Digital Landfill

Greetings from the Nation's Snowbelt. About 40-45 inches on the ground.

I put together this rough list of lists for a lecture I did for some college students.

What's missing? What's redundant? Chime in via comments -- I'd love to hear your thoughts.

8 Factors to Consider in Creating an Information Management Strategy

1. Don't underestimate the importance of your platform choices: The choices you make have a long tail.
2. A good starting point: Focus on paper.
3. Collaboration without structure is a waste of time.
4. The need for control is not going away.
5. In a tight economy, nothing flies unless it can deliver process efficiency and automation.
6. In making choices, think knowledge workers, not document specialists.
7. You need a plan.
8. Failure to address change management can make everything else moot.

Platform selection checklist

• What business objectives are you really trying to accomplish (both short and long term)? How will you measure them?
• How does your organization value the various types of ECM functionality?
• How well does your platform perform MOST important functions?
• How much is out of the box and how much is through custom integration?
• What IT competencies exist in your organization?
• What needs to integrate with what?
• Are you willing to consider open source and SaaS solutions?
• How comfortable are you with reliance on a particular vendor "stack?”

Scanning and capture checklist

• What types of documents do you need to scan?
• How many documents do you need to scan?
• Do you need color? B&W? Grayscale? How much resolution? Both have storage implications
• Are you doing backfile conversion (how far?) or day forward?
• What are you going to do with the paper when you’re done?
• How much scanning (or which parts) do you really want to do yourself?
• Are you trying to create an archive or drive a process? Or both?
• Have you thought through the training issues for distributed capture?

Collaboration checklist

• Create a policy document that defines how your organization will approach networking/collaboration.
• Cover both inside and outside the firewall.
• Define roles and responsibilities in business and HR terms, not technology.
• Be minimalist – don’t try to cover every single situation.
• Define retention requirements. What do you want to save? What MUST you save?
• Train people as to what is expected and in what situation.
• Integrate tools into everyday workflow. Don’t just bolt this on.
• Encourage spread of collaborative tools organically, not by mandates.

Risk management checklist

• Is all critical information being captured?
• Are the right disaster and data recovery processes in place?
• Can you locate and produce records and prove they are unaltered?
• Do you have a strategy for metadata?
• Can you control who can access what?
• Is there redundancy in your system?
• Can you easily find information?
• Have you considered ALL aspects of long-term preservation? – People, hardware, software

Process improvement checklist

•  Start with something important, but manageable. Document-intensive processes are everywhere.
•  Identify the BUSINESS problem you are trying to solve.
•  Identify and engage the BUSINESS stakeholders.
•  Don’t simply try to automate a poor process -- a bad idea.
•  Document the current process and verify.
•  Define the new document-enabled process and verify.
•  Market your successes. Document your benefits.
•  Be iterative. Don’t try to solve everything all at once.

Knowledge worker productivity checklist

• Can your people organize and share information in ways that help them work smarter and faster?
• Is it easy to find whomever or whatever is needed to work smarter and faster?
• Is the right information available, in the right way, in the right amount?
• Is corporate-built stuff (like IT, training, and support) easy to use?
• Does the corporate-built stuff provide what is needed, as fast as it is needed?
• Are staff resources used wisely and effectively?
• Is the system separate from or integrated with “normal” work?
• Only control what MUST be controlled.

Planning checklist

• Have you built a business strategy and blueprint?
• Has the strategy been embraced by senior management?
• Has the blueprint (including both capital and people requirements) been embraced by senior management?
• Have you assessed your current technology state and built a roadmap for the future?
• Have you created a governance structure and approach?
• Have you defined a specific initial project and built a plan?
• Assuming initial success, how will you communicate and build upon that success?
• Do you have a change management plan?

Change management checklist

• Do you have top level support?
• Are you planning to start small and build?
• Do you have an internal PR and communication plan?
• Have you created user personas?
• Are you focused on technology or process?
• Have you systematically involved users and business owners?
• Are you using the tools themselves (i.e., collaboration) to overcome resistance?
• Do you have a training plan – and also a plan for what happens after the formal training is done?

What's missing? What's redundant? Chime in via comments -- I'd love to hear your thoughts.