So far all of the costs involved have been assigned to the infrastructure required to provide a platform to build an ECM application or solution upon. Systems are the world of numbers and facts but applications are the realm of business and we take an entirely different focus. When designing the application or solution you must start from the top and work down.

1. Start with stating the business problem(s) that need to be solved and those that would be nice to solve -- be very clear here, to ensure you do not get the "tail wagging the dog" phenomenon, you must clearly identify your business goals before you choose your solution otherwise your chosen solution will identify your goals for you but that may not align with your business needs
2. For each goal list the related applications that achieve or work toward the goal
3. Attempt to estimate Total Cost of Ownership [TCO] by looking at licensing, required customization and infrastructure
4. Once all goals are identified, choose the solution(s) that provide the lowest overall TCO remembering to account for any economies of scale.
5. Make sure there is a SLA in place to answer questions like:
   
   1. Availability requirements
   2. Performance requirements
   3. Capacity requirements
   4. Business Continuity goals
   5. Budgetary restraints
6. At this point either a mature solution with pre-defined architectures and scaling metrics or a domain-specific knowledgeable person's expertise is applied to form the design using the available information. Sometimes the expert is expected to supply the answer as well as the question
7. A final report including necessary technical specifications and architectural drawings and justification for the choice