five things to consider when implementing your edms

Hughes IT Consulting, LLC

Five things to consider when implementing your EDMS

❚ What are the goals of the EDMS?❚ Define the “as-is”, and then develop

the “to-be”❚ What will be stored in the EDMS? ❚ Be sure to do capacity planning❚ Define Uptime & Recovery needs


What are the goals of the EDMS?

❚ Will it help shorten, simplify and streamline the content creation, review, and approval processes?

❚ Will authors have the opportunity to reuse existing content as much as feasible?

❚ Will it will be easier for reviewers to identify only content that is new or changed (thereby shortening content review cycles)?

❚ Will the EDMS promote content accuracy and consistency?

❚ Will having an EDMS shorten time to market, help promote your offering, or reduce legal liability?


Define the “as-is”, and then develop the “to-be”

❚ Which existing content process are effective? Which processes are ineffective, and why?

❚ Find out from the business what processes they would like to have in place, and what they would like to have in an EDMS

❚ Develop a “to-be” process that maximizes use of the EDMS so that business goals can be effectively met

❚ This process can then be used as a basis for formal user acceptance testing of the EDMS once its been implemented in a test environment

❚ Be sure to plan for and be prepared to promote this best practice approach!


What will be stored in the EDMS?

❚ Will the EDMS be used for a specific purpose (such as for Regulatory Affairs), or will it be used as a global repository for storing all content?

❚ This is a business decision (vs. a technical one)❚ Having one repository eliminates the need for multiple

implementations - potentially reducing cost ❚ However, this in turn means that design and

enhancement decisions must be agreed to by multiple stakeholders - potentially increasing decision complexity

❚ But, whatever decision is made will drive the technical implementation and process for support


Be sure to do capacity planning

❚ System throughput needs to be captured in order to properly size the system

❚ Can also be used to proactively “tune” the system

❚ Reduces costs as investments in infrastructure are made up front at the appropriate time

❚ IT should provide capacity planning worksheet (example on next slide)

❚ Info needs to be provided to IT from business


Capacity Planning worksheet(sample)

CAPACITY PLANNING WORKSHEET

INPUTS SITE A SITE B SITE C VALUE THAT APPLIES TO ALLTotal # of documentsAverage MS Word document sizeAverage PDF document sizeAverage number of versions per documentRenditions generated per document versionAverage PDF rendition size% of documents where primary content is PDFEstimated growth rate% of concurrent contributors% of concurrent consumersTotal number of users


Define Uptime & Recovery needs

❚ What is the percentage of time that the EDMS is required to be up per calendar year?

❚ If a site failure occurred, what are the acceptable hours of downtime until full system recovery?

❚ If a system failure occurred, what are the acceptable hours of downtime until full system recovery?

❚ If a document failure occurred, what are the acceptable number of hour’s worth of document data loss?

❚ The answers to these questions will drive both system architecture and service level agreements


Questions?

❚ And thoughts welcome…

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five things to consider when implementing your edms

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