“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.

Related posts:

1. Information Management in the 21st Century
2. Aligning Interests
3. Ending the Paper Shuffle: Tracking Documents

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.

Related posts:

1. R.O.Why?
2. Ending the Paper Shuffle: Tracking Documents
3. Watch “Everything I Know About Startups”

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.

No related posts.

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?)

Related posts:

1. Ending the Paper Shuffle: Tracking Documents
2. Review: Here Comes Everybody
3. Infovark Templates

Laurence raises a lot of valid concerns, all of which we’ve spent loads of time mulling over, and I’ll get to those in a second.

But first, to really understand our solution, you need to know how we got here. Dean and I absolutely understand where Pie is coming from. We have a long history of working in the ECM space with TOWER Software. We’ve read through countless customer requirement lists about compliance, Sarbanes-Oxley, retention, discovery and authoritative versioning. We’ve spent hours designing taxonomies, file plans, and security and access policies. We’ve drafted tender responses, and drawn large Visio diagrams. We’ve written integrations to nearly all the of ECM products in the market today.

After all this effort, once an organization deployed our tailored solution, we’d observe the same pattern. The content management software met the business needs, but it didn’t help the end users. Instead, It got in their way. It often made it harder to find things, and it made them work to understand things that they weren’t specialists in — like taxonomies and retention. User acceptance and training overheads were huge. We had to work like crazy to get people to use our carefully crafted solutions.

OK, you might say — that’s fine. Work isn’t supposed to be fun. You just do what you’re instructed to do. As long as the enterprise as a whole benefits from the solution, the content management program is doing its job.

Except that the enterprises weren’t really benefiting. The push-back from the user community meant that people wouldn’t actively use the solutions to do their daily work. Large, corporate, and eminently scalable repositories all over the world are filling up with dusty, useless content, most of which is almost certainly never going to be seen again. Traditional content management is extremely effective at preserving things. It’s terrible at solving the kinds of tactical problems that people deal with every day. Sure, retention was up. But productivity was down.

(Pie knows this. That’s why he talks so much about invisible, or transparent ECM . Because yes, preserving things is important, but knowledge workers don’t care.)

So, when we started Infovark, we set out explicitly to solve the other problem. The people problem. The fact that people couldn’t connect and share with each other. We decided to build an enterprise product that people would want to use, first and foremost. The capture and retention come second. The point of a transaction is not to get the paper receipt.

OK, that’s where we came from. Now to answer some of Pie’s more technical questions:

• How do you manage the disk usage? Peer-to-Peer is concerning. I’ve used Groove and it can be a disk hog. You would need a fair subscription model to manage the whole thing.

Groove is a disk hog. Transferring files from a peer through a peer is not what we do. For one thing, Groove places content on your machine that’s merely “passing through”, i.e. unrelated to your work. This can be something of a security nightmare. How do you keep that information secure? For another, Groove is about pushing updates out to subscribers. Infovark works like RSS; we pull updates. And we only pull data relevant to you and to which you have access. The network usage is about the same as if I email a document from my computer to yours.

• Are the wiki pages also stored peer to peer?

The Wiki pages are indeed stored locally and accessed remotely.

• What do you do about items once completed and needed to be kept?

As of right now, we don’t do anything! One of the great things about the REST-based approach that Infovark takes is that that content is accessible and available to the whole enterprise. Any content-spidering search product, like the Google search appliance, can easily scoop up the latest version and index it. Periodic backup or archiving would work in the same way. Use your favorite off-the-shelf tools. We’re also planning some specialized versions of Infovark that can address all three needs in the same package.

• Items are listed on a user’s Wiki. Where does it get listed when a user leaves the company?

That’s up to the IT guys. The user’s Infovark could easily be picked up and hosted on a server. Then all you’d need to do is change a DNS entry or leave behind a permanent redirect. It’s kind of like an “Employee Graveyard”. Creepy…

• How do you track/prevent cross edits? Johnny starts to edit something and then I decide to make some edits as well. How is that managed?

Gah! Stop asking hard questions. We’re working on that right now. We’ll get back to you when we get to Alpha in June.

Related posts:

1. Content with Content
2. How to Sell to Real People
3. People are Relevancy Engines