You hear it more and more often, how organisations managing information assets is as important as managing physical, human and financial assets. Many organisations are simply drowning in a vast sea of documents, data and information. Network drives are overflowing and constantly multiplying, making it difficult for people to find what they need. Organisations worry about the risk of implications of information and data breaches. Adding to this, if information silos in existing solutions were not bad enough, stray content has now emerged in new silos thanks to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications such as Box and Google Drive.
Does this benefit your organisation?
How many systems does your organisation have?
The reality in organisations is a situation where multiple information management systems and applications are used and few of them are interconnected. 50 per cent of AIIM community members report using three or more ECM/DM/DM/RM systems and 22 per cent even use five or more systems.
How are the business apps?
The consumerisation trend has completely changed the expectations of enterprise application users. Many people now assume that enterprise solutions work as seamlessly and easily as the consumer solutions they know from their personal lives. This is neither fair nor equitable, but it is the reality that enterprise application providers must take into account in the next five years.
Cloud does not initially help
Cloud and mobile are changing our expectations of where we can work, when we can work, who we can work with and what devices we can work on. However, the challenge lies in the fact that mobile and cloud technologies are increasing the volume, variety and fragmentation of information in any business - and thus increasing the likelihood of information chaos. On the one hand, information is the new currency of the world; on the other, managing and leveraging it effectively is a struggle for many businesses.
I use more than 10 applications, there is not one universal app for that
Let me tell you a bit about the applications I use on a daily basis. LinkedIn. Google. Office 365/Outlook. Yammer. Box. SharePoint. And then Word, Excel and Powerpoint, with a bit of Google Docs for when we really need to collaborate. Evernote. GoToWebinar for the webinars I organise and GoToMeeting for the calls the I have. Should that not work, I switch to Skype.
And even then, I work in a small organisation. The idea that a single monolithic enterprise content management (ECM) solution can meet all a company's content needs is not realistic. This increasing complexity of information management gives organisations headaches.
The 'silo' problem we have been talking about for almost two centuries is not getting better. Indeed, it is getting worse.
So how next?
A different approach is needed. Each organisation will have to choose its own path, but I think the following four recommendations will allow you, as an information manager, to not only take the lead, but also a hero's role. A hero role because you will create value that wasn't there before. You will lead the mission from information chaos to information goldmine.
4 recommendations to create value as an information managerers for your organisation.
One size fits none
The first tip: let go of the 'one-size-fits-all' idea. We live in a multi-repository world, which simply means that everyone has multiple places where they store documents and data. From CRM to ERP and from Google Drive to Outlook. The ideology of housing everything in one system is a pipe dream.
Not document location but context becomes more important
The second tip is to consider storage-independent enterprise solutions. So applications that have the ability to work independently and communicate simultaneously with existing business systems and repositories. This eliminates migrations and leverages existing ECM investments.
User adoption leans largely on User Interface
Encourage user adoption with simple, clear User Interfaces and intuitive tools designed to support remote and mobile use. This third tip simply means: respond to the consumerisation of enterprise applications. What applications look like and thus ease of use is precisely what is important. Mobility of these applications is even more important. This facilitates working where you want, when you want principle.
Give documents and data context with metadata
Finally, the fourth tip: understand how important metadata is. Metadata is the key to moving from a mindset based on repositories to one based on a more context-aware approach to information management. Context over location, in other words. Knowing when a contract expires is much more valuable than knowing whether it is on the network drive or in Google Drive.
To make data, documents and information work for you, your organisation needs to make appropriate choices in terms of software. Choose an application that puts context before the location of data, documents and information. Context is determined thanks to metadata. Make all this also run on mobile in an intuitive application and you will see what it brings to your organisation: time savings, error reduction, agility, compliance, insight and, above all, money.