The Benefits of ECM are numerous and, I think, well described on AIIM, Open Text, and other ECM-related web sites. I'm assuming that anybody reading this posting is already familiar with the potential benefits but may well be wondering what the costs of an Enterprise Content Management solution might be.

I hope it is obvious that I will not be providing a full calculator with this note, if it wasn't obvious to start with it will certainly be obvious after reading the entire article, but I do want to highlight the big-bucket expenses and offer an opinion as to how much each bucket might be as a percentage and (with much less accuracy) in absolute terms. It is not at all possible to be provide a single cost, or even a single cost model for ECM as it is too large a field in itself ... there is almost nobody using every sub-part of ECM. So, I hope this note helps you in planning and design but it is not intended to be used directly. So, with that said, what are the costs of ECM?

As you can see from the list below, there are many things to think about, I've listed 20 items that will all be part of the costs of using ECM from the start. Though it is a lot of work, you can't do a reasonable Return on Investment calculation if you don't look at the full costs. Like virtually all software companies, ECM vendors do not usually have a vested interest in listing all the costs involved and so you'll rarely see such a complete list come from a vendor, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't be calculating these costs as early and as completely as possible.

[2010-10-14[ this is a work in progress, while the calculator is available only some of the 20-bucket items have been properly documented. Please come back for more updates.

[2010-11-09] this has surpassed the half-way mark in number of topics fleshed out, lots of work yet to do but certainly worthy of more eyeballs now