Digital Landfill

The new report from AIIM's Executive Leadership Council , “C-Change: Consumerization and Its Impacts” is available for download from the AIIM website at www.aiim.org/consumerizationofIT. The report provides global executives insight on how to apply next-generation business strategies to technologically-enable modern workers. 

The key findings for “C-Change” are based on two ELC sessions led by Thornton May, futurist and dean of the IT Leadership Academy that were held in London and Chicago last spring. During the summits, ELC members set out with a plan to look beyond BYOD and social media technologies to explore consumerization of IT and its relevancy to business from a worker perspective. The results were unexpected revealing that consumerization of IT was less about the technology and more about the desire to do the right thing, with the right tool at the right time. 

The Executive Leadership Council is driven by the idea that the C-level executives need to look beyond rapidly emerging trends to focus on the business impact in practical term. The real significance of consumerization of IT is that it’s the beginning of the golden age of information and technology-drive innovation. We live in exciting times and by working with the ECL can provide guidance to enable C-Level executives to act accordingly.

Key findings from the ELC meetings show that the perceived disconnect between the fast, cool, bordering-on-free technology outside the enterprise and the alleged slow, un-cool, overpriced technology inside the enterprise is best understood by listening to the information workers. CIOs who have a finger on the pulse of consumerization of IT understand how to empower workers by understanding their needs and then getting out of the way. 

Break-through thinking, value-creating innovation and calculated risks have never been more important to achieving competitive differentiation than in today’s economy. With consumerization of IT, the sea change in expectations being placed on IT staff is real and irreversible. The report concludes that the winners will be those who can capitalize on this disruption. 

A series of use cases and recommendations can be found by downloading the “C-Change: Consumerization and Its Impacts” report atwww.aiim.org/consumerizationofIT

Those of us in the content space have said for years that the vast untamed Wild West of information management is in the world of unstructured information. Unstructured is all of the “stuff” (a technical term) like email, Office files, images, instant messages, social content and, yes, paper, that
surrounds, engulfs and chokes off all those nice theoretical automated processes on those cute workflow diagrams.

In this new world of radically changing technologies and radically increased stakes tied to the effective use of technology, I am convinced that our ability to engage — really engage — our customers, our partners and our employees will be the key to success.

The technologies we deploy will play a role in determining how effective we are in driving this engagement. We can no longer assume that this engagement will happen serendipitously in our organizations or as a byproduct of “serious” technologies.We need to think strategically about engagement and the information systems that are necessary to make engagement happen.

So let’s first think about this rather amorphous thing called “engagement.” Is it important? Does it impact the effectiveness of organizations? Gallup has done some very interesting work in researching the question of
“engagement.” Let’s start with employee engagement.

In Employee Engagement: What’s Your Engagement Ratio, Gallup describes the categories of employees as follows:

Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.

Non-engaged employees have essentially “checked out.” They sleepwalk through workdays. They put in time but don’t approach their work with energy or passion.

Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what engaged co-workers accomplish.

The data suggests that the reality of most organizations is a lot like “The Office,” whether you are talking about the U.S. or the U.K. version. In other words, it’s NOT GOOD. There are an awful lot of Stanley Hudsons and Creed Brattons out there in our organizations.

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. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees in organizations is 1.83:1.

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 7 percent are actively disengaged. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees in average world-class organizations is 9.57:1.

Per Gallup, all of this translates in $370 billion per year in lost productivity in the U.S. alone as a result of disengaged employees.

Gallup has also looked at this question of engagement from the customer perspective in Customer Engagement: What’s Your Engagement Ratio. Their conclusion is that fully engaged customers generate a 23 percent premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue and relationship growth. Organizations that have optimized customer engagement outperform their competitors by 26 percent in gross margin and 85 percent in sales growth.

On the business side, we keep pushing, pushing and pushing for change. We are handicapped by our lack of true technical knowledge, and yet empowered by our perceived heightened level of technical knowledge based on our experiences in the consumer space. We sense that something
should be different, but are not quite sure what.

All we know for sure is that we are spending way too much on all of those old clunky Systems of Record (http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory) and we sure would like to get more value out of our IT spend. We can’t understand why we are spending more and more money on maintaining systems that document the past rather than enable the future.

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Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.  Defined.