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George Parapadakis () is an ECM Advocate at IBM, advising customers and partners on how to maximize the value from their ECM and BPM investments. He has also been monitoring the use of ECM technologies in the Risk & Compliance field. After 20 years in the Document/Content management and Process/Workflow industry, he's still a believer!... George has been an AIIM member since 1995 and you can follow him on twitter as or hisInformationZen blog. All opinions expressed here are explicitly George's and not necessarily those of his employer.
George was one of my original 8 things guest bloggers, and his 8 Things You Need to Know about Information Risk is still one of my favorites. Check it out.
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I was watching my two teenage daughters going to extraordinary lengths preparing themselves for a friend’s birthday party. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea if we also spent some effort preparing ourselves, before joining the virtual party that is Social Media interaction.
So, imagine the scenario: You have been invited for the first time to a Social Media party. It may be a TweetJam on Twitter, a collaborative wiki, your first blog or a group chat on Microsoft Live! Messenger. How do you dress up for the occasion? What do you put in your pockets or your handbag before you leave the house?
8 things to wear to a Social Media party
1 -- Loose clothes and comfortable shoes.Before you speak, listen! Not only out of courtesy but with interest. Some people will inevitably get to the party before you. They have been talking. Take in the atmosphere and don’t dive into the pool straight away. Don’t hog the conversation and don’t be a fly on the wall. You may feel very strongly about your point, but the more you go on about it, the less attention people will pay. Pace yourself and make fewer comments, where they are relevant. There is no rule that says you must blog once-a-day or you must tweet every 10 minutes. And if you do, at least add some value. Add your own views. If all you do is repeat other people’s comments, you are not adding much value. People notice very quickly who adds value to the conversation and who is there just to fill the gaps.
5 -- GSOH.
Bring plenty of that… “Good Sense Of Humour”. Don’t forget the “Social” in social media. It’s fun, it’s personal and it’s important. People will quip and joke. People will make mistakes and make fools of themselves. We’ve all done it. Don’t berate people for honest mistakes or hang them just because you took personal offense. If you have a problem, take them on the side and sort it out (that’s what DM and email are for…), don’t pick a fight in the middle of the room. Remember, you never know who is watching and you never know when you will be in their shoes!
6 -- Your iPhone, Wikipedia and the Guinness Book of Records.
In other words, knowledge. This is a place to share knowledge and insight. Not to show off, but to add value. Did you hear a good joke? Did you hear an excellent comment? Did you take something away from so-and-so’s presentation? Did your kids make you laugh? Was he ever-so-helpful? Can you take a wild guess on what will happen next? Did you wake up with an amazing idea? People will trade knowledge with you. Interesting info and references. Share what you know and they’ll share back.
7 -- Bring a Friend, or Two.
The more the merrier! Seriously though, this is a great opportunity to introduce a colleague or a friend or a relative to the social media scene. Especially if they are introvert or shy, show them what it’s all about. Show them how much they can learn on a topic that interests them. Introduce them to some new friends. To your friends. Give them some ideas what to say. Be an example they can follow. It’s always easier to go to a party with a friend.
8 -- A long drink.
This party is a hoot. Social Media is addictive and compulsive. You may need a quick drink to remove your inhibitions when getting into it, and you will definitely need a drink later on, when the party is in full swing, you are totally dehydrated, you’ve been staring at your screen for four hours and you realize it’s 2am and you have a customer presentation in the morning. Please drink responsibly! :)
Social Media is not about technology. It’s not even about each of us individually. Each of us contributes and complements the whole community, and the value is in the community as a whole. It’s about a new way of social interaction, as much as it is about gate-crashing the party or eaves-dropping on a cool brainstorming session. It’s about connecting with people you may never meet, who live on the other side of the planet and who have never heard of you before. But they are genuinely interested to hear what you have to say. And it’s about listening, learning and understanding.
So it’s totally worth putting the extra effort to dress up for the party. Enjoy!
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Been to our cool new E20 Community site? Why the heck not?
My guest blogger today is C. David Seuss. C. David Seuss is CEO of Northern Light (www.northernlight.com), which provides strategic research portals to research-driven businesses. Mr. Seuss joined Northern Light in July of 1996, and later led an employee group in purchasing Northern Light from its corporate parent in 2003. Prior to Northern Light, Mr. Seuss was founder and CEO of Spinnaker Software Corporation, which he led from inception to a public company with $65 million in revenue and 280 employees. Before starting Spinnaker, Mr. Seuss was a consultant and manager for the Boston Consulting Group. Mr. Seuss has an industrial engineering degree from Georgia Tech and an MBA with High Distinction from the Harvard Business School.
Typically the research content is drawn from sources within and outside the enterprise –- but it is the external content, licensed from multiple publishers often at considerable cost to the organization, that can be most problematic from a management perspective. Here are eight common pitfalls enterprises must overcome to effectively maximize the value of licensed, premium research content:
8 Risks of Managing Licensed Content Across an Enterprise
1 -- Cumbersome and complex research environment.A large enterprise may purchase subscriptions to a dozen or more third-party research services. Each third-party research provider maintains its own website through which subscribers access their content. That means users within the enterprise must visit the website of each licensed source to perform a truly comprehensive search of the licensed content. Users have to confront the complexities of multiple sites, multiple log-ins, multiple user interfaces, multiple search options and syntax, different alerting solutions, and the shear, unmanageable amount of work required to use the multiple sites.
2 -- Employees miss relevant content when performing research.Because of the cumbersome and complex research environment described above, the reality is most users will rely on just a couple of the available research sources. This means the company’s investment in external research is underutilized, and worse yet, the research performed by the employees are not as well informed as would be the case if all sources were consulted every time.
3 -- Unauthorized employees access the content.In a collaborative company culture, people are encouraged to share information they find valuable; that’s generally considered a good thing. But it is not necessarily so if the dissemination of certain content is limited by the company’s contract with the publisher. By divorcing the search solutions (at the external content publishers’ sites) from the in-house enterprise collaboration solution (e.g., SharePoint), the potential exists that an authorized employee may post the document and share it with unauthorized employees.
4 -- Financial exposure related to unauthorized access.There are cases where an employee (innocently) violated document distribution rules stipulated in an organization’s contract with a third-party publisher by posting a restricted document to the company intranet and the publisher sent the company a bill for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Good intention; bad outcome.
5 -- Advanced search tools are not feasible when using third-party research sites.Typical search facilities on the websites of research publishers present a list of document links and summaries in response to a key word query, leaving all the interpretation to the user who has enough persistence and time to slog through the documents on the search result. But search tools like “text analytics” and “meaning extraction” can read all the market intelligence documents a researcher has access to, identify the business issues reported on, suggest the trends, flag the threats, highlight the opportunities, and distinguish those documents that are the most important, not from a search relevance perspective, but from a meaning perspective. The more content that is available in a research repository accessible by such tools, the more value can be delivered to users from an integrated text analytics/meaning extraction facility in the search solution.
6 -- Not being able to find internal experts and collaboration partners.Documents are a catalyst for collaboration, and identifying the people who have expertise about a particular topic can become part of the content within the system. The search application should identify internal collaboration partners by observing users’ behavior in areas like bookmarking, tagging, downloading, and sharing. But if all usage information travels only between each individual user and the third-party content publisher, how will the enterprise record the activity and make it available to potential collaboration partners across the organization?
7 -- Failure to “alert."One popular way that people learn of the existence of relevant content is through “alerts”. But given the complexities of working on a one-off basis with each external source, each with its own alerting syntax and options, it is usually impractical for a user to set up alerts on every topic of interest at every website of every content publisher.
8 -- Multiple purchases of the same document (or multiple subscriptions to the same services).The risk of financial waste is acute if within an enterprise one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. It’s not unusual within large organizations for several business units to independently (and unknowingly) purchase the same third-party research report or service. Repeat that scenario often enough and an organization wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars of unnecessary spending.
One way all these potential pitfalls can be addressed effectively is by deploying an enterprise-wide strategic research portal that provides a single online place for employees to go to search and access (within license limitations) all of an organization’s research resources. While third-party content aggregation, indexing, security and management; integrated search; text analytics with meaning extraction, alerting, and user collaboration are individually and collectively complex, they are eminently doable. The pay-off is more and better use of research and, as a result, more informed business decisions. It’s hard to put a price tag on that.-----
AIIM's ERM Community is a happening place. Check it out.
Information Valuation: Reinvention of Knowledge Management or is there more to it?
By Johannes Scholtes
Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer for ZyLAB
Recently, the term Information Valuation popped-up in various leading industry reports and in a few blogs, but the term is so new, there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for it yet (... read more
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What's the Duration of Your RIM Strategic Plan?
By Mark Mandel
Public Records Administrator for Executive Office of the Mayor, Washington D.C. Office of Public Records
Recently I attended a meeting of IT folks and the discussion revolved around strategic plans. A point was made that one year plans are best because everything changes very... read more
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Email Project Two: Return of the Killer Email Project
By Mimi Dionne
Consultant for Mimi Dionne Consulting
I’m always struck by the difference between Records Management’s perception of IT processes and IT’s perception of Records Management processes. For example, I... read more
My guest blogger today is Chris Churchill, Vice President of Document Management Solutions, Iron Mountain. Churchill oversees development and management of Iron Mountain’s Document Management Solutions business line, which includes Active File Solutions, Document Conversion and the Digital Records Center for Images. Previously, Chris held the position of Business Manager, Shredding; prior to joining Iron Mountain, Chris worked for Bear Stearns, where he provided investment banking services to Iron Mountain, including assisting with Iron Mountain’s initial public offering, capital raising and various acquisitions. Chris received his BA from Princeton University and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School.
[Have you been to the new AIIM Electronic Records Community? -- check it out at ERMCommunity.com and rate your solution provider -- share what you know with the community.]
8 Things to Help Contain the Cost & Risk of Litigation
1 -- Get your (information) house in order.It's no secret that companies of all sizes in all industries are creating and storing more documents, in more formats, than ever before, driven partly by regulatory and compliance pressures. Gaining control of your information is sound business practice. And knowing what you have (physical and digital) and where is it can be found is critical when litigation occurs.
2 -- Know how long to keep it.
Every official record has a lifespan, some longer than others. Developing and implementing a sensible and legally credible retention schedule (how long you need to store that record) helps reduce data volumes (you can dispose of information not required to meet legal, regulatory, business or compliance obligations) while ensuring you can produce information when you need it. Oftentimes, there are industry- or federally-mandated guidelines for these schedules; in some cases, it’s just “good business’ to retain these records. If you don’t know the schedule or need help developing one, seek out external experts and consultants for guidance.
3 -- Reduce legal fees by bringing some of the processes in house.General Counsels and corporate legal teams have to find creative ways to help contain legal costs. Functions that were often performed in the past by outside counsel such as conversion of physical records to digital for review, can often be more efficiently and cost effectively handled by an information management service partner. These providers can achieve greater cost savings and national coverage for consistency vs. working with more regional, niche vendors. If the provider already stores your physical records, the improved chain of custody reduces risk while saving on transportation and delivery costs.
4 -- Look for a complete solution from a single vendor.Choosing an integrated solution, will improve regulatory compliance, reduce the complexity of the discovery process, increase response time, and help mitigate the high cost of litigation. A comprehensive program gives you greater accountability in addressing all phases of the litigation process with greater speed and accuracy. Plus you get the assurance that your solution provider can scale up or down to your needs.
5 -- Have a defensible a data gathering plan.In most cases, parties in litigation have 99 days or less to confer about what data must be preserved and to produce it. When litigation requests arrive, organizations need create a plan for finding and collecting information that can be implemented quickly and is defensible. To be successful, General Counsel, IT and Records Management all need to play in the development and implementation of such a plan. By leveraging records management software you will be able to classify information for streamlined access, consistently manage retention to reduce the amount of data that needs to be searched and apply holds to ensure preservation. Reducing the volume of information required for review, saves on legal fees which can easily be $100 per hour or more.
6 -- Identify your high risk information, and scan in advance.Many organizations have begun digitizing their physical records to streamline their storage and access processes. The benefits of this approach are better management, greater levels of compliance and less risk, not to mention quicker access to your information. But one of the biggest benefits is the ability to identify high-risk documents, which can then be pre-loaded into an eDiscovery platform before litigation, enabling greater processing and review efficiencies as well as cost savings.
7 -- Ensure Secure Chain of Custody.Records and information involved in discovery may be critical to the outcome of your case. Understanding the sensitive nature of information, you must establish a full chain of custody so you know where that information is at all times. If you choose a partner to manage your information, they should be able to provide the same levels of security and peace of mind, Failure to do so can be extremely costly in dollars and potential damage to your reputation.
8 -- Don’t just apply technology.
There are many tools and technologies which promise to deliver a complete solution for litigation support, but technology alone is not the answer. You can extend your technology and process investments by adding in expertise and best practices from a trusted partner for your litigation readiness plan. A true solution partner will give you capabilities (such as conversion services) and valuable consulting to help solve complex litigation challenges.
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Today's guest blogger is Faine Mende, President of ActiveDocs North America. Faine has over ten years' experience in software product development and sales, combining expertise in both product development and client management. Having worked globally at enterprise level Faine has broad experience with introducing product and setting up often complicated implementations and she has had to understand the unique needs of a variety of territories, often working to initiate installations of cutting-edge technology with ageing incumbent solutions.
As standard documents become more complex, and organizations adopt new systems and technology, the information for these documents needs to come from different places. Pricing information may come from a financial management, sales configuration or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, while customer contact details may be stored in a customer relationship management (CRM) or contract management system. Other parts of these documents may only need to be included in certain situations, or spreadsheets that contain charts that need to somehow be incorporated. This process is often time consuming, unwieldy and error-prone. Organizations can gain extra efficiencies and optimize their resources by automating the creation of standard documents. Automation can also extend traditional templates to become more powerful by taking advantage of new technologies and other data sources.
8 Things Document Automation Can Do For Your Company
1 -- Increase Accuracy and Compliance with Changing Regulations.By using templates and automating the document creation process, resulting documents will include the most up to date content, and will be completed accurately. By example this ensures the latest terms and conditions are applied and the right customer name is used throughout. In addition, automation enables you to keep up-to-date with changing regulations. Changes can be made to the templates in advance of the regulatory change date and published at a set time, managing business risk.
2 -- Ensure Consistency.Approved corporate terms and language will be used by all staff in your organization.
3 -- Enforce Standardization.Document automation encourages your organization to standardize on document terms, best practices and the overall look and feel of your organization’s output thus fostering brand consistency.
4 -- Enhance Productivity.
Document automation dramatically reduces the time required to create complex documents such as contracts, court documents and financial statements. It also enables trainees to create first drafts of documents previously done by seasoned professionals and your organization can also serve more clients with the same or fewer resources.
5 -- Increase Responsiveness.
For service organizations, automation dramatically reduces the time between client interviews to the production of support documentation. For legal companies it speeds up the preparation, settlement and filing of a case.
6 -- Improve Processes.Document automation allows instant sharing (across time, staff, and offices) of client data captured and stored in answer files and facilitates access and re-use of client information already stored in a case management system. Employees can better understand and re-engineer these kinds of processes simply by automating them.
7 -- Consolidate Expertise.Document automation captures the substantial knowledge of more experienced and specialized employees (e.g. the right questions, options, language, strategies) so that:
8 -- Promote Better Job Satisfaction.
Staff can focus on more challenging and satisfying tasks that lead to revenue rather than repetitive, time-consuming document creation.
----By delivering low cost of ownership, sophisticated integration and flexibility to the document generation process within your organization, you will be better able to comply with regulations, mitigate risk, and save costs.
Some other posts that might be of interest...
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