Keys to a Successful ILM Implementation

• Have a clear Project Charter and Support from senior management. This is often the single most important factor for success. If the senior management is aware of the value at stake and is in a position to fully support, and at times intervene, the project is almost always going to result in a successful implementation.

• Develop and refer to the Mission Statement regularly. For instance ``Recover 15% of Storage Resource``, ``The current SLA for Performance can not be maintained given the predicted growth rates``, or ``Ensure Corporate Data Compliance``. If everyone on the project is aware of the goal it makes it much easier to motivate the team and harder for people to hold up implementation by creating road blocks and/or holding back resources. The Mission Statement should be visible at every meeting and workshop.

• Archiving Team experience and the availability of qualified Workshop members. Many failed implementations are a direct result of ``the wrong people at the wrong place``. Archiving is often very sensitive to the process and the knowledge and experience of data owners. The lack of knowledge, competence, and confidence in the archiving manager or leader interferes with the decision making ability of the functional teams. One mistake can derail the entire project.

• Understanding the Scope and Impact of Archiving on the integrated processes and systems. A silo approach to archiving will most likely end in unanticipated effects on sundry teams and users and ``breaks`` in the data model of the entire ERP including reporting system(s).

• Understanding the Corporate Compliance Requirements. Not only does the Data Compliance or Records Retention Policy guide the critical factors in the ILM implementation, it can also be extremely helpful in scoping and prioritizing the phases or aspects of the project. When clients don`t have a Records Retention Policy (many do but not all) the focus and efforts of the project are often lost or diluted.

• Having a well-defined Proposal Prior to Engaging with the Business. This factor is often critized and ignored but it should not be. For projects that get the business involved too early the consequences vary from delays and waste of resources to more serious, chaos and reluctance on the part of the data and process owners to support the project and participate in the implementation. Unfortunately, some workshop teams will still engage with business prematurely and ask ``how long do you need the data``. This approach can derail an effective archiving project. Preparing a plan based on the Mission Statement, the functionality of the tools, the guidance of the Records Retention Policy and inviting the business team to review is a much more effective methodology. Asking the business ``...this is the plan to meet the goal, is there anything we`ve missed...`` should result in an approval from the business. Of course this requires strong IT Business Analysts, Super Users, Archiving lead, and implementation tasks such as demos, training, etc.

• Depending on the size of the organization the Archiving Project should have regular access to the Steering Committee. The communication across various departments is critical when facing structural roadblocks such as parallel projects and resource conflicts, technology limitations and maintenance levels, and considerations for long term storage and disaster recovery, tax and data compliance concerns, and other big picture company and department trends, technology, vendor migration etc.

• Time and resource spent to provide education and documentation. Many SAP clients are fearful of the suggestion of archiving. Competent and experienced archiving consultants can help by confidently providing demonstrations, test scenarios and clear response to simple and complex questions. Be somewhat aware of the business, the business process, the data model in order to anticipate integration points, document types, data distribution across the applications etc. Clear and well developed documentation is also important in educating and precisely detailing the data that will be evaluated for archiving. Auritas LLC has some of the industry`s most comprehensive and well received projects and implementation documentation.

• Sticking to your Methodology. It is unlikely that the business will reject a well reasoned archiving plan that maintains the health of the system and provides user-friendly tools to access data either in the SAP archive or the BW or DaRT files. The methodology can be repeated in archiving the data of Logistics, Human Resources, Material Ledger, Financial Planning, Event Management, CRM, etc. The methodology in archiving in BW is somewhat different but sticking to the methodology is still a key factor in those implementations that discover the full potential of the ROI and successfully transition from implementation to maintenance.

As with any project (IT or otherwise) and any company, there are always keys that the consultant will not be immediately aware of, but with time, will seek them out and use them to reach a successful implementation. However, the above mentioned rules almost always hold true for a successful implementation and if one or more of them are not followed then meeting the goals and expectations of the project becomes difficult.

For more information on this topic or other topics in Document and Information Life Cycle management, contact Auritas LLC Sales Team. Ask about some of our unique offerings such as project scope/charter development, specialized training, and/or maintenance support among other products and services.