Archive for the ‘ECM’ Category
The Promise of Information Management
I asked a customer the other day why they were running an Information Management project. Her answer was refreshingly honest:
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said, “It just seems like the responsible thing to do.”
It was a great answer, and it got me thinking about The Promise of Information Management. Why are people doing this stuff? What is it that IM tools and technologies are really designed for? In my experience, the hierarchy of needs for Information Management looks something like this, with each need requiring fulfillment from the bottom up:
The Conventional Hierarchy of IM Needs
At the bottom, there’s the mitigation of risk. Effectively managed information lowers the likelihood of bad things happening to your information, and as a consequence, to your organization. Compliance is still the most common driver for people to invest in Information Management. That’s hardly a surprise since it’s the responsible thing to do. Any organization that faces public scrutiny needs to classify and control its information and implement consistent retention policies.
Higher up the pyramid, we encounter the reduction of cost. If we store our information effectively, we can spend less money storing things we don’t need. We can also recoup time spent on re-creating things we didn’t know existed. There are many ways that effective information management can reduce costs. (These are inevitably the things that end up in all the business cases, under the ROI section.)
Finally, at the pinnacle, there’s the incentive to innovate and to improve the way the organization functions — the ability to meet and exceed performance metrics and offer better solutions to customers, internal and external. Improved awareness, and greater access to knowledge. The benefits of efficient management of information result in people doing better business.
Inverting the pyramid
While these three tiers constitute the promise of information management, the reality is that the needs of knowledge workers are not being met by current IM solutions. Nearly all of the tools designed to manage information will be sold based on the benefits of improved productivity or designing better business process — but in fact are designed primarily to fulfill risk mitigation and/or cost savings. As an ECM consultant, I had to reconcile this bait-and-switch on a daily basis.
With Infovark Personal Edition now perilously close to its first public release, I find myself trying to determine how our new product fits into this information management promise. We’ve turned the pyramid upside down. We put innovation and knowledge awareness right at the bottom, as the platform that everything else is built on. Infovark contributes to cost saving only incidentally (our peer architecture doesn’t require any new servers or centralized storage) and we’ve actively removed a lot of the control, security and access barriers that compliance-oriented solutions offer.
The Infovark Hierarchy of IM Needs
We feel this aligns better with what the vast majority of business people actually need. Most knowledge workers don’t seem to care much about compliance or retention. That’s a management concern. They also seem largely uninterested in cost control. What we hear from people working with information daily is that they want an authoritative source of reliable information, the answers when they need them, and a way to learn what they don’t yet know. They focus on the revenue side of the equation, on pursuing opportunities, on delivering value.
What IM has traditionally seen as base level needs — retention, security and control — we at Infovark see as advanced needs that can be addressed only once we have first fulfilled the more pressing needs of the individuals within the organization. You have to increase transparency and information awareness first, then optimize the way information flows, and only afterward can we look at what risk mitigation policies makes sense.
Yeah, the management team might not buy this approach. But we think everyone else will.
Preserving Knowhow
Two recent articles reminded me of my days as an Enterprise Content Management consultant.
Gordon Ross discusses knowledge loss through attrition on the Thought Farmer blog. Due to the demographic bulge known as the Baby Boom, many industries will lose sizable portions of their workforce, many from upper levels in management. What happens when this group retires? How can organizations retain the knowledge these workers had?
I used to talk about this issue a lot when I worked for government clients. The U.S. government, particularly at the federal level, is one of the sectors that will be hardest hit by this event.
You’d think, with years to plan — and the government loves to plan — there would be more of a concerted effort to write important things down, put those things in an accessible place, and tell people about them. But this is a classic case of boiling the frog. The situation never seemed dire enough for most organizations to do anything about it.
At an individual scale, most workers don’t have the time to think about transition planning or succession issues. They already have enough work on their plate. And of course, “just writing stuff down” is an oversimplification. It takes time and thought to prepare training and instructional materials. Handing over a few hurriedly scribbled notes on the way out the door is not enough.
Would better tools help? Perhaps. But that brings me to the second article.
In Content as a Capital Asset the Big Men on Content lament that most businesses don’t give enough attention to — or budget for — content management tools. If companies started treating content as capital, they suggest, you’d see businesses doing a better job of cultivating and managing it.
Some industries do treat content as capital. Most newspapers and magazines have morgues, where old editions are preserved. Movie studios have film vaults and sound effect libraries. Artists and designers maintain portfolios.
But in most companies, information management is incidental. It’s something done in the course of business, not as an end in itself. It doesn’t directly impact the bottom line, which is often why calculating ROI is so hard.
We’ve seen, again and again, content management vendors and consultants try to stir up enthusiasm for managing internal company information. Forget the demographic issue, guys — if fear of Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or product liability suits won’t get companies moving, nothing will.
Instead of trotting out bogeymen, focus on the positive. Give us stories of companies that manage information well and gain efficiency, productivity, and competitive advantage from it. Inspire us, don’t scare us.
Finding the Dark Matter
Astronomers and physicists have a big problem on their hands: the universe. Cosmology has developed and discarded many models for how the universe works over the years, but our current model has a hole in it. A very dark hole.
Scientists have discovered that there is more matter in the universe than they can see. There just aren’t enough stars, planets, gas and dust to hold galaxies together. Physicists call this missing matter “Dark Matter”, because gravity indicates that something should be there, but it isn’t directly observable.
This is kind of like writing “Here be Dragons” on an old map. The term “Dark Matter” is really nothing more than a pointer to our current levels of ignorance.
I was drawn to look up all this fascinating physics stuff on Wikipedia, because for a while now I’ve been discussing “Dark Matter” as it pertains to enterprise information.
It’s hard to guess exactly how much data is dark in a typical business. You can’t know how much you don’t know, after all. But a recent AIIM study showed that 69% of people believe that less than 50% of their organization’s information is searchable online.
With all the effort being put into implementing collaboration, ECM and social media tools, you’d think someone would worry about the fact that we’re missing more than half the information we need.
And that’s merely the searchable stuff. The picture gets worse if we want to analyze or secure that information. A 2005 AIIM presentation prepared by Doculabs suggests that 80% of organizational information is unstructured and 90% of this remains unmanaged.
So every organization has a huge amount of unstructured, tacit information lying around, beyond the reach of their IT systems. This is the Dark Matter of the enterprise. And while content management vendors spout statistics about how effective information management can improve productivity and effectiveness, the vast majority of the information is still out there somewhere — unsearchable, unfindable and unknown.
We don’t have a searching problem. What we have is a data collection problem.
There’s a vast amount of Dark Matter holding our organizations together. But we know very little about it today.
Dragons indeed.
The Millenial Bug
One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.
I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).
The Millenials Are Coming is the new Y2K Bug
I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)
The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?
When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.
Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.
Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.
(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)
