3. Audit your organization, not just your data.

The best approach is to create ECM "building blocks" that solve problems for specific business units that can later be scaled out across the enterprise, Alp says. Doing that, however, requires forecasting future needs, which can't happen unless you have a good understanding of who's working in the company. "If the organization is global, distributed, with an aging user base, that organization needs to do things to capture the corporate memory as soon as possible," he says. "Others are smaller and not as complex in terms of the way they operate. They might have a much younger audience."

By figuring out what Alp calls the organization's "genome," you can tailor your ECM appropriately and avoid more expensive upgrades later. Most vendors offer such auditing services.

4. Don't let consultants walk away with all the expertise.

The Canada Council for the Arts brought in some third-party help in its initial project, but Chawla says staff were always looking over their shoulder. "We would train our staff to be able to take on some of those functions. Now they can build own interfaces, for example, and we don't have to go back to a vendor or someone for that," she says. "It may mean hiring one or two extra people, but it saves you down the road."

Alp says the amount spend on consulting will depend on the level of customization required. Some products are almost out-of-the-box, he says. Others aren't.

"If you're buying a toolkit to build a content-centric system, you'll probably spend more money on consulting. Depending on what technology you pick, there are definitely different levels."

5. Tap into free (or near-free) Web 2.0 ECM tools.

Jarche points out that a lot of enterprise content is moving out of internal databases and making use of free portal tools. For some business units, it might be possible to manage photos on Yahoo's Flickr or manage relevant Web data using bookmarking services such as Del.lic.ious.

"You don't have to build the entire box," he says. "You probably already have an intranet. If you use open protocols like RSS there's a lot of data you can feed to wherever you need it."

6. Resistance is expensive.

If you did an analysis on why most ECM projects fail, certainly people will come back and say costs were out of control, but Alp says it's often because user adoption was not the first and foremost priority when projects were put together to begin with.

"If you drill down a bit to better analyze what adoption means, most ECM implementations take the view of consolidating content into some repository and providing access to users. That's where most ECM fall short," he says. Content is important, but a lot depends on the people involved and how well they can define their existing processes. This includes the other software systems from Microsoft, SAP or Oracle they'll encounter.

"Always consider how does ECM tie into and leverage the content and have it flow back and forth. Almost every user that deals with any kind of content will have interactions with these systems."