Digital Landfill: Compliance and records management

September 17, 2013

8 New #AIIM Reports on #Content - And All Free - #ECM #SharePoint

Please enjoy these recent reports and new infographics from AIIM Market Intelligence which are free to download:

The Elephant in the Room is Compliance. Secure collaboration for financial services content via mobile and cloud

Research has shown that 33% of organizations expect to see “half or more” of their employees using iPads, tablets or digital clipboards for filling in forms in 5 years. Is your business ready to handle this shift in a responsible and secure way? Download here.

Mobile Content Security and Productivity

Organizations want their employees to have access to corporate information from mobile devices, but security and compliance are major areas of concern. This white paper measures the concerns over BYOD security, the issues with directly accessing on-premise content, and the collaboration functionality users expect on their mobile devices. Download here.

Jump-start your paper-free journey

The business case for kicking paper out of the organization is overwhelming – it takes up space, slows things down, creates costs and limits flexibility. This white paper looks at why organizations hold back from taking the paper-free step, and discuss the pros and cons of outsourcing document-oriented processes. Download here.

AIIM Trendscape: Content and the Cloud

Recently, AIIM convened a select group of content and information management professionals in London and Chicago, to deliberate the central question of the role that cloud-based technologies will play in the future. We are pleased to present the findings from those deliberations in this executive report. Download here.

SharePoint 2013 – clouding the issues

SharePoint 2013 brings new capabilities but also a number of new challenges. In this report, we look at the ongoing issues of user adoption as an ECM/DM system. We study the impact of the new 2013 features, particularly on third party add-on products. We look at the issues that cloud presents for SharePoint users. Finally, we measure spending plans for licenses, services and add-on products. Download here.

Intelligent Information Management - improving the customer experience

Improving the customer experience is critical to business success and competitive status. This white paper reviews the issues for improving customer experience across multiple input channels and the potential to automate response processes based on capturing and analyzing content. Download here.

AIIM Infographics

A picture is worth a thousand words. These Infographics illustrate the challenges and solutions faced by today's Information Professional. From Social Collaboration to Enterprise Content Management (ECM), everything you need to convey key Information Management concepts is below. Download here.

ECM Maturity: is your ECM system maximized for business value?

Are you new to enterprise content management (ECM) or have you been developing your system for a number of years? Are you making progress fast enough to get the benefits of universal content access across the enterprise and between your core systems - or are you still struggling to get over that initial hurdle of user acceptance? Take this questionnaire.

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Other AIIM research is available at aiim.org/research

Posted at 03:50 PM in 8 things, cloud, Compliance and records management, Industry statistics and research | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

September 12, 2013

If you want the Exec Suite to care about #Information #Governance, you need to clearly answer WHY?

Executives typically care about results and accountability for the following:

1 – Increasing revenues.

2 – Reducing costs.

3 – Reducing risk.

That’s it. And if that’s the case, it is through this triad that the WHY? of information governance must be understood if we’re going to make any progress in this area at all. Let’s take them in reverse order.

Reducing risk. This is perhaps the best understood WHY? of information governance. If you are in an industry in which there are either compliance or litigation concerns and costs (uhhh…let’s see…is there one in which these are not a concern?) then the only way to reduce this risk is to have defensible information management policies.

However, this is where the argument for information governance usually stops. Usually this leaves governance in the hands of people with “Information,” “Legal,” or “Records” in their title. In a tight economy in which competitive pressures are constantly rising, I fear that risk alone is a necessary but not sufficient reason to take information governance seriously. Forrester’s Alan Weintraub notes, “Good information governance isn’t just about risk, it’s about making the business more agile.”

Reduce costs. Left to their own devices, the “business” will view litigation, compliance, storage costs related to ever-increasing volumes of information as externalities. They will assume that “someone else” will pay for it, and continue to engage in a content and information consumption binge that will inevitably result in what IBM’s George Parapadakis calls “content obesity.” Per the Compliance, Governance, and Oversight Council, “90% of the data in the world was created in the last two years. We have reached a tipping point: the growth rate of information now far exceeds IT budgets and the processes for governing that information.”

The ONLY way to reduce these costs is by reducing the scale of information being saved. And the ONLY way to do this effectively is through information governance. And the ONLY way to scale information governance is by automating as much of it as possible.

Increasing revenues. Talk to any executive long enough and inevitably something like the following will come up: “We need to increase customer engagement as a pathway to capturing share and growing revenues.”

For many years, the content management industry has talked about “getting the right information to the right person at the right time to make the right decision.” Even though this rationale was overstated in the early era of content management systems, it is now at the heart of the business problem of customer engagement. Information overload and content chaos threaten to overwhelm our ability to understand and act on customer needs. It is through this prism that we need to consider information governance.

Content and information is the currency that flows through all of our core processes. Absent a strategy and framework for making its management an organizational priority, no one will be accountable for its success or failure. Per Gartner’s Deb Logan – “the root of all of our problems with information…is the fact that there is no accountability for information as such.”

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Convinced you need Information Governance and want to get started? Get this free guide, Waste Disposal -- All Content Isn't Equal.

Posted at 02:50 PM in cloud, Compliance and records management, information certification | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 25, 2013

Defining the Future of Content Management – Part 2 – Emergence of the Extreme Buyer

In our first post on the future of content management -- Defining the Future of Content Management – Part 1 – Evolution of an Industry we talked about the changes that have swept through the content "space" (going all the way back to microfilm), the acceleration of those changes over the past few years, and voiced the opinion that the "ECM" term is started to feel a bit tired.

In this second post, we'll talk abut how the buyer has changed. Driven both by the mainstreaming of content technologies and the entry of consumer technologies into the enterprise, there has been a dramatic evolution in who buys content management and how they approach the content management buy decision.

If you think about the typical buyer profile of the past, he/she usually would fall somewhere into this hierarchy (click on the diagram to enlarge it):

In this world, much of the following was/is true...

The focus of IT was on cost reduction.
Senior executives were largely technology oblivious (one CEO recently told me, "I viewed IT as a big hairball I just hoped would go away.")
Job security was found in system complexity.
As mobile and social entered the world of systems of record, initially just their sheer existence was a source of competitive differentiation.
System implementations were long and paid for by capital expenditures (CAPEX).
Technical skills in and of themselves had value.

As a result of the consumerization of IT in the enterprise, there is now a buyer migration in progress, largely reflected in the "other" side of the above pyramid (again, click to enlarge the image):

In this new world, much of the following is/will be true:

The central mission of IT is value creation.
Senior executives are now technology aware. (Note this is different from technologically-competent, but that's another story.)
The coin of the realm is now simplicity rather than complexity.
We have quickly moved into an environment in which mobile and social are becoming table stakes rather than differentiators in an enterprise IT strategy.
The desired purchase mode is by the drink rather than by the gallon -- OPEX instead of CAPEX. Oh, and also don't talk to me about implementation cycles longer than a quarter.
The really desireable technology players are those with domain/technical skills, but in a business context. Technology staff who can think more like engineers ("How can I fit the pieces together for systems that we didn't necessarily invent here?") have increasing value.

Often I talk about the above migration in this chart:

Now the challenge is that when I talk to people -- both on the buy side AND the sell side -- and ask them where the world is headed, they inevitably point to some version of the right side of the above chart. But when I ask them where all the action and money and effort is NOW, they point to the left side. When I ask them how they will make this migration and how long it will take and what they need to get there, the answer is almost always uncertainty.

And therein lies the central challenge of the next 2-3 years. Our mission at AIIM is to help organizations understand how they build content and governance strategies to navigate the transition. How can we help?

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February 07, 2013

Suppose you could take the #AIIM ERM and ECM Master classes without leaving your desk?

The ERM Virtual Master program provides you with a detailed understanding of ERM including the main elements from all of the training programs, in addition to case study exercises. The course provides complete coverage of records management in the electronic environment for professionals working in both the public and private sector.

Previously, the only way to take this class was by travelling somewhere to take it in person. Now you can take it, with a live instructor (Carl Weise, CRM), right from your desk. (Like one of those on-line university courses.)

The class runs March 12-14. The number of students is limited, so sign up now by going to THIS LINK.

Participants will use their newly gained knowledge to plan, design, and implement an ERM project based on case study exercises and expertise learned from the Strategic, Practitioner, and Specialist Course programs.

LINK FOR REGISTRATION AND INFORMATION.

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We are also making the ECM Master Class available virtually. Learn how to use plan, implement and maintain an ECM environment.

The ECM Master Training Program comprises the main elements from the Practitioner and Specialist programs in addition to a case study exercise. The course provides complete coverage of enterprise content management for professionals working in both the public and private sector.

This class runs May 26-28. Details HERE.

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AIIM ECM Virtual Master Class

AIIM ERM Virtual Master Class

Posted at 01:42 PM in Compliance and records management | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

January 31, 2013

The #Obama Administration's RM Initiative - What Does It Mean to You?

I recently did a webinar with on the impact of the Obama Administration's records management initiative -- not just on the federal government, but on records management in general. The archived webinar is HERE.

The webinar was so much fun I thought I would follow it up with a short series of questions with Sue. Here's the interview.

JM: One of the themes that we explored on the webinar was the notion that the implications of this directive stretch beyond the federal government. Tell me a little bit about how you see those implications and what the directive tells us about sound records management practice.

ST: I think that the Directive brings to light some of the very basic best practices that we have been espousing for RIM for years. First is the acknowledgement that electronic records are the way we conduct the majority of our business and as a result, we must have a strategy to enable the people, process and technology required to manage information in a distributed data environment. Next is the recognition that successful and sustained RIM programs must be led from the highest levels in the organization, hence the Senior Agency Official role that is at the assistant Secretary level. The Directive mentions formal training, certification of Records Officers and the establishment of an occupation classification for RIM employees – all of which are sound records and information management practices for public and private organizations.

JM: One of the themes at the core of the directive is the necessity for regular and sustaining records management training within an organization. Tell me a little bit about the importance of training, and how well organizations have done in providing this training in the past.

ST: Training has been hit or miss – it all depends on the organization’s culture, seriousness of attitude about RIM, and, of course, available resources. I like the use of eLearning courses that can be taken on-line anytime regardless of the physical location of the employee. Employees hear the exact same message and can be tested to determine if they understand the concepts as well as their role and responsibilities. These courses can be supplemented by department-specific training by records officers, or others. I’ve found the “lunch and learn” approach to be very successful. Without proper training and reinforcement, there is no chance that a RIM program can achieve maximum success. It would be great if Records Management can partner with internal Communications or HR departments to ensure on-going communication about the Program through emails, posters, website entries, or special events.

JM: I like your concept of thinking in big buckets rather than micro buckets when it comes to setting up classification and taxonomy schemes. At the core of our conversation was the idea of getting something right and moving on rather than biting off too much and not being able to actually implement. Tell me about your concept of big buckets and how they ultimately play into our ability to use technology to automatically classify records.

ST: Dr. Susan Cisco spearheaded the call for big buckets a couple of years ago. What’s interesting is that in her research some of the early adopters of big buckets were the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2003 and the U.S. Patent Office in 2004. We know from research the fewer series or classes of records with more distinction between them are easier for humans and machines to classify records – whether that is through auto-assisted classification or auto-classification. I like to think of “right-sizing” schedule series to create those greater distinctions while not increasing any element of risk.

JM: The concept of designating a senior agency official or SAO with ultimate responsibility for the creation and enforcement of records management practices and procedures within an agency is a significant new departure. Do you have any insights as to how effective the agencies have been so far in designating these SAOs?

ST: I don’t have much insight at this point. I do know that the SAOs were supposed to be named by 11/15/12. From what we have seen, the lists seems to be a combination of C-Level (CIO, CFO), Chiefs of Staff and records officers.

JM: Do you see “defensible disposition” – getting rid of information that is no longer needed – as a complement to becoming more prudent and strategic with regards to what you actually keep?

ST: Absolutely. If we are managing our records according to a RIM policy – that must include the entire lifecycle of the record from its creation through to its movement to an archive if deemed a permanent record or its destruction if not. When it comes to Discovery, Courts support the destruction of data providing it is 1) not on a legal hold 2) destruction is informed by retention rules in an approved Schedule, and 3) that destruction happens in a systematic and consistent fashion – it cannot be ad hoc. As organizations remove records no longer required for business purposes they have easier access to active records, reduce their storage costs, and reduce the cost/risk of litigation.

JM: Do you have any thoughts about the formats in which electronic records must be retained? I’m thinking specifically, for example, about PDF/A. Did the directive say anything about specific electronic formats?

ST: The directive does not give any specifics about formats for permanent electronic records. It does say that NARA will provide guidance by 12/31/13 regarding the transfer of records to NARA – including “sustainable formats commonly used to meet agency business needs.” It would seem as though since states and other countries have adopted the PDF/A as the format of choice, that it will factor into NARA’s guidance.

JM: if someone wants to be kept informed about the directive on an ongoing basis are there particular resources that you recommend?

ST: NARA is a primary source, including their blog, Records Express. Webinars such as the AIIM/Iron Mountain event, Federal News Radio, and records management blogs and listservs are just a few other resource options.

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Those interested in this topic might also find our upcoming (Feb 7) webinar on The Dark Side of Big Data - Beyond Defensible Disposition and Legacy Info Cleanup towards profitable Information Governance of Interest.

You might also be interested in our Electronic Records Management training.

Posted at 11:51 AM in certified information professional, Compliance and records management | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: AIIM, ARMA, Iron Mountain, Obama, records management

January 02, 2013

December 05, 2012

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?

[Note: We will be doing a webinar on this topic, primarily for NA and SA audiences given the time of day, on Wednesday, December 12 at 2 pm Eastern time. We'll be doing a second webinar, at a time more convenient for European audiences at 2 pm British time on Thursday the 13th.]

As many readers know, about two years ago a Task Force of AIIM members worked with Geoffrey Moore (author of Crossing the Chasm, among many titles) to build out a "future history" of the content industry. The intention was to think about how enterprise information technology was changing in the wake of the influx of consumer technologies. (See Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT: A Sea Change in Enterprise IT.)

The core "story" went something like this...

Organizations spent much of the past 3 decades building out "Systems of Record."

Technologies evolved a great deal during this first phase -- from mainframes to minis to PCs to the internet -- as did the core objects being managed -- from financials to department processes to documents to web pages. However, at the core of this migration was a continuing focus on building Systems of Record to document who did what to whom, when, and in what context. The transitions looked something like this:

In this world, IT was at the center of deploying enterprise systems, and innovation tended to flow down from large organizations, eventually reaching consumers.

Using another Geoff Moore diagram from , during this period the Content Management business was very much a "complex systems business," operating on the left "hump" of the diagram below, focused on relatively few customers, dealing with complicated and mission-critical business processes.

Enter Microsoft Office SharePoint Services (MOSS) in 2007, and the industry began to change. The left "hump" started to shift to the right. Price points began to change as "content management" became an increasing part of the core infrastructure of the organization. Large vendors from the world of complex content management systems initially dismissed SharePoint as "not really ECM" and then struggled to find their role relative to SharePoint as the SharePoint wave intensified. In addition, a host of new enterprise players emerged, built upon a pay-as-you-go SaaS model, led most notably by Salesforce.com.

Meanwhile, back in the bigger IT market, another revolution was brewing.

Over the past 5 years, consumer technologies have taken center stage relative to innovation and migrated into the enterprise, with far-reaching implications for how organizations use and deploy technology. These new technologies focus on interactions and conversations rather documents and records and on Systems of Engagement rather than Systems of Record.

So after a long period in which there really was no "consumer" play in the document/content space (the right volume operations "hump" in Geoff's business architecture model), suddenly one appeared. The focus was not traditional transactionally focused content management, but rather the provision of previously unavailable information management tools for the individual, built upon social and mobile technologies and optimized for the cloud. These were companies with freemium to premium models like Box, Google, Evernote, DropBox, FilesAnywhere, and Yammer.

These new volume operations players had a very different financial model than those from the complex systems world. Per Michael Moon from gistics.com, complex systems players focus on making their money on capital expenditures and professional services, with most of the money captured in the early stages of a project -- it is not unusual for 70% of the total revenues for a project to the captured before implementation even occurs. On the flip side, Systems of Engagement (and the mobile devices that go with them) are brought into the enterprise by the business rather than IT, and with far simpler pricing and deployment models. The models typically focus on operating expenditures and capturing the majority of revenues after implementation via an annuity stream.

Initially, IT organizations responded to this dichtonomy by either: 1) denying the problem existed (kind of an IT policy re the Dropboxes of the world of "Don't ask, Don't tell); 2) mounting massive resistance and opposition to these tools; 3) allowing adoption, but assuming they would someday get around to the question of integration with existing Systems of Record; and/or 4) some combination of the above.

So the question for this blog post is: What comes next? What are the next chapters in the story of Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.

We spent some time at the AIIM Board meeting last week exploring this topic, and I'd like to offer some initial thoughts.

The complete story of the next phase in our future isn't written yet, but I would offer that it will center around the "controlled collision" between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement and will include some version of the following 10 elements:

CIOs are beginning to adopt mobile-first and cloud-first strategies for new applications, especially for customer-facing applications, changing the traditional development process.
The key to understanding the future role of social technologies in the enterprise is that they will increasingly: 1) be a feature of Systems of Record, not a separate system; 2) either become integrated into core business processes (i.e., the honeymoon period of "social for social's sake" is over) or decline in importance; and 3) ultimately converge with email into a single system.
Via migrations from the "right hump," core document and collaboration technologies are now becoming available via the cloud to a host of organizations that heretofore relied on a chaotic mess of file shares. The trick will be to avoid simply taking c drive and file share digital landfills and moving them to the cloud.
True document collaboration (vs. either the poor Word "Track Changes" approach or the chaotic, little editorial control Google Docs approach) will become increasingly important.
Effective adoption of social technologies is not just a function of turning them on. Defining use cases, outlining expected behaviors within these use cases, and effectively managing change have just as much to do with success as the technology (check Social in the Flow for details).
The "we will never put important information in the cloud" and "we must choose between the cloud and on-prem" militancy is evolving into an awareness that the future lies in a hybrid environment in which information is managed across a continuum of platforms and devices.
The concept of synching from the early days of email (remember when we needed to actively manage what we did in email when "connected" and when we were not?) will become increasingly important in thinking about the cloud. As organizations think about strategies that integrate Systems of Record with Systems of Engagement, that link Saas enterprise applications like Salesforce.com to behind the firewall information repositories, and that allow for responsible deployment of social and BYOD technologies, the cloud will increasingly become the "place" in which synching occurs, with ultimate control by the System of Record.
In our desire to reassert control, we need to remember than the needs of the business to get things done will always trump our corporate need for control.
The Chief Marketing Officer will own more and more elements of the "controlled collision" and will be increasingly important in the intersection between Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement.
The SoR and SoE "collision" places an increasing premium on those who have skills to help manage this collision and understand the full picture, namely Information Professionals.

What do you think? What comes next in the "story?" Post a comment and let me know.

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Might be of interest...

Posted at 08:01 AM in 8 things, certified information professional, Compliance and records management, e20, Industry statistics and research, information certification | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

August 30, 2012

7 Pieces of Advice for Those Implementing the #Obama #Records Directive

Many may have noticed the coverage of the Directive outlining new records management requirements in the federal government. The directive is NARA's and OMB's response to a memo issued by President Obama in late 2011. Among the requirements outlined in the directive:

By 11/15/2012, each agency must appoint a Senior Agency Official (SAO)

By 12/31/2013…

Each SAO must ensure that permanent records 30 years and older are transferred and reported to NARA
Each SAO must identify all unscheduled records.
All federal agencies must have a plan to manage all permanent electronic records in an electronic format by Dec. 31, 2019.
NARA will issue guidance on managing, disposing of and transferring email.
A formal career path for records management officials must be laid out.

By 12/31/2014…

All agencies must have records management training in place for appropriate staff.

By 12/31/2016…

Each SAO, with the agency records officer, must ensure that NARA has received records schedules for all existing non-electronic records.
All agencies must manage permanent and temporary email records in an accessible electronic format.

In the realm of gratuitous advice, here is my advice to those up and coming SAOs out there (talk about a thankless job!):

[Note: I did an interview with WTOP radio this morning on some of these topics -- a replay can be found HERE.]

1-- Acknowledge that the problem is getting worse. When (NARA) estimates that 95 percent of agencies are out of compliance with current electronic records requirements, clearly there is a problem that must be addressed. Add to this the often quoted Digital Universe statistic that the volume of digital information is growing by a factor of 44 during the course of this decade, and you have a recipe for losing a key part of our digital heritage -- institutional Alzheimer's, if you will -- that we will never be able to recover. And if that was not bad enough, even though the rate of growth of paper records is slowing relative to electronic records, in absolute terms it is still growing.

2 -- Understand and educate about the impact of poor information management on agency effectiveness. According to our surveys, almost 40% of government officials surveyed have little or no confidence in the accuracy, accessibility and trustworthiness of their electronic information. The percentage rises to 60% for e-mail. 32% of government officials describe the accessibility of records to employees across their organization as "poor" or "very poor."

3 -- Embrace the concept of T-shaped individuals. The call in the directive for a career path for e-records management is welcome and overdue. Everywhere I go, I hear the same refrain, "Most RM staff know paper, not systems," and "Our IT people know storage, not retention." We need to help individuals place their deep-dive competency in a broader information management context if they are going to be effective in the future. Gartner predicts the need for these types of cross-function information professionals will grow by 50% by 2015. That's what the Certified Information Professional program is all about. (Assess your skills HERE!)

4 -- Put the focus on getting more data about data. We will not solve the problem of managing exploding volumes of electronic information by simply putting more "effort" on it or by goading individuals to be more "responsible" in complying with records management requirements. No one ever woke up in the morning and stretched and proclaimed, "I can't wait to classify my information according to the taxonomy and records retention requirements established by my organization." Auto-classification has come a long way. The use of semantic technologies to infer metadata where none exists has come a long way. It's time to step on the accelerator with these technologies.

5 -- Get out of the paper paradigm. NARA's annual self-assessment by agencies show that printing and filing remains the most common archiving method for email records, with 81 percent of respondents stating they utilize it. The second most common is back up tapes, with 49 percent stating that constitutes an archiving method (agencies could chose more than one method). A large majority of agencies are at high to moderate risk of bad records management. One unnamed agency in the report says they have "no electronic records." Yikes.

6 -- Think "digital preservation." The continuing confusion about backup and archiving says to me that we need more education that is centered around the concept of preservation. I was once many years ago a history major, so I have an appreciation for this concept of preservation, and think it is vastly under-utilized in explain why we care about all of this. The point of all of this is create an accountable history of what we did and how and why we did it. Preservation has 3 dimensions -- 1) people (training is key), 2) technology (PDF/A important here), and 3) commitment (investment in systems). Doing just 1 or 2 of the 3 wont suffice.

7 -- Be realistic. These are challenging times. The mission of your agency is NOT records management. Records are a byproduct or an artifact of the work of your agency, not the actual product. Sometimes the more zealous of records managers forget that. One recent AIIM survey commenter said, "It is difficult to justify an ERM system when bridges are falling down and people go hungry." An emotional response, but a real factor in tight times, not just in the federal government, but in any organization. You have to be able to make the argument that effective information management will help make your agency more efficient and product and not just that you "must" to do it.

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Budding SAOs out there, AIIM can help! Here are a few places to start.

AIIM is the leading provider of skills development training on electronic records management. Thousands of people have taken our ERM courses online, in person, and in private courses. Sign up for a course today or Contact Thedra White at twhite [at] aiim.org and find out how.

Get our research on best practices. The price is right (hint, they're free).

Check out our Records Management Expert Bloggers. The content is great.

Posted at 09:04 AM in certified information professional, Compliance and records management | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

July 03, 2012

Extreme Information, Surviving a #Derecho, and Cleaning out My Mother-in-Law's House

Those of you who have been following this blog for some time know of my tendency to "find" information management "lessons" in everyday experiences (witness, for example, my post on Walgreens as a Process Revolutionary).

Well, I've got to tell you, the past few days have been loaded with lessons on the challenges we face in the Era of Extreme Information (for some past thoughts on Extreme Information, see a guest post I did for Chris Preston (), It's Time to Hop into the Deep Water of Big Data).

Two lessons became particularly clear to me during the past week.

Lesson One started with a trip last week to start the process of cleaning out my mother-in-law's house. Nancy (almost 93) is now in a long-term facility near our home, and we have avoided the task of dealing with her home longer than we should. So I took a couple of days of vacation, and we headed off to get started.

Now I need to say before I say anything more, that I love my mother-in-law to death. She is one of the finest and kindest people I have ever known, and nothing that follows should be interpreted in any other light. But I should also say in the context of what follows that she and her husband were products of the Depression "save everything" mentality.

[As an aside, I can testify that I now understand the precise moment that Kodak started having financial problems. It was undoubtedly the moment when my mother-in-law stopped taking photos. Because based on the volume of photos we found in her home, I am convinced that if I could somehow sort them all into a gigantic flip-movie, every moment of the period from 1953 to 2007 would be captured. In real-time.]

But my Extreme Information epiphany in going through this museum of the past half century lies in the organizational structure applied to all of this stuff. The taxonomy used appears to be the following: 1) Gather a variety of unconnected things (one example -- photos, some credit card receipts, a tax return, some newspaper articles, the deed from the sale of a house); 2) Put them in a small plastic grocery bag without a label; 3) Put a double knot in it; and then 4) Put it "somewhere."

Now all of this would not be so challenging if the volume of "stuff" was manageable. It wouldn't really matter if there were a hundred small plastic bags that we needed to go through to find the "stuff" that we now need to save (for records purposes, for family history, or just for sentimental reasons) and to get rid of the rest. But I can tell you from personal experience last week, as we would say in the technology business, "this solution does not scale" over 50 years.

Now before we look too critically at this, I have a question.

Isn't this roughly what often passes for information management in our organizations?

Is there an increasing tendency in your organization to just take all of your information "stuff" and say, "Storage is cheap" (even if it's not) and "We'll just save everything?"

Do you really have any understanding of what is on your shared drives or in those thousands of unmanaged SharePoint repositories?

When someone leaves your organization, do you copy their files onto a DVD "just in case" and put it "somewhere?"

How about our "responsibilities" as personal information managers? We have had the capability to attach metadata to documents for years, but beyond that which is automatically applied, has anyone actually ever done so even in something as mundane as a Word document? Here is my comprehensive set of metadata for the Word file for this post.

Pretty helpful, isn't it?

Not too much different than stuffing a bunch of stuff in a plastic bag and sticking it in a drawer.

The challenge we all have now is that the volume of information coming at us will not scale with our old ad hoc and manual approaches. We need to think differently about this challenge of information governance and disposition.

Large organizations especially need to get serious about this before the storage demands of the information torrent suck up all those discretionary IT funds that are supposed to be reserved for new "investments." Organizations don't have a chance of linking up all the truly relevant information on a customer in a pretty case management system if 75% of the information in our "systems" is the equivalent of a bunch of useless and redundant "stuff" wrapped in plastic bags.

My friend George Parapadakis () does a good job talking about this challenge in a 2-part post on Content Obesity: Diagnosis and Content Obesity: Treatment. He notes that 70% of the information we are storing in our systems is "rubbish." Chris Preston () talks about this challenge in The Four Requirements for Establishing Pervasive Governance. [Note - If you've got a really good article on this issue of "Information Disposition in an Era of Extreme Information" post it as a comment -- I may pull the best together in an e-book...]

So Lesson One -- Old manual and ad-hoc approaches to information governance are not just wasteful (as in escalating storage costs) or risky (as in litigation exposure), but they ultimately threaten our ability to use information to effectively engage with customers, partners, and suppliers.

Now on to Lesson Two and a vocabulary lesson.

OK, confess, how many of you have ever hear the word "derecho" before?

It's OK to confess ignorance. I had no idea. Until Friday night.

According to Wikipedia, a "derecho" is...

a widespread and long-lived, violent convectively induced straight-line windstorm that is associated with a fast-moving band of severe thunderstorms in the form of a squall line usually taking the form of a bow echo. Derechos blow in the direction of movement of their associated storms, similar to a gust front, except that the wind is sustained and generally increases in strength behind the "gust" front. A warm weather phenomenon, derechos occur mostly in summer, especially June and July in the Northern Hemisphere. They can occur at any time of the year and occur as frequently at night as in the daylight hours.

Well, we had a hell of a derecho on Friday night in the Washington, DC area.

As a result, the power was out for 2+ days. Many in the area still don't have power.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, it was 100+ degrees during all of this time.

So people have been a bit on edge.

Did I mention the temperature was 100+ degrees?

A few observations from the land of no power.

1 -- I never thought of this, but back in the old days, I think (not sure) gasoline pumps worked without electricity. Well they sure don't now, and as a result, everyone was scrambling for gas.

2 -- This potential gas shortage was exascerbated by the tendency of many of us to drive about aimlessly in our cars to: a) stay cool; and b) use our cars to charge our phones and tablets. Please don't tell the carbon footprint people.

3 -- In our cashless society, some of the grocery stores were open on emergency power, but they could only conduct cash transactions. But many of the ATM machines were not working because of the lack of power.

4 -- Amazon’s main server facility in Northern Virginia was hit hard by the storm. Amazon’s Web Services, which powers many sites and Cloud services, was taken out by the lighting storms. Services such as Netflix, Pinterest, Reddit, and Foursquare -- which run on the Amazon Cloud -- all experienced major outages.

5 -- The cell network quickly became overtaxed to the point that it was difficult in many places to get a connection. This made all the people who had retained their landlines in the face of skepticism from their supercool tech savvy kids feel very self-righteous until they realized that most of their newer phones needed power to actually connect with the landline (unlike the old fashioned phones that draw power from the phone line).

6 -- Many of the traffic signals stopped working. This is not good in the land of "2 and 3 lanes in each direction" local roads.

7 -- I am extremely cranky when overheated.

8 -- See number 7.

The point here is that the era of Extreme Information also means Extreme Information Interdependency. We exist in a web of information dependencies that we can no longer ignore. All of our fine devices are just pretty bricks without power and bandwidth.

So Lesson Two -- Think about the information dependencies in your own organization. What is your plan -- do you have one? -- if the basics go down? Have you thought about how information connections expand exponentially in a networked world and the implications this has for your business?

-----

Information on Automating Records Management with SharePoint is HERE.

Have you read my #OccupyIT manifesto?

How to Achieve Best Practices: Records Management

Posted at 07:42 AM in Compliance and records management | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: aiim, derecho, information governance, information management, power outage, technology, washington

June 25, 2012

Is Your Organization Worried About Archiving External Social Activity? - Here's a List of 14 Solutions That Might Help

One of the issues I spend some time worrying about is how to balance my enthusiasm for social technologies with the very real concerns that exist as organizations consider the control and compliance realities.

That was one of the reasons we developed our new Social Media Governance course. This course is a MUST for any organizations deploying social systems, whether they are systems that are externally facing and designed for outside the firewall marketing and communications, or those inside the firewall and designed primarily for customer engagement.

In the context of thinking about this course, we've done a bit of research on the question of whether there are any solutions to help with the following specific use case:

I want my people out promoting our company/organization on external sites (like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter), but I also want a want a way to archive and retain what they are saying. And I don't want to do anything clunky like: 1) doing individual screen scrapes and somehow archiving them; 2) copying/pasting content from public sites to my internal RM systems; or 3) pre-screening activities BEFORE they do it and push that into some sort of retention system.

Here are some solutions that I have found with the assistance of my colleague Jesse Wilkins. If I've left any companies out, let me know via a comment and I'll add it to the post.

Note: All information below comes straight from COMPANY WEBSITES. I have not at this point attempted to validate the claims made, I am just trying to get the companies all in one place. Perhaps those experienced with a particular solution might post a comment (no fair competitors slamming others; I'll delete you). I have also not yet noted in the post which ones are AIIM members and which ones are not, which may be an issue for users to consider in the context of industry commitment.

Some of the companies that follow are great big enterprise solutions, and some are more modest.

In alphabetical order...

Actiance -- http://actiance.com/default.aspx

Socialite Enable provides granular control of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, controlling access to more than 200 features and content areas Socialite Enable also provides pre approval, post review management and archiving of traffic routed through the solution. Socialite Enable includes a number of key features for securely enabling the use of social networks, including:

Identity Management - the ability to establish a single corporate identity and track users across multiple social media platforms (e.g., on Twitter is the same as JohnHJones on LinkedIn).
Data leak prevention - preventing sensitive data from leaving the company, either maliciously or inadvertently
Granular application control - enabling the access to Facebook, but not access to chat or downloading and installing any of the applications in the gaming category.
Pre-approval or Moderator control - for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, where content is required to be pre-approved by a Corporate Communications Officer or other third party.
Activity control - the ability to manage access to features, such as who can read, like, comment upon, or access nearly a hundred features.
Log conversation and content - capture all posts, messages and commentary made to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in context, including exporting to an archive of choice for eDiscovery.

Aleph Archives -- http://aleph-archives.com/

The two main obstacles one encounters when keeping a digital document are that of the fragility of storage medium and that of technical obsolescence. Websites archiving, moreover, raises the problem of selecting and gathering data from complex websites (national libraries for example). As digital documents, websites are particularly complex elements. They are made of several types of media : text, images, sounds, animations and streams. There are two ways to consider how to archive a website :

Manual or semi-automatic archiving, which aims at collecting sites according to a determined selection.
Automatic archiving with the help of indexation robots. These robots visit websites on a regular basis and capture them either partially or totally (as snapshots).

Web collecting platform CAMA^® is part of that last category and aims at completing the following :

CAMA^® robots collect contents regardless of internal website architectures and publishing platforms.
As opposed to other tools which can change your way to view a Web archive, accessing an archive in CAMA^® is natural, smooth (click-and-run model) and completely logical (no URL rewriting, no Javascript injection, etc.)
Your stored data’s authenticity is guaranteed by CAMA^® as unaltered by human hands.
CAMA^® gives you the choice to use your archives with other analysis tools (such as linguistic software) as it is based on a open and normalized WARC storage format (ISO 28500:2009).
CAMA^® offers a friendly and natural access to your archives. Access servers are available within your infrastructure or on-line as PaaS (Platforms as a Service)

ArchiveSocial -- http://archivesocial.com/

ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution for business compliance and legal protection. ArchiveSocial automates record keeping from networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is designed to address record keeping challenges for businesses in industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare, government, and education. Key benefits:

Designed for social media: ArchiveSocial interfaces directly with each service to archive records regardless of device or network used to post content. Unlike solutions built on email and web archiving technology, ArchiveSocial preserves social media records in their native format. This enables far superior search, export, and records management capabilities.
Built for compliance and legal protection: ArchiveSocial satisfies strict industry regulations including those such as SEC 17a-4 and FINRA 10-06 in financial services. Records are digitally timestamped to prove authenticity and can be utilized as legal evidence. Data is stored safely and securely in a SAS 70 Type II-compliant data center.
Accessible to business of all sizes: As a pure cloud based solution, ArchiveSocial enables any organization to sign up online and start archiving in a matter of minutes. We offer subscription plans suitable for any business ranging from individual business owners to enterprises. There is no software to install and no long term contract required.

Arkovi -- http://www.arkovi.com/

Originally built by financial services professionals for financial services professionals, Arkovi today also serves the social media archiving needs of companies and entities in the pharmaceutical, government and education fields. As you archive your material, you can monitor it to learn more about your customer base. Analyzing stored content can help you develop fresh insights that can be applied to new initiatives.

Key benefits:

Archive Rather than “archive and forget” (until there is a problem), users can tap into the hidden power of their social media and web site activity in real time
Access “Always on” archiving provides instant access to users for all stored content 24/7
Analyze Use “lessons learned” in real time to apply to your next communications effort
Monitor Checking social media conversations keeps marketers informed of new possibilities – and problems to avoid
Convert When you tap into the energy in your archive, you open the door to converting prospects into new clients
Engage Multiple users can set rules and coordinate all activities through customized analytics and content dashboards

Backupify -- https://www.backupify.com/

Simple, automated backups of your personal, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and other social media & web apps accounts. Perfect for personal users, small businesses and social media professionals.

Next Point (CloudPreservation) -- http://www.cloudpreservation.com/

The Cloud Preservation service automatically crawls your web properties at chosen intervals, building an archive of html source code and resources, high quality snapshots, and a robust full-text search index. It's your secure, forensically sound answer to regulatory obligations and e-discovery readiness.

The service makes it a breeze to go back in time with all of your Web sites, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to search content, preview records, and produce or export your data.

Hanzo Archives -- http://www.hanzoarchives.com/

Hanzo provides comprehensive and dynamic website archiving products and services, which enable you to collect, archive, preserve and produce your social media interactions and conversations. Our social media archiving is based on the same proven technologies and methodologies we use for website archiving, used by our clients in many regulated industries and sectors, as well as in e-discovery.

Being native format web-based technology, we’re capable of collecting any web content, including publicly accessible websites, blogs, forums, Video, Flash, and wikis. This native format approach to archiving social media enables us to offer the broadest support for many social networks, and indeed enables us to expand on the usual definition of social media, beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to include your blogs, blog commentary, question and answer services, customer forums, YouTube, wikis, etc.

As with our website archiving services, our social media archiving services are backed up by our technology leadership, SAS-70 certified data centre, FINRA and SEC 17a-4 compliance, and more.

Our website and social media archives can be integrated with other enterprise archives using our Web Archive Connector, including the market leading enterprise archive platform from Symantec, with Web Archive Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault.

Iterasi -- http://www.iterasi.com/

Archive social media content from accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Authenticating and connecting through these network's API's allows us to capture both publicly available data and data stored behind password protection (e.g. Direct Messages on Twitter and Messages on Facebook).

Capture many types of social media data—status updates, group discussions, photos, videos, private messages, friend lists, events, profiles, pages and more.

Our capabilities grow every day. If you need to archive data from other social networks we can capture content through RSS feeds, page capture and other methods.

LiveOffice (Symantec) -- http://www.liveoffice.com/

Many organizations are looking for the safest way to integrate social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into their regular business communications. However, the attractive qualities of social media, such as its immediacy and broad reach, also make it a potentially risky business tool that must remain discoverable in the event of a lawsuit.

As a result of social media's rising popularity in the corporate world, many organizations are searching for ways to properly capture and supervise this content type. The good news is that some archiving solutions now offer built-in functionality that can help organizations meet their e-discovery and compliance requirements surrounding social media communications.

Below are questions to ask archiving vendors about their social media capabilities:

Can the solution capture all messages from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in a centralized repository?
Are all messages/posts searchable in the event of an e-discovery request or compliance audit?
Does the solution allow administrators to define specific usage privileges?
Does the solution allow designated personnel to review, approve or reject messages before they are posted?
Does the solution automatically enforce pre-determined policies?
Does the solution meet FINRA guidance for social media capture? (Applies only to registered securities firms.)

Page Freezer -- http://pagefreezer.com/

PageFreezer uses crawling technology, similar to that of Google, to take snapshots of your website. Archiving is an automated process, saving you time. Only new webpages and changes to webpages are archived, saving storage space. PageFreezer offers the unique feature to browse through a website exactly as it appeared live online on a specified date.

PageFreezer places a digital signature and a digital timestamp on each archived page. The Digital Timestamp is evidence of the time the page was archived and the Digital Signature provides evidence that the page was not changed since it was archived. These features can be used in court to demonstrate that the archived page is the page as it existed on your web site at that time.

Archives are securely stored in a SAS-70 compliant data center with excellent firewall protection. For added protection against disaster, a copy of your website archives is stored in a second location thousands of miles away. When requiring a local copy for any reason, you simply request a data export in XML format of all media, including HTML, PDF, TXT, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, XML, CSS or even Flash.

Smarsh -- http://www.smarsh.com/

End-to-end social media compliance solutions from Smarsh give organizations of all sizes the preservation, supervision and policy controls to embrace the emerging regulatory requirements to review and archive content from social networking sites Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.

Firms can automate policy company-wide, define which social networking features employees have access to, and review, approve, or reject messages before they are posted. Compliance officers and inside legal counsel will be able to monitor both static and interactive corporate communication with ease and intelligent functionality. All messages are captured, preserved in their native form and indexed in the secure Smarsh archive. Postings will be indexed and searchable via message criteria, including date and content keywords.

Selected postings can then be produced on-demand, assigned to multiple reviewers, or marked or tagged as "complaint" or "advertising" for compliance and supervisory review. All administrator activity is logged and quantifiable, illustrating policy enforcement and evidence of review for social media compliance. An audit trail captures data on every visual inspection of each posting in the social media archive and compliance officers can quantify social media data with comprehensive reporting functionality. Customizable organizational usage reports and evidence of supervision/policy enforcement can be created for review as evidence of a reasonably designed policy

Socialware -- http://www.socialware.com/

Reduce time and effort developing your company’s social media compliance policy. Start with best-in-class templates we have created from our work with more than 125 financial services firms. Then, use our industry-leading compliance software to exercise feature-level accesss control. Manage an unlimited number of group policies so that thousands of employees can seamlessly and directly access Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Compliance teams easily scale social media coverage across thousands of financial professionals using Socialware workflows and automated processes. Users create profiles and submit them for approval in an intuitive manner. Compliance officers are notified automatically about profile changes. This lowers the burden and barriers for compliant user access and also social media supervision for your compliance team.

Social media compliance requires firms to capture, record, and archive 100% of social conversations. Compliance officers know that, using Socialware, all data is retained correctly regardless of device. We provide native integration with email archiving systems to conform to your existing processes. Because context is vital for compliance, our software also records complete conversation threads.

Sonian -- http://www.sonian.com/

Sonian Social Media & Instant Message Archiving for Businesses. Sonian IM Archive™ is powering the next generation of message data management solutions. Designed for the broadest range of supported communication formats, low cost of provision, and seamless integration with existing systems, Sonian IM Archive is the ideal fit for today’s IT challenges and completes any message product offering.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instant Message are Becoming the Preferred Form of Business Communication. Critical and casual business communication is taking place every day via Instant Messaging (IM), Text Message (SMS), and Social Media. Addressing these mediums are a necessary part of achieving better business practices. Sonian IM Archive™ integrates IM, SMS, and Social Media data with present future messaging solutions, helping to achieve compliance and reduce the cost of eDiscovery research and regulatory oversight.

Deploy your Instant Message or Social Media Archive Quickly with Zero Maintenance. Sonian IM Archive™ is easy to deploy, requires zero maintenance, and automatically adapts to the evolving IM, SMS, and Social Media technology landscape.

Your Social Media, IM, & SMS Communications Should be Compliant. It is important to know that IM, SMS, and Social Media are subject to the same industry and governmental regulations as email. Sonian works with you to bring compliance obligations within your reach.

ZL Technologies -- http://www.zlti.com/

Through its suite of social media archiving solutions, ZL Unified Archive® enables businesses to capture, index, search, review, preserve and produce chats and messages from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and RSS Feeds in order to meet legal and regulatory demands.

System administrators can monitor social media communications and promptly report on irresponsible corporate use. With extensive auditing capabilities, ZL is able to capture all user or administrator actions, changes, and configuration modes. Administrators can quickly quantify data by creating customized reports detailing audited activity.

ZL UA uses deep content analysis and contextual filters to provide supervisory review of all outbound and inbound communications. Messages are flagged using a lexical system that can be edited to align supervision requirements with internal and external policies.

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AIIM's Social Media Governance Course covers the topics below. Contact us today to find out how to set up a private course for your organization and/or how to access these courses on-line.

The course covers the concepts, processes, and technologies required to govern social media tools and processes, both internal and external and across the enterprise. The course is available online or as a two-day instructor-led classroom course.

Information Governance in the Age of Social Media
How to Develop Social Media Policies
How to Conduct a Social Business Assessment
How to Identify Organizational Social Media Accounts
How to Identify and Capture Social Content as Records
Social Business Content and Public Records Requirements
Internal vs. External Social Media Tools
How to Use Social Technologies in Regulated Industries
How to Produce Social Content in Response to Legal or Regulatory Requests
How to Monitor Social Media for Relevant Discussions
The Social Business Roadmap
Social Media Roles & Responsibilities

Get more information on AIIM's Social Media Governance Course.

Posted at 01:26 PM in certified information professional, Compliance and records management, social business, Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: actiance, archivesocial, archiving, arkovi, backuptify, facebook, hanzo, iterasi, linkedin, live office, nextpoint, pagefreezer, smarsh, social media, socialware, sonian, twitter, ZL

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September 17, 2013

8 New #AIIM Reports on #Content - And All Free - #ECM #SharePoint

September 12, 2013

If you want the Exec Suite to care about #Information #Governance, you need to clearly answer WHY?

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February 07, 2013

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January 31, 2013

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January 02, 2013

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December 05, 2012

2013 Predictions -- Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement -- What Comes Next?

August 30, 2012

7 Pieces of Advice for Those Implementing the #Obama #Records Directive

July 03, 2012

Extreme Information, Surviving a #Derecho, and Cleaning out My Mother-in-Law's House

June 25, 2012

Is Your Organization Worried About Archiving External Social Activity? - Here's a List of 14 Solutions That Might Help