Archive for the ‘ECM’ Category
How Enterprise Search Sabotages Itself
Venkatesh Rao’s recent post on The Real Reason Enterprise Search is Broken struck a chord with me. A very discordant chord.
Venkatesh writes that while the technical challenges faced by enterprise search are daunting, they can be solved with enough engineering talent. He thinks the real reasons for failure lie in organizational behavior.
I desperately want him to be wrong about office politics undermining enterprise search, but I suspect he’s right. I’ve experienced it.
The situation
In a previous job, I served as a consultant deploying enterprise content management systems. The company was making a big push to get their software installed on every workstation. Getting the software onto more computers meant more employee licenses meant more money.
Most end users disliked the content management system. Putting stuff into the systems was time-consuming and difficult process. Unless managing corporate records or documents was your job, it competed with all the other work you had to do.
The enticement for registering material in the content management system was that it became searchable and sharable. That’s nice, but many employees had worked out some method of finding stuff on their own computers, however inefficient. And you can always share stuff by sending endless streams of email back and forth, however much people say they hate that. No, the real draw of enterprise search was being able to find other people’s stuff.
My job was to battle the adoption problem. You needed a large base of employees contributing material to build the network effects. You needed enough other people contributing their stuff to entice you to search and contribute your stuff. If you didn’t get a critical mass, the system wouldn’t work.
So you’d think that the software company I worked for would have invested massive amounts of time and effort in making the search and sharing features as attractive and usable as possible, right?
Wrong. The search and sharing features sucked.
It took me several years to figure out why.
Cross purposes
Although the more users = more licenses = more money equation seems simple enough, my old software company knew that the secret to sales was getting upper management to sign the check. And their reasons for paying for a system are quite different than employees’ reasons for using the system.
Usability failure.
At one company I worked with, the biggest champion of the content management system was the corporate counsel. She wanted all important records and documents collected in one system. This would bring the company into compliance with Sarbanes Oxley and a host of other government regulations. Public companies are required to keep records.
But public companies hate being sued. And they really hate the “discovery” process by which lawyers pick through corporate records looking for misdeeds. An ideal content management system, she explained, would be one where you could add records (as required by law) but never get them out again (to keep the company out of trouble).
At another company I worked for, a senior leader wanted more information about far-flung satellite offices. He had responsibility for service delivery and quality control, and wanted to monitor everything. His position and authority depended on him being “in the know”.
But it also depended on others not knowing the things he did, or being able to draw their own conclusions from his data. He particularly didn’t want these satellite offices coming up with their own ways of doing things, without help from headquarters and from him. An ideal content management system would vacuum data directly from all his service techs machines — ideally without their intervention — and piped directly to him for analysis. Only he or members of his staff were to have access to the information in the system after it had been entered.
For these check-signers and management champions, the fact that our enterprise search sucked was a feature, not a bug.
Cognitive Dissonance
Most organizations simply aren’t ready to adopt the radical transparency and decentralization that pervades the web, even if they accepted these things as worthwhile goals. Many wouldn’t think it necessary. And some will actively resist it.
The same features that engage knowledge workers may actually put off those in management. This inevitably leads to compromises in the design and implementation of enterprise search tools.
And if enterprise search isn’t comprehensive, a lot of what makes it compelling as a solution is lost. It becomes yet another repository that must be consulted and cross referenced, in addition to all the other partial solutions that already exist within the organization. It will add to the noise, rather than reduce it.
Venkatesh is surely right that if your organization’s culture is hostile to information sharing, or even ambivalent about it, your enterprise search initiative is likely to fail. You’ll be forced to make compromises that undermine the system. And there are plenty of consultants and software companies that will help you sabotage your effort. You’ll get a broken system, because on some unconscious level, that’s what your company wanted.
But if there’s a shred of hope, it’s this: Not all corporate cultures are hostile to information sharing. Some enterprises thrive on it. And politics and culture can be changed. It just isn’t as easy as buying and installing software.
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.
