The #AIIM15 Digital Transformation Hot Seat: The Dark and Dirty of Big Data

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.