As we start to think about #AIIM14, Here are the three questions I'm asking all the sponsors... What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers? What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now? What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company? So here goes short interview #3, with Sean Nathaniel, VP of Technology at Upland Software and General Manager of FileBound by Upland. What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers? The legacy solutions are not solving the content chaos, they are contributing to it. When software is hard to use or not made accessible to everyone in the organization, users will work around it. Content chaos can only be controlled by strong, flexible and agile workflow to process the content. Our customers not only want superior workflow functionality to ensure process consistency and efficiency, they also need to be able to react quickly to market changes or changes in how the business operates. And they need... Continue reading

As we start to think about #AIIM14, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions and put them on a bit of a hot seat with regards to how they see the future -- and let attendees start thinking about your own questions to ask them in Orlando. Here are the three questions I'm asking: What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers? What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now? What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company? So here goes short interview #2, with John Newton from Alresco (and immediate past chair of AIIM): What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers? How do we control information flowing out of the business into internet sites? How do we modernize and replace our old proprietary vendor stack? How do we securely on-board employees with their mobile devices, particularly BYOD? What do you see as the three most important trends related... Continue reading

In my previous post -- Welcome to the Era of #InfoChaos: How Will Your Organization Adjust? -- I discussed the colliding forces of Information Opportunity and Information Chaos. In this post, I want to discuss how we wound up in this strange place of incredible opportunity and risk. I believe there are three major disruptors that are simultaneously colliding to transform the world as we know it. Consumerization -- transforming what users expect from applications. Mobile and Cloud -- leading to an expectation of anywhere, anytime access. Changing Nature of Work -- forcing organizations to think flat and agile, not hierarchical and slow. Continue reading

The game has changed. Information is the world’s new currency. Read just about any businesspublication and you will quickly conclude that how an organization manages its information assets is now just as fundamental a source of competitive differentiation as how it manages its physical assets, its human assets, and its financial assets. Everything and every process is being re-imagined. According to Gartner senior vice president Peter Sondergaard: “Every budget is an IT budget. Every company is an IT company. Every business leader is becoming a digital leader. Every person is becoming a technology company. We are entering the era of the Digital Industrial Economy." You probably were expecting a “but,” and, yes, there is a “but.” Amidst all of this opportunity, organizations are drowning in a sea of content and information. File servers are overflowing and multiplying, making it difficult for anyone to find anything. Information is leaking out of the organization at every turn. If information silos in our existing solutions weren’t bad enough, we now have our content popping up in new silos in SaaS applications that are beyond the reach of our conventional information governance frameworks. Content and information is coming at us at breakneck speed in... Continue reading

As we start to think about #AIIM14, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions and put them on a bit of a hot seat with regards to how they see the future -- and let attendees start thinking about your own questions to ask them in Orlando. Here are the three questions I'll ask: What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers? What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Chaos facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now? What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company? So here goes short interview #1, with Darrell Mervau, CEO of FileTrail. What are the three most important business problems related to Information Chaos facing YOUR customers? 1) What exists, 2) where is it, and 3) what is its exposure and/or its value? Our customers face the challenge of having their information-both physical and electronic-in various repositories and physical locations. Access, visibility, and effectively applying policy are all hurdles faced by the majority of our clients. What do you... Continue reading

Automation Should Get The Job Done And Be Defensible In Court by Jim Merrifield Director of Information Governance for FileTrail, Inc. When is automation going to deliver the promises we have been hearing for years? Automation is software that automatically classifies records, starts the review cycle automatically, notifies re... read more How to Sell InfoGov to C-Level Executives by Jim Merrifield Director of Information Governance for FileTrail, Inc. I attended three ARMA meetings last week and guess what topic all of them focused on? You guessed it, Information Governance. It is the hottest topic in the records management space today. If yo... read more Demonstrating the Business Value of Social Collaboration by Christian Buckley Director of Product Evangelism for Metalogix Measurement of social sucks. And I'm saying this without having a clear picture of what needs to happen for it to be fixed. But treating internal social collaboration like your externa... read more Looking at SharePoint Beyond the Social Buzz by Christian Buckley Director of Product Evangelism for Metalogix In a very visible (and heavily Tweeted) survey last year conducted by Avanade, over 1,000 business and IT leaders and 4,000 end users were asked about the impacts of social technologies... Continue reading

The keynote lineup is set -- check it out. Every one of them an expert on solving the problems of InfoChaos. Continue reading

Today is Data Privacy Day. It is hard to say when tipping points occur, but the combination of the NSA revelations and the sophistication of the recent Target thefts have me thinking a lot more about this issue than I did as recently as 12 months ago. Here's some useful information about Data Privacy passed along from Iron Mountain... Continue reading

How do I -- Design a scalable, easy-to-use content management repository? Build an ECM team with specific project governance roles? Gain stakeholder support for project and change management? Here's a great resource. Continue reading

15 Great -- and FREE -- Guides and Checklists to Help You Survive #InfoChaos Continue reading

True Tale of Heroism: I Built a Taxonomy in Less Than a Year! You Won't Believe the Knowledge Worker Who Nearly Died Under a Pile of Documents! A Tale of Personal Survival: How I Found My Way Back from #InfoChaos! How the Variety, Velocity, and Volume of Information Nearly Killed Me! Continue reading

We’re dealing with an influx of information. Some information is on our local systems. Some is out in the “cloud.” Other information is on external services provided by Facebook, Google, and others. We have some information on local desktops and laptops, yet we have EVEN MORE information on phones, tablets, and other devices. How the heck are we supposed to manage all of this information? Continue reading

62% of actual and potential users would find content analytics applications “very valuable” including 20% who would say “hugely valuable”. There is particular value in linking structured and unstructured content together. Continue reading

How often do you hear the buzz terms, "We are going to have to do more with less" or "This is the New Normal?" These are not the only buzz terms being tossed around in the industry. The effect of the slow growing economy is obvious, yet we are all being asked to build complex, integrated and adaptive systems. These systems need to utilize the latest and greatest tools and be modeled for future growth. Continue reading

Fifteen years ago, when we first imagined networks (we called them all “communities of practice”), we tried injecting our project management ideas and failed. We stamped out the tiny vestiges of creativity that our members had left after they’d clicked through our clunky, hyper-structured websites. Now, with social platforms, it seems that adding design would pierce the breezy, elegant simplicity of the experience. Not so. People crave substantial and transparent engagement. So many fly-by-night network “look-alikes” come at them – selling something or tricking them into doing their work – that they’ve starting to feel exploited. If we want our networks to live up to the promise of true, authentic collaboration, it’s time to design. Continue reading

34% of respondents see that big data will be an “essential capability” for their business (up from 27% eighteen months ago). Includes 10% where it is already essential (up from 9%). The number of respondents who don’t know what big data is has fallen from 14% to 6%. Continue reading

There seem to be a number of product announcements going today on at #EMC on #ECM. Per Rohit Ghai, SVP & GM, Products and Solutions, at the Information Intelligence Group: "The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market is quickly evolving with the advancement of Big Data, mobile, social, and cloud technologies, accelerating the sophistication of business user content and access. This growth is forcing enterprises to transform in a way that allows them to keep up with user demands and business requirements." Here are a couple of links on the details I came across... http://pulseblog.emc.com/2014/01/21/advancing-art-science-enterprise-content-management/ https://community.emc.com/go/ECMevolved ----- BTW, EMC is a Platinum Sponsor of #AIIM14 -- I'm sure they will be going over some of these changes and launches at the Conference. Continue reading

Take a listen to Alex Colic with TD Bank on the question of content silos. This is a favorite issue of mine, because I personally believe that the question of content silos is about to get a lot more complicated for organizations as they try to address not only on premise silos but also silos in the cloud. Continue reading

This is a little story about how the Principles of Holistic Information Governance (the PHIGs) were leveraged to turn a pure records management project into something the entire organization, and its stakeholders, could benefit from. Continue reading

As many of you know, well-known futurist Thornton May (and a former AIIM Board Chair) is one of the keynote speakers at #AIIM14 (April 1-4, in Orlando). Thornton is one of those keynote speakers you won’t forget – suffice it to say, he is not a shy person! I usually start my research for introductions at Conferences not by looking at all the boring CV/Resume data points about schools and jobs, but rather by looking at things a speaker has actually said and whether these things jar my conventional assumptions. With Thornton, there is no shortage of great quotes. Here are a few samples to get your juices flowing for some of the issues we'll address at #AIIM14. As I've told many people, our objective is to create a "head-scratching, this sure ain't a trade show, gosh I never thought of that" kind of Conference. I think this short sample from Thornton will give you some idea of what we're up to... “We are at the big bang of social, economic, political and evolutionary change.” “The old think was that information overload is a problem. We’ve got to change our thinking. Having all this information available to us is not... Continue reading

Organizations with a strategic view of these things recognize that Information Governance and ediscovery are flip sides of the same coin. Simply put, the only way to diminish the significant risks attendant with ediscovery is to go "upstream" of that triggering event, working to put in place the very policies, procedures, processes, and controls referenced above. The failure to "care" about this means that an organization will always venture into the ediscovery game on a reactive (and thereby less effective) footing. Continue reading

State of the Document Service Provider Industry Survey The document services and ECM supply channel is in a state of change. How reliant are you on traditional scanning services? Where do you see the best new opportunities? How challenging are general business conditions for you? For our regular report on the state of the DSO/DPO industry, we would like to survey general business health, the prospects for 2014, changes to services provided, and the choices being made for the future. At the end of the survey you can opt-in to win a free pass (worth $1,495) to the AIIM Service Provider Executive Forum taking place April 1-3 in Orlando, Florida* (alongside the AIIM Conference). Second prize is a Kindle Fire HD or an iPad Mini. You'll also receive a summary of the survey results. In this year's AIIM survey we ask: - Are you finding business tough or is it booming? - What forward strategies do you have for 2014? - Who are your biggest competitors? - Which services and sectors are you focusing on? - How are you reducing costs for more competitive bids? Take the survey at http://www.aiimhost.com/survey7 The survey should take approximately 10 minutes to complete (but... Continue reading

Technology changes what is possible. Every “age” has a feel, a zeitgeist. That zeitgeist is very much a function of the fact that every age has a defining technology. The age we are just now entering has four defining technologies – Social, Mobile, Analytics, & Cloud – the SMAC stack. The economics and ergonomics of experimentation have changed. It has never been easier – or more profitable – to do new things. To do new things require new modes of thought. Continue reading

From the AIIM Strategic Plan, 1993. A few more predictions of interest HERE. Interested in the future rather than the past? Don't miss #AIIM14, April 1-3 in Orlando. Sign up before it sells out. Continue reading

Simply put, we aren’t managing content; we are hoarding stuff. Stuff we think might have value, stuff we think we have to keep, and stuff we simply lost track of so long ago that we no longer know what it is. I have stuff like this in my inbox; you may have some of this stuff too. If you don’t, you don’t have to look very hard to find it. Maybe it’s in a shared drive; maybe it’s on your C: drive; maybe it’s still in a file cabinet; and maybe it’s already made its way into SharePoint. Continue reading