Welcome to the Digital Landfill

(Note:  This is part of a longer series of interviews with some of the sponsors at AIIM15, many of whom will be running interactive roundtables at the event.  NOT presentations, but facilitating actual conversations -- imagine that!)

The actual speaker list, including keynotes, is HERE.

So far in the series of sponsor interviews.

• The Dark and Dirty of Big Data
• The Year CIO Means "Career Isn't Over"
• Security in a World of Anytime, Anywhere Access
• How a Document Viewing Company Embraces the Chaos
• The Key to Digital Transformation is User Adoption
• Doing Business in a Customer-Driven Era
• Your Data Must Be Clean at Capture
• Advanced capture - the first step to "embrace the chaos?"
• Welcoming Digital Natives Without Creating Digital Mayhem

Welcoming Digital Natives Without Creating Digital Mayhem

Andrea Chiappe is Director of Strategic Innovation for Systemware, Inc.

JM:  What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to "Embrace the Chaos?"

AC:  It's difficult to limit to three, but here are the three biggest challenges I see:

First, Welcoming digital natives into business environments has created a catalyst for change in how technology enables work. On the front line, the struggle between IT and business departments are amplified by the introduction of these technologically evolved business users. They challenge the status quo in order to get their jobs done more quickly and efficiently. 

This creates mayhem within businesses, as users are no longer conforming to the age-old ways of doing work that have been imposed on them by outdated procedures and solutions. Instead, they are quickly establishing new standards and intelligent processes that embrace the context of who they are, what they are doing, and where they are in respect to their work. 

Often, this internal revolution leads to the development of standalone department solutions unregulated by existing IT processes. These unmonitored "shadow" or "stealth IT" solutions further compound the siloed nature of the technology landscape within companies, adding yet another dimension to the chaos. 

Second, Although companies admit that they need to define a comprehensive ECM Strategy very few have. Company-wide ECM strategies with C-level stakeholder involvement are still lacking from small to large organizations alike. An obvious consequence with the increasing volume, velocity, and variety of content coupled with the lack of visibility is that the exposure to critical information risks also increases within their ECM landscape. We have all read about some of the more obvious problems in the last 18 months but these are the tip of the iceberg to what is actually happening. Simply understanding your current state ECM environment is fragmented and difficult:

• How many ECM systems are there?
• What departments, users, and systems do they serve?
• What information is stored in them?
• What platforms are used?
• What level of risk exists in keeping the platform (is it outdated, secure, etc.)?
• How does the ECM solution enable business goals, other systems, users, partners, and customers?
• How agile, flexible, and capable are the solutions in meeting ever-evolving business requirements?
• Does the solution meet the needs of your security, compliance, records management, and information governance policies? 

Only after understanding the gaps in current state ECM environment can a business establish a plan to move forward to the desired future state ECM environment.

And lastly, a lack of flexibility in aged or legacy ECM systems restricts companies from capitalizing on new uses and views of the information that they already manage. The lack of flexibility limits the opportunities to realize new value in their information or processes. 

JM:  What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

AC:  1) Flexible ECM frameworks will be Information Ecosystem aware, allowing organizations to establish compliant multi-organizational and dimensional digital business places to meet their content needs. Content derivatives will carry as much if not more value than the content itself in commoditizing content within these defined Information Ecosystems. 2) The evolution of the digital business will expose a paradigm shift in the approach to securing data. 3) Companies will continue to move from overly complex cumbersome ECM solutions to elegant and simple ECM solutions that further leverage consumer-oriented methodologies to engage employees in the digital workplace.

JM:  What are the three most important things AIIM15 attendees should know about your company?

AC:

1. Systemware¹s Content Cloud, an intelligent enterprise content management network, provides a blended, or cross-platform hybrid deployment flexibility that optimizes the utilization of existing infrastructure, so corporations can leverage their investment in both the centralized and distributed platforms. Systemware¹s seamless solution helps companies securely capture, analyze, secure, and enable content, all within the context of their business. 

2. Systemware UX design is focused on easy and unobtrusive access to content and metadata with the goal of increasing productivity in the digital workplace rather than creating distractions. Systemware's holistic approach presents the most meaningful or relevant content in coordination with the context of the end user. Within the same UI, IT and Business administrators alike have the flexibility to quickly create content applications and app stores to effectively meet the tailored needs of their users and departments. 

3. Systemware's secure services oriented architecture offers: 1) A well-documented API that exposes 100% of ECM capability, without restrictions; 2) Allows for the in place rationalization of existing ECM platforms; and 3)  Interoperates seamlessly with existing systems

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Have you download our free e-book companion to AIIM15 -- Are You Prepared for Digital Disruption?

Early Bird Pricing for AIIM15 ends January 31 -- Don't Miss It!

(Note:  This is part of a longer series of interviews with some of the sponsors at AIIM15, many of whom will be running interactive roundtables at the event.  NOT presentations, but facilitating actual conversations -- imagine that!)

The actual speaker list, including keynotes, is HERE.

So far in the series of sponsor interviews.

• The Dark and Dirty of Big Data
• The Year CIO Means "Career Isn't Over"
• Security in a World of Anytime, Anywhere Access
• How a Document Viewing Company Embraces the Chaos
• The Key to Digital Transformation is User Adoption
• Doing Business in a Customer-Driven Era
• Your Data Must Be Clean at Capture
• Advanced capture - the first step to "embrace the chaos?"

Advanced capture - the first step to "embrace the chaos"?

Frank Tiedt, Chief Sales Officer at I.R.I.S., a Canon Company, will be running a roundtable at AIIM15 on how advanced capture can be used as the first step to "embrace the chaos."  

JM:  What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to "Embrace the Chaos?"

 

FT:  1) Identifying the right process to start with and to empower individuals to pursue solutions that will allow them to work more flexibly;  2) Finding the right partner and technology with which not just one process can be dealt with but that will allow the company to move, one step after the other, towards structured and digital information management;  3) Going for the investment that will, at some point, increase efficiency and thus decrease recurring costs.

JM:  What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

FT:  1) Mobility and the need for increasing accessibility and information sharing with broader audiences (internal, external); 2) Outsourcing of IT departments: Cloud services reduce costs and resources; 3) Decreasing process cycle completion times to meet changing expectations.

JM:  What are the three most important things AIIM15 attendees should know about your company?

FT:  1) IRIS capture solutions are flexible, proven and field-tested in a variety of businesses and organizations; 2) IRIS solutions are mobile, cloud ready and adaptable to various production environments; 3) IRIS solutions are for production level deployment, built for high-volume processing.

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Have you download our free e-book companion to AIIM15 -- Are You Prepared for Digital Disruption?

Early Bird Pricing for AIIM15 ends January 31 -- Don't Miss It!

As we start to think about #AIIM15, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions in order to get an understanding of how they see the future of our industry -- and let those of you attending start to think about your own questions to ask them in San Diego.  Here are the three questions I'll ask:

1. What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?
2. What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?
3. What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

Roger Beharry Lall, Director of Market Strategy and Research at Adlib Software, says organizations need to take control of their information today before it hits critical mass.

What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?

1. The collection, organization and publishing of all of the required information in order to meet compliance demands – from internal corporate mandates to broad-based industry standards like FDA, SOX and more.
2. The inability to access content to support business growth. Organizations are looking to improve collaboration across the enterprise, which means better access to content. One way to do this is to implement effective archiving solutions so that content is always accessible and available for the long term. Leveraging industry standards like PDF/A will enable teams across the organization to access content at any time from anywhere. 
3. The inability to understand and access information. While organizations have done a good job of moving from paper to electronic format, and standardizing with formats like PDF for digitally born content, they now face an additional challenge around digesting this information: ensuring that text and images are readable; that information can be accessed automatically without manual reformatting; easily extracting insight from documents; sorting, de-duplicating, attributing and deleting files. These are all critical, but often ignored in favor of more advanced ‘Big Data’ initiatives. 

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

1. The shift in focus from “Big Data” projects to more specific projects like addressing “Dark Data” and “Dirty Data”, focusing on more effective/efficient content analytics endeavors. 
2. The recognition that content management solutions should be “enterprise” , not departmental solutions.
3. With more and more importance being placed on compliance, the PDF and PDF/A standards will become more and more prevalent in solving this for organizations. Moreover though, organizations will actively look at solutions to optimize those PDFs making them more accessible, standardized, and automated. 

We believe that in two years, information chaos will have reached an all time high unless organizations act now to gain control of their content. This situation will put many of them at great risk. Think compliance, archiving, the draining of resources. There is a way to get ahead of the curve and proactively ensure content is secure so that in two years they aren’t playing catch up and having to turn their attention away from core business projects to deal with document problems.

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

1. That PDF is more than just a standard - it can be applied to organizations in a broad range of industries to solve complex business problems 
2. That our Advanced Rendering technology centralizes, automates and enhances critical business processes like compliance and archiving – reducing manual dependencies to reduce information risk. 
3. That customers and partners are using Advanced Rendering technology not only for content output and archiving, but also to optimize the capture and ingestion of incoming or digitally born information.

As we start to think about #AIIM15, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions in order to get an understanding of how they see the future of our industry -- and let those of you attending start to think about your own questions to ask them in San Diego.  Here are the three questions I'll ask:

1. What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?
2. What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?
3. What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

Phil Robinson, Senior Vice President of Business Development at Zia Consulting, says CIO does NOT stand for "Career is Over".

What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?

The three biggest challenges we’ve seen our customers face here at Zia are 1.) Garnering ECM user adoption (vs. “ECM avoidance”), 2.) Addressing the compliance and security needs of the organization versus the wants of users, and 3.) Avoiding the notion that CIO means “Career is Over”.

ECM Avoidance and IT vs. Users: The legacy of ECM systems is one of complexity, with challenging user interfaces, multiple logins, and more—which is why for most organizations, email applications and shared drives are still the dominant form of “content management”. It’s also why many ECM technologies are best known as “shelfware”. We believe that when you offer solutions that “work the way you do, using the tools you use today,” users aren’t forced to embrace alternatives that don’t fit Enterprise IT strategy. Solutions that leverage tools like Office, Email, and SharePoint Integration and Cloud Sync deliver content management systems that work—providing the ease of use and familiarity users want, with the security and compliance companies need.

CIO = Career Isn’t Over. If CIOs can solve the ECM avoidance issue—maintaining employee usage of tools they prefer to use like email and SharePoint—while addressing security concerns around tools like Dropbox and solving Governance with simplified Records Management processes, they will have taken a major step in ensuring they still have a job in 2016. Once that’s done, the CIO can take the next step towards the boardroom by delivering technology as a competitive advantage, truly impacting the strategic direction of the enterprise. Thus, the title of CIO can actually mean “Career Isn’t Over”.

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

We believe the three most important trends related to Information Management over the next 18 – 24 months are 1.) Solving SharePoint, 2.) Solving document security, and 3.) Solving information governance/records management issues.

Solving SharePoint: Across both the public and private sector, companies have made an investment in SharePoint and it is clear that it isn’t going to simply disappear from their daily operations. Instead of looking to replace SharePoint, executives often want to implement control and compliance around it—essentially implementing a co-existence strategy. Through our partnership with SeeUnity, we’ll often integrate existing SharePoint instances with a more powerful content hub on the backend such as Alfresco, so that users can continue to collaborate in the way they are accustomed to while still addressing the company’s true document and records management needs.

Solving Document Security: Often what keeps a CIO up at night are concerns about appearing on the front-page of the newspaper due to a leak of corporate data/documents. Fortunately, there are secure collaboration solutions available that address this issue for both internal documents as well as those going outside the organization. Through a strategic partnership with Covertix, Zia’s Universal Document Security (UDS) solutions deliver secure collaboration whether it's via email, Alfresco Cloud, or even consumer sharing technologies such as Dropbox or Box.net. These solutions enable internal and external parties to share confidential files with monitoring, auditing and control--significantly reducing overall risk.

Solving Information Governance/Records Management: The legacy of Records Management systems is one where RM solutions have traditionally been designed for dedicated compliance offers, rather than content creators, and deployed in a standalone environment, disconnected from collaboration and ECM systems. This duplication of effort, moving documents from ECM to RM systems and back again, adds tremendous cost and complexity to the information governance effort within the Enterprise, and makes it challenging for Users to find and use records when they need them. To combat this issue, we provide Easy Records Management (Easy RM) Solutions where “everyone’s a records manager, and nobody knows it” - connecting those who are creating content with the compliance process. Easy RM incorporates the tools you use on a daily basis, reducing barriers to implementation and adoption.

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

The three most important things to know about our company in 2015 are 1.) If you are a CIO, we can help save your career, 2.) We are content people who solve your business needs surrounding the management of your business critical content, and 3.) We work with you.

CIO = Career Isn’t Over: Traditionally, the primary role of the CIO is to secure and govern information, while also make technology investments that provide cost savings for the company. The CIO is known for putting their focus on reducing costs instead of adding new value, and has been criticized widely since 2008 as having little knowledge of what it actually means to be a CEO or sit on a board. However, Zia would like to offer 5 reasons you still need a CIO (and how we can help save their career): 1.) To solve ECM avoidance once for all, 2.) To solve SharePoint, 3.) To solve the DropBox problem, 4.) To solve Information Governance, and 5.) Once 1-4 are completed, deliver true business value with technology as a competitive advantage.

Content People: Zia understands the importance of content to your success–with a focus on where your content comes from and, more importantly, where you need it to be. We recognize that these requirements may be unique to your industry, which is why we have established Zia Public Sector Solutions, Zia Solutions for Financial Services, and other vertical-focused practice groups. Additionally, we appreciate that content workflows differ by division or department, which is why we’ve developed solutions for Corporate Finance, Corporate Legal, Human Resources, and other branches of your organization. To address the critical role that content plays in the strategic direction of your organization, Zia’s “Content Consultancy” Services deliver an end-to-end assessment of your existing content processes and a roadmap for how document automation and other enhancements can provide a measurable impact on your organization’s success.

Working with You: At Zia, we are committed to providing measurable business results on time and within budget. We deliver solutions powered by industry-leading partners like Alfresco for ECM and Ephesoft for Intelligent Document Capture to give us the benefits of an open platform and the most modern technology in the content world. As a guiding principle, we will always work with you, in a true partnership, to provide a solution that is yours to own and manage in the future.

As we start to think about #AIIM15, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions in order to get an understanding of how they see the future of our industry -- and let those of you attending start to think about your own questions to ask them in San Diego.  Here are the three questions I'll ask:

1. What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?
2. What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?
3. What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

Mike Maxey, Director of Content Solutions at AirWatch by VMware, says high-profile data breaches have brought security to the forefront of the anywhere, anytime access conversation.

What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?

Access, Enablement and Control.

The reality people want to work anywhere, anytime, as life allows and end users now dictate which tools they are going to use to manage their business life. With the explosion of mobile, dozens of tools have been created for workers to access productivity tools on multiple devices, with the functionality they need and usability that is simple. Unfortunately for IT leaders, this paradigm has opened many issues with tough planning dynamics. The possibility for data breaches and sensitive data leakage has grown exponentially with many consumer grade tools being used in the enterprise. Without an enterprise-grade alternative with end user centric features, IT leadership is often forced to be the “bad guy,” blocking services to access files, videos or social networks that are becoming critical to workers who use these services to manage their personal and business lives. Organizations need a partner who can help bring these tools to business, while satisfying security concerns in a world where we see almost monthly high-profile data breaches.

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

First, with more and more high profile data breaches, organizations are adding up the costs of their peers and realizing just how much is at risk in an unencrypted, poorly controlled and non-managed information sharing environment. Second, as more workers become familiar with collaboration tools, work between multiple affiliated organizations around the globe will need to be facilitated with enterprise-grade tools. Lastly, this is being driven by adoption of tools in business that younger generations have been using to manage their personal lives for several years. These workers continue to take on broader roles in organizations, including leadership positions and the work-style they are implementing requires flexibility in information management policies and access privileges that work for the user, not against them.

Two years from now, I see automation becoming much more widespread, intelligent workflow expanding across multiple systems and organizations being tied into these processes. What will really change the game is when machine learning experts begin integrating some of those technologies into workflow and the process improves itself over multiple cycles, learning from the data gathered in real time and historically.

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

Leaders need a partner for technology solutions that empower them to be flexible to meet their employee’s needs. Knowledge workers are very adept to identifying tools, applications and processes to do their jobs most effectively. Often, this means IT managers are forced to support and manage multiple systems and solutions, which creates silos and complexity. AirWatch Content Locker and the entire AirWatch productivity suite, takes an open integration approach that solves this friction and brings everyone together regardless of storage strategy to collaborate, communicate and share on a single secure platform that solves IT concerns and gives workers freedom. In summary, our company gives three important things: IT piece of mind, user freedom, and application openness.

Many of you knew our colleague, Carl Weise.  We're pleased to launch a scholarship in his name.

As we start to think about #AIIM15, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions in order to get an understanding of how they see the future of our industry -- and let those of you attending start to think about your own questions to ask them in San Diego.  Here are the three questions I'll ask:

1. What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?
2. What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?
3. What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

Simon Wieczner, CEO of Snowbound Software, sees security being a hot topic in the next 18-24 months as organizations continue to move applications off the desktop and into the cloud.

What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?

1. One of the biggest challenges Snowbound Software sees right now for our customers is implementing new ECM systems for the enterprise without fully knowing the complete needs of all the users. People are often very creative and find ways to make their applications do things that were never initially intended. When embarking on a replacement system, it can be very difficult to determine what people are doing and how they are actually going to use it. There is a big risk that you are creating a solution that doesn't fit the needs of the current users.

2. In large organizations, hardware resources can differ widely—many can be legacy systems that will not handle newer technology. The risk here is that you design and implement a system depending on the latest technologies of 64 bit processors and operating systems with plenty of high speed memory and then discover some important subset of your users have obsolete computing technology that cannot be easily upgraded because of legacy software or budget restrictions.

3. As an HTML document viewer vendor, Snowbound deals with hundreds of different document formats on a daily basis. One thing we are reminded of constantly is that not all documents are created equally, even if they share a format extension. Similarly, when introducing an ECM system, one of our biggest challenges is needing to not only handle the popular document formats but also be able to handle documents from across the globe.

What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

Security, cloud based applications and storage, greater consolidation of software products.

We expect that security will consume a huge amount of effort and resources over the next two years. Where cloud-based applications can help security, they will see much greater success and penetration. Organizations will try to get applications off the desktop in order to better control application access, the version levels will be updated to utilize the latest security improvements, and document storage will be kept on the server as much as possible (sending only select portions of documents to the client).

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

1. Snowbound is one of the very few remaining ind

ependent document viewing and conversion companies in the business. Our goal is to please every customer, not just our owners. Our greatest success has been solving specific customer problems through our engineering expertise. We sell to the most demanding companies in the world (9 of 10 US banks, 7 of 10 international banks, insurance, shipping, etc).

2. Almost all the technology we sell is created in-house by our engineers. Because we are the only ones with intimate knowledge of our products, we can offer fast responses to document viewing challenges–both in terms of rendering documents and in converting or viewing them.

3. We are the only company that offers specific products for both Windows and Java - thereby supporting the greatest range of computer systems.

As we start to think about #AIIM15, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions in order to get an understanding of how they see the future of our industry -- and let those of you attending start to think about your own questions to ask them in San Diego.  Here are the three questions I'll ask:

1. What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?
2. What do you see as the three most important trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?
3. What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

Alan McMillen, CEO of Repstor, says user adoption of new systems is key to a successful digital transformation.

What are the three biggest challenges you see your customers facing while trying to “Embrace the Chaos”?

1. User Adoption of organizational content systems

According to AIIM, the top reason for ECM deployment failures is user adoption, and top of the list of user adoption issues is persuading users to manage and share their information within an ECM system. We see this all the time with our customers – the information systems team has implemented a “shiny new ECM system” that unfortunately no one uses. ECM systems can be complex. If our customers are going to successfully “Embrace the Chaos” organizations will need to think about the User and put their greatest emphasis on encouraging users to adopt their ECM systems.

2. Consistent filing and saving of emails and content

Managing emails as records has topped the AIIM survey charts for many years as the most important issue for records managers. People are particularly bad at filing important emails. The huge issue here is that a high proportion of litigation revolves around emails, as well as important contractual elements between customers, suppliers and, indeed, employees. However, given the already onerous task of working through the daily inbox workload, most employees will skip the important step of pulling off the important ones, and filing them in the SharePoint, ECM or RM system.

3. Finding intuitive tools that make managing content in multiple locations easy

For many organizations, SharePoint is only one of the document repositories in use. File shares are still used extensively, especially for work-in-progress, and many organizations will have one or more legacy systems, particularly for formal records management. Providing a single point of search and access across these repositories is important for knowledge recall and decision support, and will also encourage appropriate filing behavior if each system is easily and consistently available.

What do you see as the three most important 

trends related to Information Management facing organizations over the next 18-24 months? What will be different in our industry two years from now?

1. There will be an uptake in Office 365 for all sizes of organizations, commoditizing storage of information and how organizations manage information. Previously smaller and medium organizations couldn’t afford to move to the Microsoft  platform for full ECM but now there is a large incentive for them to do so, right now they aren’t quite sure how to take advantage of this but this will develop over time.

2. Managing information in multiple systems will present a challenge for organizations. With over a quarter of companies having 4 or more types of repository, organizations will be faced with managing content in legacy repositories and avoiding big bang migration. There will be a demand for tools that link up multiple internal systems and present both the old and new systems with the same consistent interface and functionality.

3. User adoption will continue to be key. Given that budgets continue to be restricted organizations will seek to maximize their investment in current systems by selecting tools that are easy to use for the end user and help them to better manage their information, minimizing change management costs.

What are the three most important things attendees should know about your company?

1. Repstor is in business to inspire enterprise ECM adoption. Repstor provides products for managing content easily within document management systems that users will adopt by making them intuitive and familiar.

2. Repstor products make it easy for people to file, save and access content regardless of the content system the information is stored in. Multiple systems can be accessed in parallel.

3. The latest addition to our product line, Repstor custodian enables your standard SharePoint/Office 365 document management system for case and matter management. All of the key common Case and Matter Management activities are completed in the familiar Outlook user interface.

[ This is a guest post from Christopher Surdak, JD, Author of Data Crunch. Chris will be speaking at The AIIM Conference in San Diego on the effects disruptive technologies have on how we do business. ]

Today, we live in a society that is alight with constant, relentless, accelerating change. It seems every aspect of our daily lives is changing before our very eyes and the beliefs, structures and experiences that we take for granted are evaporating every day.  What is most surprising in all of this is not that these changes are coming so quickly.  Rather, what's remarkable is that all of us appear to be so blasé with it, if not downright welcoming!

Modern society has focused upon globalization, quality, information technology and connectedness for half of a century, and there are some outcomes from these efforts which may have been somewhat unexpected.  Some key consequences of these efforts include:

• Quality: Consumers simply expect perfection.  Deliver anything less, and your customers will immediately abandon you for someone else
• Ubiquity: Globalization and just-in-time logistics have made it possible to have nearly anything, anywhere at any time.  And now, for most of us anything less than this is simply not acceptable.
• Immediacy: Globalization, Logistics and smartphones with apps have also created the expectation of immediate gratification.  Customers want their needs fulfilled instantly, and now predictively.
• Disengagement: It was common in the past for people to build their own solutions to their problems.  Then, they began to outsource certain functions, while maintaining a degree of control.  Going forward, this will no longer be the case.  Customers will only care about obtaining a result; how they get there will become less and less important and more and more difficult to discern in any event.
• Intimacy: Conversely, customers' increasing disengagement with how they obtain products and services will leave them hungering for other forms of connectedness.  Feeling like part of a community will be even more important as our needs are met more anonymously.
• Purpose: Ultimately, these trends will leave many people feeling adrift in their lives.  They will hunger for a sense of purpose, for a reason for being, for something to feel passionate about.  Whomever can fulfill this need for purpose will hold a tremendous influence over those whose needs they meet.

Together, these six trends will form the basis of our "New Normal;" the way in which each of us lives in the new world we are creating.

Constant accelerating change is also a part of our new normal.  When a new app is released or a new electronic gizmo is launched, we not only adopt them nearly instantaneously, we also grow tired of them almost as quickly. When a new smartphone is released it sells millions of units on its first day of sale.  When a new app becomes popular, it may also sell millions of copies in a single day.  It seems our technology-driven society has tapped into our ingrained lust for discovery and change and is now hyper-stimulating all of us into a frenzy of activity.  Rather than being sated, our hunger for newness and change seems to grow sharper by the moment.

This then defines the opportunities and challenges that present themselves to organizations who wish to tap into this revolution. How do you hold true to any sort of consistent message, brand and value proposition in a world that rewards constant, relentless change over all else?  Almost certainly, the answer lies in data and analytics.

Data analytics has been a key driver of organizational performance since the dawn of the computer age. The availability of information has allowed organizations to constantly improve their performance and to better address the needs of their audiences. As such, data and analytics have leveraged the human mind just as levers, pulleys and wheels enhanced the power of human muscles. The application of new insights and knowledge that is derived from data and analytics will be the basis of economic growth and power over the coming decades, and only those organizations that adapt to this fundamental change will likely survive the disruption that this change will necessarily entail.

Embracing the Chaos

In light of these thoughts, the theme of AIIM 2015, "Embrace the Chaos," seems particularly apropos. We live in extremely chaotic times, where much of what we take for granted is being degraded by our lust for newness.  Indeed, I now live by the axiom, "If you're not uncomfortable with what you're doing, you're either not trying hard enough, or you're already irrelevant."

The challenge for business leaders is to stay in this zone of discomfort, embracing the chaos around you and still building value from what you know and what you do. Walking this tightrope means using business information and analytics to constantly question your existing beliefs, and bravely stepping out on the tightrope of change.  If this doesn't make you at least a little bit nervous, you're not trying hard enough.

[ Thanks for reading! See Chris and many other wonderful speakers March 18-20 at The AIIM Conference 2015 in San Diego. ]

As we start to think about #AIIM15, I thought I would ask a number of our sponsors a few identical questions in order to get an understanding of how they see the future of our industry -- and let those of you attending start to think about your own questions to ask them in San Diego.  Here are the three questions I'll ask: