How Do I Tame My Information Chaos? 3 Ways to Address it Head-On

Before we get into how to tame your Information Chaos, let’s take a step back and look at WHY so many of us are experiencing it.

These days, business information can come from anywhere, anytime, and in any form. Match this up with a growing volume and variety of the information we’re creating, and you can see how it can quickly get out of hand and become unmanageable without some strategies in place.

Capture Is Not New, But It Does Have to Be Re-Imagined

For many years, information “capture” - or the way we collect information into a useable/manageable format, was somewhat of an afterthought.

• It was something focused primarily on paper documents.
• It was something focused on archiving the document rather than on the extraction of data from the document.
• It was something you did at some point after information entered the organization.
• It was usually done in the context of one particular business process and needed to be customized to that process.

But according to the IDC’s report on The Digitization of the World From Edge to Core, there are three primary locations where digitization is happening and where digital content is being created. These include:

• The Core - traditional and cloud datacenter
• The Edge - enterprise-hardened infrastructures like cell towers and branch offices
• The Endpoints - PCs, smartphones, and IoT devices

The IDC predicts that this “Global Datasphere” will grow from 33 Zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025 and that the endpoints and edge will play an increasingly important role in this growth.

It’s this growth at the edge and endpoints that’s a core reason why information capture can no longer be an afterthought. Information capture must now be viewed as a core part of an organization’s Digital Transformation strategy.

In addition, as organizations seek to automate the capture of the torrent of information arriving all over their organization, these key challenges emerge:

1. Information Volume
2. Information Variety
3. Poor Capture Integration Into Core Line-of-Business Systems
4. A Skills Gap

All of which are tied to automating the understanding of information content and context and paint a clear picture of the twin challenges ahead.

• Information chaos is undermining even the most well-intentioned Digital Transformation initiatives.
• Intelligent Capture is emerging as a necessary strategic capability to address this rising tide of chaos.

3 Ways to Address Your Information Chaos Head-On

Now that we have a better understanding of what we’re up against, we’re better suited to solve it. Start with these three best practices to take on your information chaos head-on:

1. Educate senior management on the link between information chaos and Digital Transformation failure.
2. Educate records and content professionals about the critical skill set they possess in a Digital Transformation journey, and “upsell” these capabilities to senior management.
3. Have a clear and realistic understanding of your Digital Transformation starting point BEFORE rolling out elaborate top-down strategies.

Next Steps – The Intelligent Capture Journey Doesn’t End Here

Intelligent Capture is a journey that doesn’t happen overnight. After incorporating these three recommendations, it’s likely you’ll be looking for your next steps. We put together this FREE report to help you out. The report provides four things that top-performing organizations do to help conquer the rising tide of information chaos with Intelligent Capture, including:

• An Intelligent Capture Checklist
• How to Focus Capture Efforts at the Point of Origination
• Meaningful Process Metrics to Help You Measure Progress
• Future considerations like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning