Digital Landfill

[The opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Kurt Mueffelmann, CEO of HiSoftware.]

For those that have been readers for a while, this will be the last guest post in the "5 myths" and "8 things" series.  I still love guest posts -- thanks to the hundreds of contributors -- but I think it's time for a fresh structure.  Stand by -- and ideas welcome! 

5 Myths about SharePoint Content Protection

A CIO recently said to me, “SharePoint? What a security nightmare…”At first I was taken aback – SharePoint can be a great tool for CIO’s looking to protect content. But having worked with SharePoint content for years, I know the protections that are in place automatically – and the ones that fit into current workflow– to help organizations embrace secure collaboration.

But for many people, the idea of collaboration of any kind, even formalized in SharePoint, leads to visions of unsecure content flitting about cyber space.  They couldn’t be more wrong. According to Symantec’s 2011 Cost of Data Breach Study released last month, employee negligence factors into 39% of data breaches. When used correctly, SharePoint can work to eliminate the possibility of that negligence.

Here are 5 things people think about implementing SharePoint Security that are just flat out incorrect.

Myth #1 -- Collaboration Puts Content at Risk.

The most fundamental myth about SharePoint content protection is the idea that collaboration inherently makes content less secure. But that isn’t the case in SharePoint. When used correctly, SharePoint can significantly reduce the risks associated with sharing files. The system protects content by housing it securely and eliminating the need for email  - a huge potential for risk.

SharePoint left to its own devices does not provide the best possible security for your content. Technology vendors (like mine, let’s not kid ourselves) have developed a number of tools to support SharePoint content and promote security and efficient collaboration. But myths about them exist as well.

Myth #2 -- One Size Fits All.

There are people in technology that think in terms of band-aids or cures. SharePoint security solutions can offer both. But before you decide what you need, you need to know what your up against.

Step one is to assess your data so you have a strong understanding of the problem you face, giving you the information so you can judge the situation. Based on this information, you can make the best decision about the need for a content solution and what will work best for your organization. The fact is that data trumps opinion every time and an assessment provides the information you need to make your case to the rest of your organization.

Many technology vendors that automate information security, compliance and monitoring offer assessment services or trials so you can better understand the breadth of the problem and figure out how a solution might work within your environment. An assessment will help you document your organization’s unique needs and ensure that the technology solution that you’re implementing addresses your biggest concerns.

Myth #3 -- You Can Do it On Your Own.

Because SharePoint is a collaboration tool, many people in an organization are invested in its success and policies. Neither a SharePoint administrator nor a CTO should jump into a SharePoint content solution without the buy-in, and more importantly the participation of a number of people in the organization.

It’s best to set up a Governance Board comprised of people from several different departments. If your CIO wants to establish certain policies, it won’t do any good without the advice and support of the SharePoint Administrator. Creating a defensible, written information security plan empowers your organization to address blind spots inside SharePoint and minimize fallout from breaches if they should happen.

Myth #4 -- File-Level Security is Fine.

The people who use the SharePoint system everyday do not make content security their priority. And no matter how much it is YOUR priority, that reality will never change. Expecting users to appropriately file content within SharePoint,

Classifying and securing your SharePoint content at the file level changes that. In concert with a full assessment, developing a complete classification of content and documents can secure your system. Once you classify information, you can use that to limit distribution, thereby ensuring the security of each piece of information rather than relying on folder-level security. In this scenario, each document that has a credit card number or the name of the secret project only gets into trusted hands.

Myth #5 -- The End is Near.

The end of installation is hardly the end of SharePoint security. The policies and technologies you have put in place to protect your SharePoint content are a critical part of keeping content secure, but not enough. Ongoing auditing and monitoring are vital to the success of your implementation and provide a strong backbone of support for regulators and auditors.

If not controlled properly, SharePoint can create the major weak point that CIO’s fear and can have significant consequences for your organization. By understanding and overcoming these 5 myths, companies can embrace collaboration wholly and reap the benefits it has to offer.

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More information on HiSoftware can be found here.

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Information on Automating Records Management with SharePoint is HERE.

 

 

 

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Faine Mende, President of North American Operations at ActiveDocs. As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

All organizations produce documents, some even hundreds or thousands a day. Information contained in these documents is often vital to business – from producing sales quotations, policy and procedure documents to employment or legal contracts. While some content in these documents will change, other aspects, such as its structure and how it is formatted, may not. In other words, many documents contain repetitive content that changes little from one document to the next and variable content that must be accurately personalized. Document automation can streamline the creation of the simplest or most complex corporate document but many companies are confused by how it works. Below are 5 Myths organizations need to think about when considering how they handle document creation.

Myth #1: Document automation is only Word Merge.

Reality:  Microsoft® Word mail merge is a desktop-based application and allows users to create large volumes of documents by populating “merge fields” in templates pulling data from external sources such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Access Database or other OLE DB/ODBC standard compliant resources. Since it is not a server application the mail merge is processed on the end user’s desktop and the resulting documents are saved on the desktop, in a file system or printed directly by the end user. The performance of the application is also limited by the end user machine and it can easily tie up an end-user machine for long periods. More importantly, scalability cannot be achieved. The mail merge functionality can only be enhanced by using custom made VB Scripts for each application/mail merge template. This can increase template creation and maintenance costs, as well as make the template itself more complex. On top of this if templates are subject to a workflow, an additional application must be deployed to manage the editing, audit and approval needs. Microsoft Word is therefore not ideal for high volume automated document production due to the limitations on scalability and unmanned document production capabilities.

In general, Microsoft Word mail merge satisfies the document production needs of an individual or small business/department, in the same way that Microsoft Word as a text editor allows full customization of documents. However its deployment as a corporate solution for document creation is questionable as manual document editing and customization by using complex fields in a template is error prone which is not acceptable when creating customer-facing documents.

Myth #2: My contracts/proposals are all perfect.

Reality: What goes into corporate document management systems as approved language is often a free-for-all of broken procedures, bypassed controls, outdated boilerplates and inaccurate numbers. Documents created through these all-too-common processes, such as contracts for example, often leave companies open to penalties and legal liability. The cause isn’t negligence, but inadequate technology.

Most companies have business rules around document preparation to minimize their risk exposure. Very few of them have a cohesive system for enforcing those rules where documents are actually created – on employees’ desktops. Rules and procedures are fine, but when there is no way to express them through the technology systems used to create documents, they’re easy to circumvent – deliberately or accidentally. At the end of the day, most companies have more effective controls around their processes for buying office supplies than they do for creating legally binding documents.

This lack of control at the front end of the document management process – creating the actual document – leaves companies open to risk. As anyone involved in document creation knows, one errant phrase can cost a company millions. Insufficient or non-existent document automation increases the chances that the errant phrase will end up in the contract. Companies respond to that risk in two ways. Those serious about reducing their risk exposure search for products that will improve their front-end document preparation. Those not serious about reducing their exposure issue more memos and procedures so they have plausible deniability if something goes wrong, which it often does.

Myth #3: It’s okay if my sales guy spends four hours creating a proposal.

Reality:  According to Gartner Group, documents claim up to 60 percent of office worker time and account for up to 45 percent of labor costs – too much time spent on mundane tasks vs. focusing on core competencies and bringing in revenue. To understand the time spent in your own organization consider these questions: How are documents created in your business? Copy and paste? Built from scratch every time? Or, built from user-unfriendly templates where all the information is entered by hand (even if you already have it in another system) and can't be validated or repeated (so if the customer's name appears twice, you have to enter it twice) or have business rules and logic applied? None of these methods is efficient or accurate. They are time-consuming, error-prone, and almost guaranteed to create problems further down the line. Input costs are increased, and productivity suffers. By automating the process you can have more efficient and accurate document creation. Copy-and-paste, and build-from-scratch approaches are eliminated.

Myth #4: My documents are too complex to be automated.

Reality: Many documents become more complex as information is pulled from outside of the application that is creating them. Pricing information needs to be looked up in an Excel spreadsheet, financial management or ERP system, while customer address details have to be looked up in a CRM system, for example. But document automation software takes advantage of the latest XML technologies to enable intelligent, “active” documents that can be produced automatically with ease. They include tools such as wizard-driven forms that replace the traditional macro and template driven approach to performing repetitive Word tasks. They seamlessly access external data sources and repositories of text-based data relevant to the Word document being created, eliminating the need to copy and paste. And because the information comes from live sources, it’s always up to date, no matter how complex the data or the resulting document.

Myth #5: Document automation is just document management.

Reality: Document automation technology is often mistaken for the document management software common in most industries. Document management software is not designed to help companies avoid contract creation problems. Its purpose is to maintain the integrity of a document once it’s completed by restricting access and editing privileges, and managing audit trails of who reviews, modifies and approves documents. If the document is flawed to begin with, the document management system can’t help the company fix it. Also, document management systems are often maintained at the departmental level. A sales or project manager might not have direct access to the latest legal or financial content. They have to rely on those departments to send them updated content – an often unreliable process.

Document automation systems are applications that use built-in workflows to structure document creation. They replace word processing applications as the primary tool for creating documents. That’s a crucial change in the document management process. Word processors do not enable the company to enforce business rules. The enforcement is all manual and outside the document creation process. Document automation systems enable organizations to express and enforce their business rules right from the beginning of the process.

Conclusion

By better understanding automated document creation and its benefits over current approaches, organizations can be assured the documents they produce are consistent and of a high quality, and adhere to all corporate standards. These benefits can be accomplished quickly while reducing maintenance and training costs and ensuring the organization can leverage intellectual property, improve staff productivity and provide more efficient service to customers.

About the Author:  Faine Mende is President of North American Operations at ActiveDocs. She can be reached at or .

 

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Faine Mende, President of North American Operations at ActiveDocs. As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

All organizations produce documents, some even hundreds or thousands a day. Information contained in these documents is often vital to business – from producing sales quotations, policy and procedure documents to employment or legal contracts. While some content in these documents will change, other aspects, such as its structure and how it is formatted, may not. In other words, many documents contain repetitive content that changes little from one document to the next and variable content that must be accurately personalized. Document automation can streamline the creation of the simplest or most complex corporate document but many companies are confused by how it works. Below are 5 Myths organizations need to think about when considering how they handle document creation.

Myth #1: Document automation is only Word Merge.

Reality:  Microsoft® Word mail merge is a desktop-based application and allows users to create large volumes of documents by populating “merge fields” in templates pulling data from external sources such as Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Microsoft Access Database or other OLE DB/ODBC standard compliant resources. Since it is not a server application the mail merge is processed on the end user’s desktop and the resulting documents are saved on the desktop, in a file system or printed directly by the end user. The performance of the application is also limited by the end user machine and it can easily tie up an end-user machine for long periods. More importantly, scalability cannot be achieved. The mail merge functionality can only be enhanced by using custom made VB Scripts for each application/mail merge template. This can increase template creation and maintenance costs, as well as make the template itself more complex. On top of this if templates are subject to a workflow, an additional application must be deployed to manage the editing, audit and approval needs. Microsoft Word is therefore not ideal for high volume automated document production due to the limitations on scalability and unmanned document production capabilities.

In general, Microsoft Word mail merge satisfies the document production needs of an individual or small business/department, in the same way that Microsoft Word as a text editor allows full customization of documents. However its deployment as a corporate solution for document creation is questionable as manual document editing and customization by using complex fields in a template is error prone which is not acceptable when creating customer-facing documents.

Myth #2: My contracts/proposals are all perfect.

Reality: What goes into corporate document management systems as approved language is often a free-for-all of broken procedures, bypassed controls, outdated boilerplates and inaccurate numbers. Documents created through these all-too-common processes, such as contracts for example, often leave companies open to penalties and legal liability. The cause isn’t negligence, but inadequate technology.

Most companies have business rules around document preparation to minimize their risk exposure. Very few of them have a cohesive system for enforcing those rules where documents are actually created – on employees’ desktops. Rules and procedures are fine, but when there is no way to express them through the technology systems used to create documents, they’re easy to circumvent – deliberately or accidentally. At the end of the day, most companies have more effective controls around their processes for buying office supplies than they do for creating legally binding documents.

This lack of control at the front end of the document management process – creating the actual document – leaves companies open to risk. As anyone involved in document creation knows, one errant phrase can cost a company millions. Insufficient or non-existent document automation increases the chances that the errant phrase will end up in the contract. Companies respond to that risk in two ways. Those serious about reducing their risk exposure search for products that will improve their front-end document preparation. Those not serious about reducing their exposure issue more memos and procedures so they have plausible deniability if something goes wrong, which it often does.

Myth #3: It’s okay if my sales guy spends four hours creating a proposal.

Reality:  According to Gartner Group, documents claim up to 60 percent of office worker time and account for up to 45 percent of labor costs – too much time spent on mundane tasks vs. focusing on core competencies and bringing in revenue. To understand the time spent in your own organization consider these questions: How are documents created in your business? Copy and paste? Built from scratch every time? Or, built from user-unfriendly templates where all the information is entered by hand (even if you already have it in another system) and can't be validated or repeated (so if the customer's name appears twice, you have to enter it twice) or have business rules and logic applied? None of these methods is efficient or accurate. They are time-consuming, error-prone, and almost guaranteed to create problems further down the line. Input costs are increased, and productivity suffers. By automating the process you can have more efficient and accurate document creation. Copy-and-paste, and build-from-scratch approaches are eliminated.

Myth #4: My documents are too complex to be automated.

Reality: Many documents become more complex as information is pulled from outside of the application that is creating them. Pricing information needs to be looked up in an Excel spreadsheet, financial management or ERP system, while customer address details have to be looked up in a CRM system, for example. But document automation software takes advantage of the latest XML technologies to enable intelligent, “active” documents that can be produced automatically with ease. They include tools such as wizard-driven forms that replace the traditional macro and template driven approach to performing repetitive Word tasks. They seamlessly access external data sources and repositories of text-based data relevant to the Word document being created, eliminating the need to copy and paste. And because the information comes from live sources, it’s always up to date, no matter how complex the data or the resulting document.

Myth #5: Document automation is just document management.

Reality: Document automation technology is often mistaken for the document management software common in most industries. Document management software is not designed to help companies avoid contract creation problems. Its purpose is to maintain the integrity of a document once it’s completed by restricting access and editing privileges, and managing audit trails of who reviews, modifies and approves documents. If the document is flawed to begin with, the document management system can’t help the company fix it. Also, document management systems are often maintained at the departmental level. A sales or project manager might not have direct access to the latest legal or financial content. They have to rely on those departments to send them updated content – an often unreliable process.

Document automation systems are applications that use built-in workflows to structure document creation. They replace word processing applications as the primary tool for creating documents. That’s a crucial change in the document management process. Word processors do not enable the company to enforce business rules. The enforcement is all manual and outside the document creation process. Document automation systems enable organizations to express and enforce their business rules right from the beginning of the process.

Conclusion

By better understanding automated document creation and its benefits over current approaches, organizations can be assured the documents they produce are consistent and of a high quality, and adhere to all corporate standards. These benefits can be accomplished quickly while reducing maintenance and training costs and ensuring the organization can leverage intellectual property, improve staff productivity and provide more efficient service to customers.

About the Author:  Faine Mende is President of North American Operations at ActiveDocs. She can be reached at or .

 

Industry analysts quote the growth of unstructured content at around 40% a year. A big contributor to content growth is Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) files.

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by John Bellegarde is Vice President of Marketing at Active Navigation (www.activenavigation.com).  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1: There is no Content ROT in my organization -- My organization has policies and procedures in place to make sure that there is no ROT in my file servers, collaboration systems or in my ECM system.

Reality: ROT is everywhere. End users control what is put into storage, and they are impossible to control.

First, they are information hoarders. When a user finds a document they like, they save a copy to their “O:” drive. Even worse, they do not feel empowered to delete anything, anytime. They even save archives, backup files and the like. Worst still, they feel that the “O:” drive is the place for their iTunes library and worse personal data.

ROT is created every day, and just compounds as new documents are created. The fact is that 1/3 of all of the content in an unmanaged server is ROT. It can be as much as 70% ROT!

Myth #2: Content ROT isn’t hurting my organization. ROT doesn’t really hurt my organization. We have been in business for years, and this has never been a problem.

Reality: ROT hurts you every day. ROT makes it hard to find the really important documents in your organization. ROT makes it easy to misplace sensitive data, that you don’t want found. ROT places unnecessary risks in your organization that will result in loss of productivity, reputation and increased exposure to litigation. It gums up search engines and their indexes. When people leave the organization their ROT is left behind and gets in the way of others. ROT huts you in just so many ways.

Myth #3: Content ROT isn’t costing my organization anything, so why worry? Disks are cheap now a days, so why care?

Reality: The total cost of ownership for storage is way more than you think. High speed reliable disk itself is about 5X more expensive than the hard drive in your laptop. It sits in servers, that have to be managed, backed up, cooled and the like. Most organizations charge back a Terabyte of content at a cost of between $20,000 - $30,000 a year. An average iTunes library will run $1500/year. If that storage is in SharePoint or an ECM system, multiply that cost x3! A lot more than that 500GB drive at BestBuy.

Myth #4: I have specialized hardware that deals with ROT. My Storage Area Network (SAN) detects duplicates. Isn’t that enough?

Reality: While it is true that specialized hardware can effectively manage some of the storage problems related to ROT, then only handle part of the problem, binary duplicates on the same server. It doesn’t handle near duplicates, out of policy data, sensitive data, and trivial items. What’s more, it doesn’t reduce file count, so search the ROT is still seen by the users and indexed by search engines. There are a lot of great reasons to have high-end storage hardware, but eliminating ROT isn’t one of them.

Myth #5: ROT is hard to eliminate. Even if ROT is costing my organization, it is too hard to find and eliminate.

Reality: In the past, we have left it up to our end users to deal with ROT. They caused the problem in the first place, so they cannot be part of the solution. In the 90’s we tried technology like enterprise search. Search is good at finding bits of ROT, but it isn’t fit for ROT hunting.

What is needed is involving People with a Process and specialized Technology to attack the ROT problem.

• Only People can make the kind of decisions necessary to remove content for a system
• Only Technology can identify ROT and present it for processing
• Without a well-defined Process, it is impossible to take a systematic approach to eliminating ROT.

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About the Author: John Bellegarde is Vice President of Marketing at Active Navigation (www.activenavigation.com). John has worked in content management since the late 80s and is currently helping to clean up the mess earlier generations of solutions has created.

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Some other 5 myths posts...

5 myths about collaboration

5 myths about the paperless office that hinder Document Management adoption

5 myths about working with information in the 21st century

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

5 myths about the CMIS standard

5 myths about SharePoint

5 myths about taxonomy and SharePoint

 

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by John Keadle, a Principal Architect for CSC and a SharePoint Administration Trainer for the USPJ Academy (uspja.com).  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1 -- Communication is simple.

Reality -- We may hope “It will help management get their message out. The executives can clarify their mission. The managers can state the teams’ goals. Issues can be resolved quickly and clearly.”

Collaboration can’t change the fact that, most often, it's impossible or even illegal to say anything of substance down the chain of command except in an office with the door closed. Long term success requires continuous improvement which requires change. Change always causes pain. Pain cannot be allowed to be expressed except in private.

Never mind that no leader wants verbiage appearing above his or her name that has the first typographical, spelling or grammatical error. Consider also the fact that leaders are leaders because they "can accomplish" not because they "can write." They all fear the day some newbie underling just out of freshman comp points out their glaring misuse of passive voice.

As a result, the only thing a leader can say in print is yesterday's news, items that have been exhaustively vetted, approved by all the stakeholders and already implemented. This guarantees that the moment they are posted, they are obsolete audience killers.

Myth #2 -- Task management is simple.

Reality -- We may hope that “Team management software will keep everyone on track. We'll just make a list of everything that we need to do and assign each task to a capable worker. Everyone can check their task list every morning and check off two or three items before lunch and a few more in the afternoon. When those tasks are completed, they are reviewed by subject matter experts and approved by the chain of command.”

First of all, collaboration does not overrule the Peter Principle. Paraphrasing, this assures us that no task is ever assigned to a capable worker. Attracted by higher salaries, capable workers have already left for jobs that they are not capable of doing.

In addition, we can’t ignore the management overhead associated with the task list life-cycle. For example, even if the original list was 85% accurate each imperfection will gate at least two other tasks so that, on day one, only 55% of the list can be acted on and only half of those will actually be started. That leaves us with 27.5% effectiveness on day one. Of course, each gated task will either a) be worked on by a worker oblivious to its futility or b) delivered substantially short of expectations.

This means that on day two, nothing will have gotten accomplished and the task list author will have taken the day for an interview leaving a less capable assistant with his or her own list that's probably only 70% accurate. From here, the math only gets worse.

Myth #3 -- Technology is simple.

Reality -- Somewhere, “teleconferences and web meetings are just as good as working in the same office. We'll share work spaces and track changes. We'll post our documents to the team site, enforce check in\out and control versions.”

Collaboration doesn’t change the fact that our overmatched and overpaid coworkers are under way too much pressure to allow us to spend valuable time troubleshooting a shared meeting solution. Out of kindness, they will offer to let us "take some time to figure it out and reschedule.” By that time, our agenda will be obsolete any we'll have to rework our content. Heaven forbid we've spent any time on a slide deck because it will all be worthless. Even if we get our slide deck to work on everyone's screen, PowerPoint's infinitesimal information transfer rate means, by the third slide, remote attendees will have us on mute while they work through their Facebook backlog. In fact, the only slides that anyone ever pays attention to are the slides they built or slides that have their name on them.

So we post the document and email a link to the team. Let's hope we have not turned on "Track Changes" which will mean that no one will make any because of all those ugly red marks it makes. This means that each of our team members will download the document, make some changes and, because the check in\out process is so onerous, they'll email it to everyone who will do the same. In less than two days, you'll have n^2 irreconcilable versions where n is the number of people on your team that don't know how to use "Track Changes" or "Check in\out."

Myth #4 -- Skills development is simple.

Reality -- We all spout the clichés that “this team site and our office applications will drive productivity. The discussion boards will help with how-to’s and on-boarding. We'll eat our own dog food and never have to reinvent the wheel.”

When we hear ourselves saying these things, we need to ask just how well do we know our team? Does the Venn diagram for our team's software, social and collaborative skills looks like a polka-dotted bedspread where the dots don't even touch?

Typically, in a team of ten, one will know the URL for the team site. One will know how to check in\out, unlock versions and roll back. One will know how to add a second page to Excel. Two will know how to make coffee and the rest little more than the combo numbers at the Wendy's Drive Thru. Anything more involved will be way too complicated for anyone else to understand and the last thing we want to do is make anyone learn how to navigate a new dialog box or edit a host file. However, should one of our team members convince the chain of command to publicize a new solution, the necessary "how-to" documents will be fatal to the author’s productivity and of such low quality that no one will ever figure out how it works.

Myth #5 -- Quality is simple.

Reality -- Of course, we all believe “our collaborative product is superior. We get more people to invest in more, better ideas and end up with a best of breed product.”

In contrast, we can’t ignore the correlation between nobility and capability; our most capable people are also the most considerate, meek and humble. As a consequence, our least capable people are the most stubborn, selfish, ambitious and most determined to leave their mark. To them, "COB Friday" means "lunch-time on Monday," "Code Cut-off" means "I can ignore change management to get my last modules in the build until someone deletes my access," and "user acceptance" means "but it's plated with gold."

Ultimately, our deliverables will be a curious mix of their most outlandish ideas bound together with just enough cleverness and thoughtfulness to meet the lowest level of most critical requirements. All others will be slated to a later release.

So, as you drive your team to be more collaborative, keep in mind how complicated our operations are. Remember that we have star performers and the only collaboration that matters is collaboration that supports them. If their teammates don't appreciate their role, there's no collaborative solution. No matter how sophisticated your approach, or how much technology you employ, your success is really dependent on getting people to get along.

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Some other 5 myths...

5 myths about the paperless office that hinder Document Management adoption

5 myths about working with information in the 21st century

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

5 myths about the CMIS standard

5 myths about SharePoint

5 myths about taxonomy and SharePoint

 

 

[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Robert Hillard from Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1 –We'll all work less hours in the 21st century.

Reality -- In the 1970s and 1980s, many writers -- such as Alvin Toffler in “Future Shock” -- mused that the increasing computing capability available to business and government was going to greatly reduce the work required to run our economy and society.  We were told that in the twenty first century, our biggest challenge would be to decide what to do with all our leisure time! 

For example Mechanix Illustrated published an article in 1968 titled "40 Years in the Future" (by James R. Berry) which confidently stated:  “People (will) have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours."

The reality has turned out to be very different and it’s time to start asking, how did they get it so wrong?  (Or when can I start taking mid-week holidays?)  Affordable computing power has increased as predicted, yet something else must have happened as well?

This is not an academic argument.  Technology projects cost too much and are getting much more expensive despite the continual reduction in the cost of the computing capacity itself.  Despite the elimination of many, if not most, clerical roles from organizations, we are seeing a shortage of available staff to run our businesses.  The status quo is not sustainable.

In the 1980s most businesses had just one form or entry process to complete each major process such as bringing on new staff, registering new customers and creating products.  By the 1990s, businesses introduced call centers and online channels with many different processes – each of which were mirrors of their original process but, ungoverned, created their own unique records, documents and other content – each adding exponentially to the complexity of business computing.  Is the problem that we are creating more data?

Myth #2 – We're creating more data than ever before.

Reality -- I often hear people talking about the amount of data that is being created as being unprecedented.  It isn’t.  What is unprecedented is the disparity of content (such as with all the different business processes) and, even more importantly, its retention.  We are all conditioned to the "growth of data."  This is really lazy language and should be changed to the "growth of the retention of data."  A business process which creates data has probably been always creating it, but until recently it was probably just transient.

When someone proposes a new approach or product, the best way to determine if it is actually new is to measure its use of information.  But what does this mean?

Consider Amazon who recommend books for your future purchase. The data that they use isn't new, you have always had an identity and you always made individual book purchases, it is just that it wasn't previously kept beyond the time of the transaction.  The approach to handling the data is new, but the data isn’t.

While Amazon isn’t really creating new data, a small number of business innovations are actually creating something that didn’t exist before.  Consider the creation of a loyalty scheme by an airline where a new interaction is generated, which is the redemption, which provides new information.

In other words, a small number of people are writing something new.  However, the rest of us may have just stopped throwing-out the rubbish and may even be able to extract some value from it.

Myth #3 – An infinite crowd is infinitely wise.

Reality -- All that data needs someone to bring it together.  It’s very fashionable at the moment to deal with quantity and complexity of information by turning to a crowd.  After all, an answer from the crowd (such as with Wikipedia) is always better than something you could produce from your own small team, right?

The wisdom of the crowd is great, but it isn’t going to differentiate your business in the longer term– after all, that great idea is probably available to everyone else.  True “ah ha” moments come from unique insight, the lone inventor (or small team) who look at a problem in a completely different way.

The crowd can find an idea that already exists in the mountains of information rubbish (through six degrees of separation), refine the answer or test the insight.  Ultimately though, the crowd is best at ensuring that we maintain the status quo.  We are herd animals and the crowd is the ultimate herd!

We have to stop assuming that the analysis of massive amounts information by massive numbers of people will always give us a better answer.  The next “big idea” to solve world hunger, fix the economy or improve the environment isn’t likely to be a small increment to existing approaches sourced by the crowd.  The next “big idea” takes a genius who is prepared to turn their back on the herd and take the risk of being wrong.

Myth #4 – Email was a 20th century tool.

Reality -- Because people assume that we are now always going to be working as part of a crowd, there is a movement to get rid of email.  What role does one-on-one communication have anyway?  Plus, most of us are being buried under a mountain email and desperately want a way out!

Rather than give up on the modern version of the business “memo," there are two quick things that we can do:

First, allow staff to declare themselves “email bankrupts."  The act of doing so will result in a message to all who have sent an email outstanding in their inbox, that nothing prior to the given date will be read or actioned.  The bankrupt then has a clean inbox and a fresh start.  Declaring bankruptcy should have some consequences, but they must not be too serious (name and shame would normally suffice).  In addition, like a financial bankrupt, they should be given some assistance to help them avoid the situation in the future.

Second, encourage staff (starting with yourself) to batch email sends.  Email was created based on the metaphor of paper memos.  Those memos went through an internal or external mail system (“snail mail”) that caused a natural lag in the communication.  People typically looked at their incoming mail in the morning when they came to work.  If there was a backlog of mail they took it home in their briefcase to read and reply – but the sending was done the next day.

Modern email clients allow us to set the priority of email and to delay their sending for a few hours or until the next day in business hours.  IT leaders should encourage the use of this feature. 

The result of this batching is that you still get the sense of being in control of your inbox without the depressing reality of a flood of replies coming in as fast as you deal with them.  As people get used to you working this way they will consider their reply carefully so as to maximize the value in the information that you return, knowing that they can’t create a dynamic conversation.

Myth #5: All documents and unstructured content are equivalent.

Reality -- A part of responsible rather than quick communication is putting the information in context.  We assume that all content is equal and don’t put it in the context of where it sits in the organization.  All material can be identified as sitting at one of four layers in the information landscape:

Layer 1: Metrics -- For information to be used for management decision making, it ultimately needs to be summarized into a score or metrics against which “good” or “bad” can be defined.

Layer 2: Dimensional or Navigational -- At this layer we are talking about structuring the content in way that we can find in a systematic way (via a taxonomy).  It is from here that metrics, such as a count or score, can be derived.  It is also from here that we go to find content in its general form.

Layer 3: Normalized or Atomic -- In the unstructured sense it is better to use the term “atomic” for this layer which contains the content in its original form referenced by the event that created it rather than a business taxonomy.

Layer 4: Operational -- The fourth layer is the front line and refers to the situation and technology context in which the content is created or updated.

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Other 5 myths articles...

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

5 myths about the CMIS standard

5 myths about SharePoint

5 myths about taxonomy and SharePoint

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[As is the case with our 8 things series, the opinions expressed in the 5 myths guest columns are those of the guest contributor and not necessarily mine or AIIM's.  This guest post is by Northern Light's CEO C. David Seuss.  As usual, contra perspectives welcome.]

Myth #1 -- SharePoint was not developed by a secret team of Microsoft Tribbles.

Reality -- Actually, I believe it was.  Many companies today are discovering that SharePoint has led to a rapid and uncontrolled spawning of user-created portals, just like that cute but pesky first pair of tribbles that spawned so many offspring so quickly that they almost overwhelmed the starship Enterprise.  I have heard many companies report to their astonishment that after deploying SharePoint they had thousands of SharePoint sites thrown up by employees.  One company recently told me, as they tried to work through a degree of shock that suggested the need for professional therapeutic intervention, that they had determined just that morning that there were 30,000 SharePoint sites on their network.  Surely a team of programming tribbles produced such an application.

Myth #2 -- You can share stuff with SharePoint.

Reality -- You cry out, “How can this be a myth?”  Before SharePoint, there was the option of central document repositories focused on tasks like market research, competitive intelligence, or technology research.  Everyone would know where to go to find the company's material in the relevant domain.  Now, with SharePoint sites being created by every department, geographic division, functional area, project team, committee, brand team, company softball team, and even individual staff members worldwide, there might be scores, hundreds, or thousands of places on the company intranet with just a little bitty piece of the puzzle.  The easiest way to not share something is to obscure its location from people that might want it by scattering it against a giant backdrop of other material.  Presto, hidden in "plain site!"

Myth #3 -- You can find the stuff you need with SharePoint Search.

Reality -- Who thought of this one?  Once again, the easiest way to keep people from finding what they need is to put it in the middle of a lot of stuff they don't.  If there are hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of sites posting content mentioning products, organizational units, competitors, marketing programs, development projects, employees, job titles, and everything else with no versioning, aging, quality control, strategic focus, or semblance of overall organization, the high quality material fades to obscurity on search results, diluted way down by the mass of material, no matter how good the search technology.

Myth #4 -- SharePoint won't share inappropriately.

Reality -- Yes, dear reader, SharePoint can implement traditional enterprise security models that are often effective for securing file directories, applications, and entire document repositories.   But there are whole categories of content that do not easily fit into standard enterprise security constructs.  For example, consider licensed external research reports from industry experts and analysts.  Such reports and content feeds often carry severe restrictions on who can seem them.  For example, a particular Gartner research report might be licensed only to one person, while another report from Gartner might have been purchased with the rights to share it internally.  Or one Forrester content collection might be restricted to a department, while another is enterprise wide.   SharePoint is totally uninformed on third-party licensed and purchased content usage restrictions.  Make SharePoint your collaboration platform for licensed external content and kiss your business rules goodbye on who can see what.  I have been told of multiple cases of invoices for hundreds of thousands of dollars being delivered to companies by third-party information providers for single reports purchased with seat restrictions and then posted by well meaning but clueless employees on generally-available internal SharePoint sites.

Myth #5 -- SharePoint is a user-level tool, so it won't break the IT department.

Reality -- This is my favorite myth about SharePoint.   SharePoint is supposedly easy enough to use that anyone can create a personal, team, or department portal.   And that is maybe true for a rudimentary portal that posts some documents and does light-weight RSS reading.  But if a user with average computer skills decides to do anything more -- like install a Web Part, create a vertical content feed, or set security levels for documents -- the likelihood of success drops to roughly the equivalent of trying to hike Death Valley in the summer without a map.  Rescue by experts will be required.   So get yourself 5,000 SharePoint installations on your intranet and you also get yourself 5,000 new applications that need IT support.   But since IT budgets are unlimited and IT staff is sitting around all day reading gear-head magazines because there is no IT backlog to work on, that shouldn't be a problem.

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About the Author - C. David Seuss joined Northern Light in July of 1996, as employee number 18. He describes that time period as when “there were 17 engineers and me in a basement.” Several years later, it was David who led an employee group in purchasing Northern Light from its corporate parent in 2003. David is the inventor of Northern Light’s technology for the automated extraction of meaning from research documents, for which Northern Light received a patent in January 2011. He is the author of “Teaching Search Engines To Interpret Meaning,” Published in the Proceedings of the IEEE in April 2011.  David has an industrial engineering degree from Georgia Tech (from which he received the Distinguished Alumni Award in 2002) and an MBA with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School. Check out David’s blog, In-Depth Understanding. 

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Other guest posts in the "5 myths" series...

5 myths about records management

5 myths about enterprise social media

5 myths about SharePoint records management

5 myths about electronic document management for small business

5 myths about collaboration in the enterprise

5 myths about document automation and electronic document creation

5 myths about ECM ROI

5 myths about document management

5 myths about the CMIS standard