may ask yourself,
well, how did I get here?” – Talking Heads
In general, healthcare ECM is either in the EMR or the
Finance IT camp. As Mr. Clark outlines, a large ECM should stand on its own,
outside of IT along with EMR. This depends on which IT group and business area
developed the ECM solution first. Both finance and health information management
(HIM) departments are inundated with paper.
Finance
In the past, paper coming in from 3rd party invoices
and employee expenses was enormous. The ROI on implementing a scan/store
solution was an easy sell for Accounts Payable. This is why many ECM solutions
were first introduced into the finance IT area.
HIM
Health information went from purely
paper to EMR relatively quickly. This meant that some areas were left alone
because of the need to implement “80%” of the solution. Part of every EMR
solution is dealing with scanning and storing paper forms, especially ones that
need to be signed, or ones that are brought in from other healthcare providers.
ECM can easily be introduced with in the EMR solution. If your hospital has
EPIC as its EMR, chances are good that Hyland OnBase is there as well.
Who wins Finance or HIM?
Many issues from project priorities
to information governance are usually after thoughts when it comes to thinking
about change management of ECM organization. Moving the ECM group from either
Finance or HIM into its own program can be a battle. How do you split up the project intake
process when there’s no governance or program management specifically for ECM?
What happened to ECM governance?
When ECM was initially rolled out there was most likely some
type of group or consultant that wrote out the goals, strategy and deployment
plans. The documents and diagrams have dust on them. The regular meetings went
from weekly to yearly. The intake process is on fire. And so on… Chris Riley in
his
http://searchcontentmanagement.techtarget.com/
article, “Taking charge: Structuring and managing an ECM governance committee”,
explains the need for sustaining a governance committee:
“A strong ECM governance committee reduces the burden
on IT and establishes a more robust and broadly supported governance framework
than IT could build on its own. Not only that, committee members who are
properly involved in creating governance processes will stand by a system and
be the first defense against ECM naysayers.”
How the Program Management going?
With ECM governance intact, Program Management can exist
beyond the project management software and “project managers” pushing
milestones. At the program level, according to Mr. Clark, we are talking about
the following responsibilities:
·
Drive the
creation and execution of the ECM strategy
·
Liaison to
the steering committee
·
Manage
vendor relationships
·
Hire and
manage the ECM team
·
Contribute
to or lead the development of an appropriate information architecture
·
Identify,
track and act upon key metrics for the ECM program
Ok, so here’s where the split between Finance and HIM could
have the potential to merge. It would take a program level management structure
to efficiently handle ECM projects. Otherwise, the project priorities are
dependent on the old school influences which only worked in smaller
organization.
Here’s what Mr. Clark says:
“The most important aspect of this particular
structure is that the ECM group is not part of the IT department, Legal group
or even an administrative or business services group. This organization has
chosen to align ECM with overall business operations in a group called
Technical Operations and Competence. This division is responsible for helping
the organization achieve operational excellence across their core business, and
includes such functions as Engineering Standards, Maintenance and Reliability,
Environment, Health and Safety (EHS), Training and Development, and, finally,
the ECM function.”
Pulling a mature ECM program out of IT may seem impossible,
however the reasons for doing so should outweigh the reasons for status quo. A
liberated ECM program strategy is free to pursue the higher level goals of the
organization with being held back by IT.
