Lessons Learned from Implementing Enterprise Content Management at the National Public Administration in Liechtenstein

The objective of this chapter is to summarize the experiences gained from an enterprise content management (ECM) initiative at the National Public Administration (NPA) in Liechtenstein. The results are grounded in the academic literature on ECM and in qualitative data, including observations, document analyses, and semi-structured interviews, collected over a period of 19 months (March 2009 to October 2010). The chapter presents and discusses fifteen important lessons the project group learned during the implementation and customization of an ECM software package in one of the NPA’s departments. These lessons include informing those who will be affected about the pros and cons of ECM early in the process, defining a transition strategy from paper to digital records, performing a content audit, and establishing ownership along the content lifecycle. The results are limited in that they were determined from a single implementation project of ECM. Nevertheless, they can assist researchers in future studies on ECM adoption, also in contexts other than public administration. In addition, public administrators are provided with ECM success factors at the organizational and departmental levels that can assist them in planning, executing, and evaluating their own ECM initiatives. The study contributes to information systems (IS) research by investigating in some depth the adoption of ECM in the public administration context.