Digital Landfill

A few readers requested that all of these be aggregated into a single post...So here they are! (Also, to get a copy of my new White Paper covering some of these issues in more detail, go to THIS LINK.)

The 6 Imperatives Facing Information Professionals

#1 -- Make everything mobile: Redefine content delivery and process automation to take advantage of mobile devices and mobile workforces.

Ubiquitous mobile computing is one of the core underlying drivers for Systems of Engagement and continues to shape the future of these systems. 

• In the span of a decade, cell phones have spread to essentially every person and location on the planet.
• Less than half the devices accessing the Internet run on Windows, and the shipments of smartphones and tablets are now larger than the shipments of laptops and PCs. 
• Mobile technologies have been the "steroid" accelerating the push to social technologies, and this push is now spreading to the business. 
• We are only just beginning to understand the full impact of what it means to have location services attached to the actual device we use to deliver content and initiate processes.
• The spread of ubiquitous connectivity on consumer-centric devices has changed the nature of work and workplaces and what it means to collaborate in a business setting.

Data points:

• 94% of organizations have deployed mobile access to email, but < 30% have mobile access to enterprise systems -- ECM, CRM, ERP [AIIM -- Making the Most of Mobile:  Content on the Move]
• 37% of organizations have no mobile ECM access; a further 30% rely on conventional web interface. [AIIM -- Making the Most of Mobile:  Content on the Move]
• Only 47% allow personal devices to access company data, and most do so in a policy void. [AIIM --Making the Most of Mobile:  Content on the Move]
• 68% of installed ECM systems have no browser or mobile access option. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]

#2 -- Digitize processes: Drive paper bottlenecks out of processes and automate process flows.

No matter how elegant the front-end, Systems of Engagement cannot operate in an environment in which the processes that support and complement these Systems of Engagement are engulfed by paper. 

• The reality of most organizations is that they exist in hybrid environment in which process information may come from paper documents, paper forms, web forms, faxes, emails, SMS, mobile and social. 
• Automated capture as early as possible in the business process produces cleaner data, resulting in higher quality information, less exception handling, and better process management. The more important the process is to a business, the greater the impact such improvements will have.
• Forms processing is a particularly important element in process automation.  Forms -- both electronic and paper -- are used to collect data, to carry signatures, to drive the business process, and to provide an auditable record of the outcome. Each of these can be readily carried out in all-electronic formats, but until recently, the paper form has been somewhat stubborn in its hold on even the most modern offices. 
• Most organizations still operate in a hybrid world of electronic forms and signatures mixed with paper documents that need to be digitized and documents still requiring wet signatures, holding up the implementation of Systems of Engagement.

Data points:

• On average, organizations using scanning and capture consider that it improves the speed of response to customers, suppliers, citizens or staff by 6-times or more. 70% estimate an improvement of at least 3x, and 29% see an improvement of 10x or more.  [AIIM – The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?]
• 42% of users have achieved a payback period of 12 months or less from their scanning and capture investments. 57% are posting a payback of 18-months or less. [AIIM – The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?]
• On average, 45% of documents that are scanned are 100% “born digital” – just as they came from the printer. And many of the rest would be all-digital if not for the added signatures. [AIIM – The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?]
• 77% of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments get printed. 31% of faxed invoices get printed and scanned back in. On average, 30% of invoices arrive as PDF attachments, and 15% as faxes. [AIIM – The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?]

#3 -- Make the business social: Integrate social technologies into processes rather than create stand-alone social networks. Connect internal and external stakeholders to tap into unexpected sources of knowledge.

Social technologies have moved into the enterprise, and are beginning to transform organizational processes.

• Consumer sites like Twitter and Facebook initially exposed organizations to the potential benefit of using social technologies as listening posts to the market.
• Organizations are now beginning to understand that true Systems of Engagement mean more than just this public veneer; true Systems of Engagement mean embedding social technologies in the very nature of how an organization operates.
• Many early adopters of social and collaborative technologies were keen to try out different tools and services to see how they might work in a business environment. These pioneering toolsets have now converged to a much more defined set of products and application areas, and an increasing focus on integrating social technologies into the core of business processes.
• In just a few years we will cease to view “social” as a separate layer from process and the objective will be how to make the business itself social. 

Data points:

• 51% of organizations consider social business to be “Imperative” or “Significant” to their overall business goals and success. [AIIM – Social Business Systems, Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications]
• 27% of organizations now consider social business applications to be an infrastructure investment, rather than one required a separate financial business case analysis, and this % has doubled in the past 3 years. [AIIM – Social Business Systems, Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications]
• Within organizations using an Open Innovation social platform for ideas and suggestions, 48% have successfully surfaced major changes to internal processes and 34% have come up with major changes to external product offerings. [AIIM – Social Business Systems, Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications]
• 38% of those organizations using some form of Enterprise Q&A or expertise sourcing get half or more of their answers from unexpected sources within the business. [AIIM – Social Business Systems, Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications]

 #4 -- Use automation to ensure information governance: Acknowledge that the paper-based records paradigm no longer works in the digital workplace – if it ever did -- and use automation to ensure governance and disposition.

The shift to Systems of Engagement dramatically increases the complexity and volume of data and information that must be managed within an organization.

• Clearly not everything can or should be saved forever. However, the scale of the problem facing organizations is now making it clear that manual information retention and disposition processes simply extended from the world of Systems of Record will no longer suffice.
• Aside from the sheer enormity of the task, a lack of clarity about what content is valuable is the main obstacle, along with the fear of getting it wrong and a sense that there is no immediate ROI from getting rid of outdated information. 

Data points:

• The biggest obstacle faced regarding content decommissioning is, “not clear which content is valuable and which is not.” There is also considerable “Fear of the compliance and regulatory impact of deleting information. [AIIM -- Content Analytics: Research Tools for Unstructured Content and Rich Media]
• Only 15% have an automatic way of finding and deleting duplicates in their content stores, with just 8% able to analyze them automatically for relevancy and to delete irrelevant content. [AIIM --Content Analytics: Research Tools for Unstructured Content and Rich Media]
• 72% of larger organizations have 3 or more ECM/DM/RM systems. 25% have 5 or more. [AIIM –State of the ECM Industry]
• Governance is still sadly lacking in most organizations, with less than half keeping their own history record or searchable archive of content that has appeared both on internal social sites and, more worryingly, public sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. [AIIM – Social Business Systems, Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications]
• If the amount of information in the Digital Universe is growing at 50% a year or so, the subset of information that needs to be secured is growing almost twice as fast.  The amount of UNPROTECTED yet sensitive data is growing even faster. [EMC and IDC, Digital Universe]
• Although the amount of information in the Digital Universe will grow by a factor of 44, and the number of containers or files will grow by a factor of 67 from 2009 to 2020, the number of IT professionals in the world will grow only by a factor of 1.4. [EMC and IDC, Digital Universe]

 #5 -- Commit to the cloud: Break down monolithic "enterprise" solutions into more “app like” solutions that can be deployed quickly independent of platform and in the cloud.

The spread of consumer technologies over the past decade that has driven the move to Systems of Engagement has also migrated expectations typical of consumer technologies (easy to use and deploy and available on multiple devices) into the enterprise IT environment.

• SaaS and cloud-based content and process solutions are creating opportunities to deploy solutions more quickly and cheaply than ever.
• "The business" is increasingly demanding that IT staffs produce solutions that take advantage of the cloud and that are: 1) responsive to new demands to engage customers, suppliers, and employees; 2) quick to deploy; 3) more agile and modular than monolithic (i.e., more like an "app").
• To make things even more challenging, "the business" is demanding that these new initiatives be paid for by savings in legacy systems.

Data points:

• Cloud computing spending among SMEs (1-1,000 employees) will double between 2010 and 2015 from $6.3 billion to $13.3 billion (In-Stat, http://www.instat.com)
• 28% feel constrained by their ECM/workflow system when it comes to making process changes, and for 15% it has limited their ability to achieve an enterprise-wide solution. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]
• The total size of the public cloud market will grow from $25.5 billion in 2011 to $159.3 billion in 2020. The market for virtual private cloud solutions will grow from $7.5 billion in 2011 to $66.4 billion in 2020. The market for private cloud solutions will grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to $15.9 billion in 2020. [Forrester, Sizing the Cloud]
• 60 percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving competitive advantage. The figure nearly doubles the number of CIOs who said they would utilize cloud in the previous 2009 study. [IBM Survey of 3,000 global CIOs]
• 28 percent of US organizations currently using cloud computing. [CDW Cloud Computing Tracking Poll]
• 1/3 of organizations still unlikely to use cloud-based or SaaS solutions. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]
• Terminology confusion abounds - 13% of those who say they would not store content on the public web nonetheless use Salesforce. [AIIM – State of the ECM Industry]
• 41% open to idea of cloud or SaaS records management solution – once security and reliability are “secure” [AIIM – Records Management Strategies: Plotting the Changes]

#6 - Mine big content: Find insights and value in massive aggregations of unstructured information and explore what big data will mean for information professionals.

“Big data” is a top issue for CIOs that really reflects a far more fundamental challenge for the business – “How do I help my organization become analytics-driven in order to reduce costs, increase revenues and improve competitiveness? Or more simply, how do I redefine customer experiences by extracting value from all this information I am accumulating?”  

• Many analytical solutions were not possible previously in the world of unstructured information because: 1) they were too costly to implement; 2) they were not capable of handling the large volumes of data involved in a timely manner; or 3) the required data simply did not exist in an electronic form.
• New tools now bring the capabilities of business intelligence and the benefits of optimization, asset management, pattern detection and compliance monitoring to the world of unstructured information.
• The “big content” subset of “big data” includes semantic technologies, the application of analytics to high volume print streams, content and text analytics (both inside the firewall and in social streams), and ultimately managing and personalizing the web experience in which all of this comes together for the customer.    
• The entrance of “big data” issues to our space feels disorienting in the same way that “social content” once felt, and it raises a series of questions for information professionals and for the providers of content management solutions:  
  • What are the implications of the rapid blurring of the lines between structured and unstructured information for the providers of content solutions?
  • How does the accumulation of massive volumes of data and information — increasingly located in public, private, and hybrid clouds -- effect how information professionals need to look at the question of governance and risk?
  • How can organizations turn "big data" and "big content" from being viewed solely as potential liability to a new potential source of business and customer value?
  • How do organizations use all the information they have about customers — information that is currently hidden in digital landfills — to create new value and new ways of delivering that value?

Data points:

• To increase competitiveness, 83% of CIOs have visionary plans that include business intelligence and analytics. [IBM – The Essential CIO]
• 50% would find it of “high” or “very high” commercial value to be able to link a customer/citizen/staff-member search across structured (database) data & unstructured documents & case notes. [AIIM -- Content Analytics: Research Tools for Unstructured Content and Rich Media]
• For 72% of organizations, it’s harder to find information owned by their organization than information not owned by them – i.e., on the Web [AIIM -- Content Analytics: Research Tools for Unstructured Content and Rich Media]
• The average securities and investment firm with more than 1,000 employees has 3,866 terabytes of data; by comparison, the full collection of the Library of Congress is 235 terabytes. [McKinsey]

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