10 Great Posts on Content Management and ECM

The Many Uses of Email

By Lisa Ricciuti

Despite all the methods of communication email is still popular and has become as necessary as a phone number or mailing address. Similar to calling somebody, email has become a standard mode of communication with the expectation being that everybody should have an email address. Email started out as a simple communication tool but is now used for much more than that. In many ways, email has made my life easier. It allows me to: Contact people all over the world for free (or inexpensively) Communicate with more than one person at a time Document interactions (e.g. the highly prized CYA paper-trail) Leave messages any time...MORE: The Many Uses of Email

AIIM Training Success Stories - An ECM Master

By Michael Fray

Back in 2006, I was certified as an AIIM ECM Master. I went all the way from little Denmark to Tampa for the training, but I thought it was necessary to show the world that I was serious about ECM. This proved to be a very valuable investment. I could prove to customers that I had the required skills to help them with the ECM challenges and needs. In 2008, I wrote the first book about ECM in Danish and it was published just before 2009; ECM – Enterprise Content Management, ISBN: 9788779008311 This would not have been possible, had I not taken the AIIM training. The training and my book lead to invitations to give keynotes and talks on ECM and related...MORE: AIIM Training Success Stories - An ECM Master

Will predictive analytics become the hero in eDiscovery?

By Cate Evans

eDiscovery is an expensive business problem. I recently did some research on analytics and what I found was that predictive analytics is being touted as the next ‘breakthrough’ technology to solve eDiscovery. Based on research, many text analytics vendors are turning to eDiscovery as the new cash cow. Don’t blame them. It is a very time-consuming, risky, and expensive activity. What are some of the snippets I found? Fortune 500 companies will have, on average 125 lawsuits at any given time (National Law Review) The average cost in US dollars is $1.5M – $3M eDiscovery is expensive, time-consuming, and risky...MORE: Will predictive analytics become the hero in eDiscovery?

Utilize the Cloud, Increase Productivity

By Dennis Kempner

Using the cloud, businesses can give employees the tools and abilities to increase their productivity and improve their workflow. 59% of companies that use the cloud are more likely to see productivity benefits. Business leaders who use the cloud said that they improved business processes and faster responses to market changes. Here are other ways that the cloud can boost productivity: Always Connected Employees can access information at any place, any time, office, home or plane. All they need is the cloud and internet connection to full access of files and documents. Because of cloud computing, your employees have the ability to work from home...MORE: Utilize the Cloud, Increase Productivity

Online Signatures “No longer novel"

By Larry Kluger

Technology is often touted as being new, advanced, exciting, fresh, and so on. But when a technology is crowned as the latest new new thing, valid concerns are often raised: will it last? Is it legal? Can everyone involved in the process use it successfully? What are the unknown unknowns as Donald Rumsfeld would say? Due to this common fear of new technology, its adoption rate is often much slower than many people would like. For digital signatures, these issues cause many potential users to shy away from the technology, citing vague concerns about the legality of electronic or digital signatures. Their concerns linger despite the many laws...MORE: Online Signatures “No longer novel

Just in case – doesn’t cut it in analytics.

By Cate Evans posted 8 days ago

Analytics can create business differentiators, if the tools are effective, and information is proactively managed. And what organization doesn’t want to improve performance? If you are working with structured data, the process becomes much easier. With unstructured data, ah well, that’s a different story. Your unstructured data contains value and insights, but can also be used against you for non-compliance and litigation. As I see it, the bottom line is to clean it up and get rid of it. That’s the hard part. Not many folks want to be responsible for permanently deleting information – regardless of the fact that it contains no value...MORE: Just in case – doesn’t cut it in analytics.

Save Green With the Cloud

By Dennis Kempner

“The Cloud” has become one of the most popular buzzwords in today’s tech world. Cloud storage simply put, is online space that you can use to store your digital data. Cloud storage provides a secure way to store and share data and information. If your business is ready to put the cloud to work, you can save green, and two types of green while you’re at it: money and trees. A Few Ways Cloud Storage Saves You Money Cloud storage is relatively inexpensive – you only pay for the storage you need. Employee Efficiency- Employees will no longer need to file or search for documents. Reduce Costs- Reduce the need to purchase...MORE: Save Green With the Cloud

6 Tips for Making Cloud Records Storage a Success

By Ross Nepean 

Cloud services are everywhere these days, from data backup to music streaming, so it’s not surprising that the cloud has entered the world of records management too. For records managers, the cloud promises cheap and scalable on-demand document storage, which is a very exciting prospect. However, as with all new solutions, the cloud comes with new questions and new challenges. For example, is it legal to store records in the cloud, especially when you can’t be sure of the physical location of the servers on which they are hosted? Who maintains legal control of documents stored in the cloud? Do cloud solutions support retention schedules? Approaching...MORE: 6 Tips for Making Cloud Records Storage a Success

The Evolving Search Experience

By Christian Buckley

Almost 20 years ago, I took a role as a technical project manager in an IT shared services team at the phone company, and got involved in the development and support of our division's portal. A key part of the role was managing the front-end tools and reports made available to our internal customers, with some data and reporting capabilities consumed through our portal. As I began working with the many different vendors and with my DB team to provide data and reports to our internal power users, I was introduced into the world of search -- with all of its nuances and limitations. I can't tell you how many meetings I sat through or conducted...MORE: The Evolving Search Experience

Enterprise File Sync and Share - Not What You Think It Is

By Chris Walker

When Gartner came out with their Magic Quadrant for Enterprise File Sync and Share (EFSS) back in July 2014 I laughed a little because I find the idea of an EFSS market, well, laughable. Yes, I know they put in a whole bunch of stuff about what could or should be part of the market, but boiled down it seemed to me that EFSS per Gartner is little more than the old Microsoft Briefcase. I.e.: a feature of a larger solution. Let’s face it; EFSS is little more than email and consumer grade cloud storage. If I were Box, EMC, Alfresco and most of the other vendors on the MQ I’d be more than a little irked. Most of the vendors have invested heavily, organically...MORE: Enterprise File Sync and Share - Not What You Think It Is

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Check out -- 23 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE My First ECM/Content Management Project.

What are the 6 Information Management Trends That Will Redefine the New Normal?

The six trends below are by AIIM15 Speaker and Data Crush author Chris Surdak.  Get over 50 pages of simliar insights about the future in our new e-book, Embrace the Chaos, A Comprehensive Preview of #AIIM15.

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1 -- QUALITY: Consumers simply expect perfection. Deliver anything less, and your customers will immediately abandon you for someone else.

2 -- 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.

3 -- IMMEDIACY: Globalization, Logistics and smartphones with apps have also created the expectation of immediate gratification. Customers want their needs fulfilled instantly, and now predictively.

4 -- DISENGAGEMENT: 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.

5 -- 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.

6 -- 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.

5 Technology Predictions for the Next 20 Years

OK, 20 years is a LONG time.  But getting ahead of the curve -- and helping your organization get ahead of the curve -- is what AIIM15 is all about.  

The five predictions below are by AIIM15 Keynoter Tom Koulopoulos from the Delphi Group.  Get over 50 pages of simliar insights about the future in our new e-book, Embrace the Chaos, A Comprehensive Preview of #AIIM15.

From Tom: -- "As a child I couldn’t grasp the concept gravity. If you drop an object from twice as high it doesn’t take twice as long to reach the ground. It only takes 1.4 times as long. The reason is that the higher the object the more time it has to accelerate. (Yes, for those of you who did pay attention in physics class, I’m leaving out air resistance, distance from sea level, and terminal velocity.) The simplest analogy is to think of pulling onto a highway. When you accelerate from 0-105 KPH in ten seconds you are actually covering more ground with each passing second."

So what does this have to do with the future? Well, the future has its own form of gravity that pulls us to it faster and faster, it’s called technology, and we simply cannot project technology change at the same rate going forward as it has occurred in the past.

Here are 5 examples of trends that will shape the future of business:

1 -- Open sourcing patents. The days of winning through protecting IP are numbered.

2 -- The Death of Retirement. 50% of all Millenials and Gen Zers plan to be self employed. Retirement is history. Every Knowledge worker will need to build their own brand to sustain themselves for life.

3 -- Higher Education will crumble under its own weight. Trillion dollar debt load on students and their parents. Open classrooms for anyone with a mobile device anywhere on the planet. Research funded by the crowd.

4 -- We will no longer understand how computers work. The promise of artificial intelligence has always been measured against how well a computer can think like a human. The real shift will occur when computers think in ways we can’t even begin to understand.

5 -- Half of all new cars will be self-driving. We fear them and chuckle at them as a curiosity today. But, self-driving cars are like dishwashers or washing machines; once you get another month of your life handed over to you you’ll never, ever think of giving it back.

Stretch your “getting ready for the future” chops.  Join us at AIIM15.  Check out the full AGENDA.

And check out the (free to all) Conference e-book.

Check out -- 23 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE My First ECM/Content Management Project.

How to Move Beyond Having Every Big Data Conversation Begin and End with Hadoop

Organizations of all sizes are struggling with how to extract insight and mitigate risk relative to the massive volumes of information and data that they're accumulating.  This isn’t just a question of big data—it is also a question of dark data, trapped in long-forgotten repositories, often without metadata. This is content and information that just begs for the light of day through semantics and analytics.

Big data initiatives to date have been almost exclusively driven by IT.  These initiatives are focused on the question of "how do we apply technology to manage large volumes of data?"  

New content analytics and semantic technologies allow you to move beyond the sheer volume question and ask "What kinds of questions and hypotheses should we be testing with our data?" In other words, how does insight into our data change the very nature of the questions we ask and hypotheses we form in our businesses?

How can your organization get business INSIGHT out of all the information you are gathering?  At AIIM15, find out how to change to conversation about Big Data from a conversation about Hadoop to one about the BUSINESS role of Big Data.  Get a preview of the INSIGHT sessions HERE.

Here's a fun ebook, free to all, covering some of the sessions at #AIIM15.

Check out -- 23 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE My First ECM/Content Management Project.

Why Should You Worry About Collaboration?

According to Gallup, in AVERAGE organizations, 33 percent of workers are engaged in their jobs, 49 percent are not engaged, and 18 percent are actively disengaged. On the other hand, in WORLD-CLASS organizations, the numbers are vastly different: 67 percent of workers are engaged in their jobs, 26 percent are not engaged, and only 7 percent are actively disengaged.

Unfortunately, most organizations still look like the fictional company Dunder Mifflin in the show The Office. Most of the systems that are used to engage employees are an afterthought.  In far too many organizations, "collaboration" is just another name for sending around big attachments on email to a long list of recipients, asking everyone to "comment," and then sending those comments via a "reply-all" message.  

Some advice from AIIM’s community of 80,000 practitioners:

1 -- If you're not fully engaging your employees, your business is probably falling behind the competition.

2 -- You can no longer assume that engagement will happen serendipitously in your organization.

3 -- You need to think strategically about the information systems that are necessary to make it happen.

Help your organization address this strategic challenge by comparing notes with hundreds of other fellow-travelers at AIIM15.  Check out the ENGAGE track.  

New predictions from Brian Solis, Tom Koulopoulos, and Chris Surdak are in our new e-book.

Check out -- 23 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE My First ECM/Content Management Project.

Moving Beyond the Call Center from Hell

There is a critical need to rethink how we engage with customers. Most organizations have a thin veneer of social engagement -- a twitter account, or a Facebook site, or a mobile app.

The challenge moving forward is that most of these systems are basically a veneer, unconnected with core back-end business processes. Everyone has experienced the Call Center from hell, where you wait in a long queue for a real person, only to have to constantly restate information to all of the various people with whom you speak. 

Organizations have long had a challenge with building a 360-degree view of the customer. In an era of radical transformation, this problem is getting more pronounced -- except now, the customer has social power to immediately tell the world when they've had a bad experience with your business.  Some call getting your arms around this Case Management (often those with a document perspective, some call it Customer Experience Management (often those with a WCM perspective), but at the core of both is aligning people with processes and information.  (See my earlier 2015 prediction post, 2015 Prediction No. 6 -- Case Management Lights Up (Or A Rose By Any Other Name?)

Think about these data points:

1 -- 54% of organizations are finding the rapid convergence of collaboration and social tools to be very confusing.

2 -- 65% of organizations as say that their employees struggle to access internal information from mobile devices.

3 -- 50% of organizations believe that they have shortfalls in technical support for internal collaboration.

4 -- 42% of organizations struggle with rationalizing the many ways customers engage with them and connecting these inputs to key business systems.

Your back-end business processes are now exposed, warts and all.  Get serious about customer experience management at AIIM15.

Check out our e-book with predictions from Brian Solis, Tom Koulopoulos, Chris Surdak, and others:

Check out -- 23 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE My First ECM/Content Management Project.

Weekly Roundup -- 8 #ECM and #Infogov Posts You May Have Missed...

1. How Do We Focus the C-Suite on #ECM? -- Or Do We Need to Change OUR Tune?
2. Confess – Are Your Processes Better Suited for 1995 than 2015?
3. 4 Trends That Will Force You to Rethink Your Processes
4. Checklist for ECM Project Success – 14 Steps
5. If I want to buy a car, why do you insist on explaining how the pistons work in the engine?
6. 4 Data Points That Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Information Risk
7. 3 Reasons You Need to Get Serious About Information Governance and Information Risk
8. Oil & Gas: The Move From Documents to Data

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Check out the AIIM15 Full Conference Agenda and download our free Conference preview e-book.

4 Trends That Will Force You Confess -- Are Your Business Processes Better Suited for 1995 than 2015?

"It was 20 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play..." And also, 20 years ago is a pretty realistic picture for most organizations of what many of their back-end business processes look like.

It's time to act -- check out 4 Trends That Will Make You Rethink Your Processes.

The amount of paper still used in your business processes is a good indicator of how far behind you are in preparing your organization to address the challenge of digital transformation.  Think about these data points...

1 -- In 25% of organizations the volume of physical paper is increasing instead instead of decreasing.

2 -- Even when organizations deploy scanning technologies to reduce their use of paper, 16% of the original paper documents still get photocopied before scanning, and 65% of these documents are not destroyed or recycled after scanning. In other words the paper still survives, and keeps piling up.

3 -- Even business processes that many think were automated a long time ago still use significant amounts of paper. For organizations committed to financial automation, 44% of their invoices initially arrive in electronic form, yet 59% of those digital invoices will still end up as a paper copy.

Reinventing your core processes is clearly critical to building your digital transformation strategy. AIIM15 will give you the tools to succeed.

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How should your organization TRANSFORM and AUTOMATE your information-intensive business processes? This free e-book provides some tips:

Join us at AIIM15 and connect with hundreds of other executives wrestling with these challenges and get access to sessions like these... Full List of Conference sessions HERE.

• AIIM Certified Information Professional Briefing
• AIIM BPM Practitioner Training Session
• AIIM ECM Practitioner Training Session

• The Race to Digital Transformation -- Keynote Speaker: Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter Group
• Industry Insights 2020 Expert Panel -- Focus on Process Transformation
• The Gen Z Effect; The Six Forces Shaping the Future of Business -- Keynote Speaker: Tom Koulopoulos, Founder, Delphi Group and author of nine books
• Living the Digital Transformation Dream -- Case Study -- ConocoPhilips -- Keynote Speaker: Christy Clark, Director Enterprise Content Management, ConocoPhillips
• Living the Digital Transformation Dream -- Case Study -- Yale School of Medicine -- Keynote Speaker: Daniel Barchi, CIO, Yale School of Medicine & Yale-New Haven Health System

• Innovative Use of SharePoint 2013 for IKM in a 9000+ Person Organization -- Barry Byrne, Sr Information & Knowledge Mgt Officer, Irish Defence Forces HQ
• Before Leaping Into That Technical Solution, Consider Assessing Your ECM Status -- Alix Kneifel, Owner/Principal Consultant, A.Kneifel and Associates
• What the Oil and Gas Industry Can Tell You About Documents and Data -- Neale Stidolph, Head of Information Management, Lockheed Martin UK
• Smooth is Fast: Transforming Your ECM Strategy -- Rich Medina, Co-Founder, & Principal Consultant, Doculabs
• Letting Go Of "Perfect": A Case Study of a One Size Fits All RIM SharePoint -- Renee Latham, Director, ERM, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, and Christine Padilla, Director, ECM, Sunovion Pharmaceutical
• Change Management: From Chaos to Transformation -- Laurie Fischer, Managing Director, Huron Consulting Group
• and much, much MORE.

4 Trends That Will Force You to Rethink Your Processes

1 -- The walls that used to exist between your customers and all those messy back-office operations are being torn down by social technologies. Organizations can no longer hide the weakness in their processes.  Customers are PART of our businesses now, and can voice their displeasure vocally and immediately via social outlets if they confront dated and inefficient legacy systems.

2 -- The next five years will witness a massive reinvention of business processes. If the first wave of automation was all about digitizing existing processes, the next wave will be much more radical and involve the actual reinvention of processes from the ground up. Who have ever thought that an entrenched business like the taxi business could be eclipsed by a newcomer like Uber?

3 -- AIIM data indicates that organizations still have a significant gap between what their customers see -- their external-facing systems of engagement -- and how business actually gets done -- their core back-end systems of record.  Most organizations just have a thin veneer of engagement, with messy back-end processes that are ripe for disclosure.

4 -- Organizations understand that they have to automate and they need to expose their back-end processes to the light -- 68% of organizations agree that business at the speed of paper will be "unacceptable" in just a few years. Getting there, though, is quite another thing.  Our data suggests that most organizations have a long way to go.

How should your organization TRANSFORM and AUTOMATE your information-intensive business processes? This free e-book provides some tips:

Join us at AIIM15 and connect with hundreds of other executives wrestling with these challenges and get access to sessions like these... Full List of Conference sessions HERE.

• AIIM Certified Information Professional Briefing
• AIIM BPM Practitioner Training Session
• AIIM ECM Practitioner Training Session

• The Race to Digital Transformation -- Keynote Speaker: Brian Solis, Principal, Altimeter Group
• Industry Insights 2020 Expert Panel -- Focus on Process Transformation
• The Gen Z Effect; The Six Forces Shaping the Future of Business -- Keynote Speaker: Tom Koulopoulos, Founder, Delphi Group and author of nine books
• Living the Digital Transformation Dream -- Case Study -- ConocoPhilips -- Keynote Speaker: Christy Clark, Director Enterprise Content Management, ConocoPhillips
• Living the Digital Transformation Dream -- Case Study -- Yale School of Medicine -- Keynote Speaker: Daniel Barchi, CIO, Yale School of Medicine & Yale-New Haven Health System

• Innovative Use of SharePoint 2013 for IKM in a 9000+ Person Organization -- Barry Byrne, Sr Information & Knowledge Mgt Officer, Irish Defence Forces HQ
• Before Leaping Into That Technical Solution, Consider Assessing Your ECM Status -- Alix Kneifel, Owner/Principal Consultant, A.Kneifel and Associates
• What the Oil and Gas Industry Can Tell You About Documents and Data -- Neale Stidolph, Head of Information Management, Lockheed Martin UK
• Smooth is Fast: Transforming Your ECM Strategy -- Rich Medina, Co-Founder, & Principal Consultant, Doculabs
• Letting Go Of "Perfect": A Case Study of a One Size Fits All RIM SharePoint -- Renee Latham, Director, ERM, Sunovion Pharmaceuticals, and Christine Padilla, Director, ECM, Sunovion Pharmaceutical
• Change Management: From Chaos to Transformation -- Laurie Fischer, Managing Director, Huron Consulting Group
• and much, much MORE.

Checklist for ECM Project Success – 14 Steps

I recently put together a short white paper distilling my years of ECM experience into 14 steps –here’s a snapshot:

1. Keep your eye on the goal, and close tabs on the project.
2. Create a framework for understanding how you will protect your information assets.
3. Take time to get management buy-in on the front end.
4. Explicitly think about how and when you will communicate about the project.
5. Conduct an information survey to determine present-state.
6. Create a business case with financial teeth.
7. Build business and system requirements tied to the business case.
8. Create a business classification scheme as a frame to your content.
9. Clearly define user categories, roles, and contexts.
10. Inventory the existing (and missing) people and technology assets to support the project.
11. Create a meaningful pilot.
12. Create a detailed roll-out plan – and follow it.
13. Create a fall-back plan.
14. After initial implementation, take time to determine and commit to next steps.

The full white paper is HERE and FREE. Check it out.