Digital Landfill

It seems like only yesterday that the IPhone first appeared.  It's hard to believe how long the iPhone - and all the sons of iPhones for those initially held in Verizon and Sprint purgatory - have been with us.  NOT!  Believe it or not, it's been less than 5 years.  A blink of an eye. 

The iPhone was introduced in June 2007, to fairly widespread snickering among "serious" technology types. Per blogger Mark Flosser (http://www.intomobile.com), "The initial reaction from competitors, or soon-to-be competitors since Apple wasn’t really in the game yet, was either shock or laughter. RIM didn’t think it was possible to have such a device without it being a power hog. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer laughed at it for not having a physical keyboard."

I will confess to being swept up early in the iPhone frenzy, and ultimately convinced my IT types to chill, that I would handle my own tech support, and that everything would be OK.  (And true confessions, for the most part it was.  And yes, I do understand that technology in a small 45-person organization is different than technology in a Fortune 500 company.)

Well, a lot has changed. We now find ourselves in…

• A world in which there are now more tablets and smartphones sold than PCs.
• A world in which more people have cell phones than toothbrushes.  Yikes.
• A world in which our customers expect to use a mobile device to: 1) interact with us; interact with the information we provide; and 3) interact with the processes that drive our businesses.
• A world in which our employees are increasingly working outside of traditional, chained to the desk, office environments, and expect to use multiple devices and locations to interact with corporate information and systems that we once thought of as locked down and "company confidential."

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.  And all of this is not just in the context of smartphones, but in the context of an ever increasing array of devices beyond smartphones that are truly mobile.

On the opportunity side, we now interact with customers on devices that are aware of their location.  If we know exactly where a customer is in real time, what does this mean in terms of the kinds of new products and services we can deliver? If our customers carry around connected devices with 5 megapixel portable cameras and scanning devices in their pockets, what does this mean in the context of our interactions with them?

The natural reaction of IT in the face of this dramatic change to fall back into the control paradigm. Witness the following…

• 76% of organizations have no mobile processes: 24% haven’t even thought about it, 20% have security reasons or feel it adds no value, 32% have evaluated it but not made a move. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• A third of organizations have not optimized their websites for mobile. Of those that have, only 8% specifically test access to all pages and forms and only 10% have apps -- and only 5% check for tablet resolution. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Median % of processes that could be mobile that actually are = 2.5%. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Only 47% of organizations allow personal devices to access company data, and most do so in a policy void. (Making the Most of Mobile:  Content on the Move)
• Mobile access to ECM systems is somewhat restricted. 37% of organizations have no mobile access available on their ECM systems, and a further 30% would need to rely on a conventional web interface. 15% have a dedicated app, at least for iPhone. (Making the Most of Mobile: Content on the Move)
• 42% expect staff to carry two phones, a company one and a personal one. 47% allow personal devices to access company data, but only a third of those enforce data-wipe policies. The rest rely on employee trust. 20% have no usage policy on mobile and 9% allow staff to hook up in an ad hoc way. (Making the Most of Mobile: Content on the Move)

The potential benefits of embracing mobile are significant:

• Median expected productivity improvement among administrative staff for automated processes = 29%. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• 67% of organizations believe that mobile technologies are "important or extremely important to improving their business processes. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Median expected productivity improvement for field-based or travelling staff if they could input directly to, and/or interact with back-office processes using mobile (hand-held) devices = 25%. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Median organization that has deployed mobile solutions is 2.7X faster in responding to customers and staff than those that have not. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

While we can't ignore the control factor, we need to respond aggressively to the opportunities afforded by mobile.  Mobile needs to be a part of every IT decision, not an afterthought.  We must invest in the required technical skills, which are different from traditional IT skills, which we need to take advantage of mobile. We need to set our focus on where our customers will be three years from now in terms of mobile, and figure out how our IT strategies and systems will meet them when they get there.

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Have you registered for the AIIM Content Management Boot Camp yet?

A few slots are left; the event is free, but first come, first served.  

May 01, 2012	Renaissance Houston Greenway Plaza Hotel	Houston, TX	Register/Agenda
May 03, 2012	Renaissance Dallas Hotel	Dallas, TX	Register/Agenda
May 08, 2012	Hyatt Regency Denver Convention Center	Denver, CO	Register/Agenda
May 10, 2012	Sheraton Anaheim Hotel	Anaheim, CA	Register/Agenda
May 15, 2012	The Westin Bellevue	Bellevue, WA	Register/Agenda
May 17, 2012	Palace Hotel	San Francisco, CA	Register/Agenda

 9 reasons to attend...

1. Your organization needs to change the way they handle paper – it’s everywhere and it’s slowing down your business processes.
2. Your marketing team wants to reach customers where they are and how they consume content – social, local, and mobile.
3. Your company has offices around the globe and you need to collaborate better.
4. Your Business Executives want to put everything in the Cloud. Should you?
5. You need to build a strategy to handle “Big Data” in your organization.
6. You want to ban email in your organization - just for one day.
7. You want to find out how your peers are solving their business challenges and get some insight in to key considerations.
8. There are so many solutions out there. Which one do you choose?
9. For you records managers and information professionals, the event has been pre-approved for 4 hours of ICRM Certification Maintenance Program (CMP) credits when you attend. You'll also get CIP credits.

It seems like just a few years ago (oh, it was just years ago) that social technologies were viewed as some temporary aberration of college students.  Kind of like keg stands or an ice luge (ask your kids). Well wake up, social technologies have moved into the enterprise with a vengeance, 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. 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.

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. 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.

It is clear that the young professionals in our organizations -- those of the mobile and social generation -- view work much differently than we in the email generation do.  And if we are going to race with the machine rather than against it, if we are going to position our organizations for the future rather than the past, we best start paying attention to what they are saying.

A few months ago, Cisco did a very interesting report on what is going on in the minds of college students and young professionals. The Cisco World of Work Report was published in November 2011, and surveyed 1,400 college students (ranging in age from 18-23) and 1,400 young professionals (30 years old of less) from 14 countries.  

Now one can say, particularly if one is of my generation, “Who cares what these people want. Just suck it up and work the way we tell you to.”  But honestly I don't feel that's the way to approach it.  If we buy the proposition that engagement is key to creating value -- and ultimately profitability and productivity -- then we really need to think about the social and mobile technology systems that create and foster engagement -- and how they connect back to the existing information resources of the organization.

So let me give you a couple of data points about how young professionals in the workplace view mobility and flexibility and social technologies from the Cisco report.

• 45% of young professionals would accept a lower paying job with more flexibility rather than a higher-paying job with less.
• One in four young professionals say the absence of a remote access option for their jobs would influence their job decision. 
• 30% of young professionals feel that the ability to work remotely with a flexible schedule is a "right.”
• 77% of young professionals have multiple computing and communication devices.  33% use at least three devices for work purposes. 
• 52% of young professionals believe that they are not responsible for securing their work devices and data -- service providers and IT are.  15% of young professionals have had their mobile phone, laptop or other devices stolen in the past 12 months. 30% have experienced identity theft at least once.
• 73% of young professionals access Facebook at least once per day.  70% of these have “friended” either their colleagues, their manager, or both.
• 68% of young professionals believe that company-issued devices should be available for both work and play.

So clearly we need to think about how we engage this generation of employees differently from how we engaged the email generation. While deployments of social technologies in a business context is still in its infancy, the data suggests huge potential benefits:

• 51% of organizations consider social business to be “Imperative” or “Significant” to their overall business goals and success. [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. (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. (Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications)
• By using specific social collaboration between Sales and Marketing staff, the number of respondents reporting “poor sharing of knowledge and information” drops from 41% of organizations to 8%, and “poor working together” drops from 21% to 4%.  (Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications

Social technologies are clearly on the way to becoming digital dial tone in organizations. There is still huge resistance to these technologies, in this case not only from traditional IT, but from business executives who believe that these technologies will result in the escape of corporate "secrets" and the death knell of employee productivity.  Sound familiar?  We all said exactly the same thing about deployment of email and then internet connectivity to the general employee population.

The business needs to demand that we embrace social technologies as the future digital dial tone of our organizations. We need to understand that how the Facebook generation will expect to connect with their peers and customers is dramatically different from how the email generation did so.  We need to admit that email as a group collaborative tool (as opposed to a direct tool for one to one communication) is an abject failure.

-----

Have you registered for the AIIM Content Management Boot Camp yet?

A few slots are left; the event is free, but first come, first served.  

May 01, 2012	Renaissance Houston Greenway Plaza Hotel	Houston, TX	Register/Agenda
May 03, 2012	Renaissance Dallas Hotel	Dallas, TX	Register/Agenda
May 08, 2012	Hyatt Regency Denver Convention Center	Denver, CO	Register/Agenda
May 10, 2012	Sheraton Anaheim Hotel	Anaheim, CA	Register/Agenda
May 15, 2012	The Westin Bellevue	Bellevue, WA	Register/Agenda
May 17, 2012	Palace Hotel	San Francisco, CA	Register/Agenda

 9 reasons to attend...

1. Your organization needs to change the way they handle paper – it’s everywhere and it’s slowing down your business processes.
2. Your marketing team wants to reach customers where they are and how they consume content – social, local, and mobile.
3. Your company has offices around the globe and you need to collaborate better.
4. Your Business Executives want to put everything in the Cloud. Should you?
5. You need to build a strategy to handle “Big Data” in your organization.
6. You want to ban email in your organization - just for one day.
7. You want to find out how your peers are solving their business challenges and get some insight in to key considerations.
8. There are so many solutions out there. Which one do you choose?
9. For you records managers and information professionals, the event has been pre-approved for 4 hours of ICRM Certification Maintenance Program (CMP) credits when you attend. You'll also get CIP credits.

According to IDC, the amount of information in the Digital Universe will grow by a factor of 44 between now and the end of the decade.  Even more challenging, the number of containers or files will grow by a factor of 67. The subset of information that needs to be secured is growing almost twice as fast.  And the amount of UNPROTECTED yet sensitive data is growing even faster.

And while all of this is going on, the number of IT professionals in the world will grow only by a factor of 1.4. [IDC, Digital Universe]

Well, hell, that's a lot of bits and bytes.

The shift to Systems of Engagement dramatically increases the complexity and volume of data and information that must be managed within an organization. IT, we understand that not everything can or should be saved forever because of the litigation risk associated with saving "everything." We also understand that there is growing value in mining the huge masses of information we are accumulating.  We also understand that these two statements are not necessarily consistent with each other.  Help us make sense of our irrationality.

On the "risk" side of the equation, the volume of information coming at us is 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. 

The reality in most organizations is that traditional approaches to information governance are a joke, and it's not for lack of effort. It was never realistic to assume that knowledge workers would assist in manually classifying documents according a complex records retention schedule, and it is equally unrealistic to assume that we will manage the firehouse of data and unstructured ephemeral social content with the same kinds of records rigor that we applied to retention of a life insurance policy for the life of the policy holder.

Clearly, adapting to the world that is upon us is proving problematic:

• Two-thirds of organizations have an Information Management Strategy, only 22% use it. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet).
• 79% of organizations have an Information Retention policy, but only 32% enforce it. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet).
• 70% have mobile device rules, and social media rules, only 30% enforce them. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet).
• 58% of organizations say that a single enterprise records management model underlying all content systems is their goal, yet only 9% have achieved this. (Records Management Strategies: Plotting the Changes)

Yuchon Lee, a VP with IBM, describes the "value" side of the equation this way...

"For the past decade, companies have been accumulating data in what we call a system of record.  Those who survive going forward will also have systems of engagement, which start with evaluating how you can have a relevant conversation with each individual customer across all channels.  And insuring you have the analytical capability and the data to support that analysis.  That is where the linkage is between the system of record data to system of engagement. On the technology side, we believe the future of handling this volume lies in leveraging the capability of the cloud.  A lot of the analysis is done behind a firewall, but the analysis, platform and architecture is really a hybrid.  That is how you solve the problem and get the most value out of the data."

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.  Cloud technologies such as HADOOP and NoSQL have dramatically changed the cost of analyzing large volumes of information, making analysis of large amounts this information affordable for first time.

The systems that we have deployed until know have largely centered around trying to identify, store, preserve, and act upon information that has intrinsic value, usually directly in the context of business process.  We have done a better job of managing this high-value Systems of Record information on the structured side than on the unstructured side. This is not only in terms of the % of information under some sort of governance (think of our usual lament that 80% of the information in an organization is unstructured, and most of this in unmanaged), but also in terms of the lack of tools to actively interpret and mine all of this unstructured information in any meaningful way.

Systems of Engagement are generating massive volumes of new structured and unstructured information.  Per Fortune, by 2020, Internet connected devices will grow from 400 million today to 50 billion.  These devices will be talking to each other and to the Internet.  By 2020, it is also predicted that our smart phones will have the capability of storing and accessing as much information as IBM’s Watson and super-computers can.  The core difference between this "low-value-density" information and all of the high-value information in Systems of Record is that this new information tends to have value in the aggregate or as it is interpreted rather than intrinsinctly.  In other words, it is easy to see the value in storing a document or a piece of data that documents a specific transaction or process.  It is more difficult - and it has been too expensive in the past - to do so with vast quantities of digital flotsam and jetsam that has value only as it is aggregated and analyzed.

Advances in semantics, search, content and text analytics, and print stream analytics are now making analysis of large amounts of information practical for first time - especially all of that unstructured information hidden away in digital landfills.  In addition, for the first time, natural language processing and visualization techologies are moving the analysis of all of this data and information from technical back rooms and into the executive suite (to help solve the vexing business problems listed above).

The business needs to acknowledge that the old world of paper driven records management approaches is dead; and we need IT's help in mitigating the risks associated with the death of this nice predictable world. We also desperately need to get more value out of all the "stuff" we are gathering -- and use this intelligence to improve customer responsiveness and anticipate and predict where the business will go next.

-----

Have you registered for the AIIM Content Management Boot Camp yet?

A few slots are left; the event is free, but first come, first served.  

May 01, 2012	Renaissance Houston Greenway Plaza Hotel	Houston, TX	Register/Agenda
May 03, 2012	Renaissance Dallas Hotel	Dallas, TX	Register/Agenda
May 08, 2012	Hyatt Regency Denver Convention Center	Denver, CO	Register/Agenda
May 10, 2012	Sheraton Anaheim Hotel	Anaheim, CA	Register/Agenda
May 15, 2012	The Westin Bellevue	Bellevue, WA	Register/Agenda
May 17, 2012	Palace Hotel	San Francisco, CA	Register/Agenda

 9 reasons to attend...

1. Your organization needs to change the way they handle paper – it’s everywhere and it’s slowing down your business processes.
2. Your marketing team wants to reach customers where they are and how they consume content – social, local, and mobile.
3. Your company has offices around the globe and you need to collaborate better.
4. Your Business Executives want to put everything in the Cloud. Should you?
5. You need to build a strategy to handle “Big Data” in your organization.
6. You want to ban email in your organization - just for one day.
7. You want to find out how your peers are solving their business challenges and get some insight in to key considerations.
8. There are so many solutions out there. Which one do you choose?
9. For you records managers and information professionals, the event has been pre-approved for 4 hours of ICRM Certification Maintenance Program (CMP) credits when you attend. You'll also get CIP credits.

We've all done it.  Admit it. Tearful confessions are the first step to forgiveness.  And an appearance on Oprah.

No, not sex, drugs, or rock-n-roll.  I'm talking about pulling rank on the IT people, coming in with a great idea you thought of over the weekend, and convincing everybody to roll it out as quickly as possible. To push out that new "System of "Engagement" and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Except for one thing.  True customer engagement is more than just creating a social veneer.  Because once you bring the customer into the business, once they truly engage, all of the weaknesses of your back end systems and processes will be exposed.

The reality of most organizations is that there is a lot of cleaning up to be done in core backend processes. We've all experienced the irritation of keying in our phone number or account number multiple times in a call response system, only have the very first question asked by a customer service representative (assuming we get one) be, "Can you tell me your phone number?"

I won't even go into the recent customer experiences that generated the following tweets (company names masked to protect the guilty; my wife calls these my old man rants):

- 1:40 pm via HootSuite - If someone doesn’t contact me today and let me end run your #Satanic call center, I’m blogging tomorrow

- 3:40 pm via HootSuite - This is Day 87 that I am held hostage by ’s ridiculous #mortgage refinance process. Please call.

No matter how elegant the front-end, Systems of Engagement cannot operate in an environment in which the processes that support and complement them are engulfed by paper and inefficiency. The reality is that most organizations exist in a 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.

A few data points illustrate the reality that exists in most organizations:

• The median cost to process a paper invoice is still > $9. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)
• Overall, 52% of organizations surveyed have yet to adopt any automated AP systems. One third of organizations receiving more than 25,000 invoices per month are still using paper-based processes. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)
• A third of small and mid-sized companies and 22% of the largest have yet to adopt any paper-free processes. Only 20% of any size orgs pro-actively evaluate all processes for driving out paper. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Median % of processes that could be paper free that actually are = 14%. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• 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. (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. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)
• For 40% of organizations, half or more of their electronic workflows are interrupted by physical sign-offs, generally requiring multiple paper copies to be printed (Digital Signatures for documents, workflow and SharePoint)

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about true progress relative to digitizing processes is how compelling the existing results are relative to the lack of progress outlined above.

• Electronic-only filing would halve the storage space needed for paper in 5 years. The average proportion of office space taken up by paper is now 15.3%, and it would drop to 7.4% with an all-electronic filing policy, a saving of nearly 8% in overall office costs. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)
• 61% of Accounts Payable system users report a payback period of 12 months or less. 77% consider they have achieved a payback of 18 months or less. A significant 20% report a payback in as little as 6 months. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)
• The median cost per invoice to process is $9. Costs reported range from less than $2 to more than $30, with an average of $11.6. Half of survey respondents are processing 5,000 or more invoices per month. At this level a 33% saving at $10 per invoice is $200,000 per year. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)
• On average, respondents 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 3-times, and nearly a third (29%) see an improvement of 10-times or more. (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. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)

The business needs to demand that we ruthlessly drive paper out of every process we can find. It must demand that we view the connections between systems with as much rigor as we view the individual systems themselves. It must demand that once we drive paper out, we keep it out. It must demand that we automate just enough, but not too much.

-----

Have you registered for the AIIM Content Management Boot Camp yet?

A few slots are left; the event is free, but first come, first served.  

May 01, 2012	Renaissance Houston Greenway Plaza Hotel	Houston, TX	Register/Agenda
May 03, 2012	Renaissance Dallas Hotel	Dallas, TX	Register/Agenda
May 08, 2012	Hyatt Regency Denver Convention Center	Denver, CO	Register/Agenda
May 10, 2012	Sheraton Anaheim Hotel	Anaheim, CA	Register/Agenda
May 15, 2012	The Westin Bellevue	Bellevue, WA	Register/Agenda
May 17, 2012	Palace Hotel	San Francisco, CA	Register/Agenda

9 reasons to attend...

1. Your organization needs to change the way they handle paper – it’s everywhere and it’s slowing down your business processes.
2. Your marketing team wants to reach customers where they are and how they consume content – social, local, and mobile.
3. Your company has offices around the globe and you need to collaborate better.
4. Your Business Executives want to put everything in the Cloud. Should you?
5. You need to build a strategy to handle “Big Data” in your organization.
6. You want to ban email in your organization - just for one day.
7. You want to find out how your peers are solving their business challenges and get some insight in to key considerations.
8. There are so many solutions out there. Which one do you choose?
9. For you records managers and information professionals, the event has been pre-approved for 4 hours of ICRM Certification Maintenance Program (CMP) credits when you attend. You'll also get CIP credits.

 

We've all just about had it with monolithic proprietary systems that cost lots of money in purchase costs and annual service, require expensive customizations in order to get anything actually done, with frequent upgrades requiring additional consulting services just to do the upgrade, followed by yet more consulting services to port the previous customizations to the upgrade, and on and on and on.

Per Cloud Powering an Enterprise, business always strives to do three things simultaneously: 1) sustain existing products and services; 2) grow them; and 3) introduce new ones. Gartner labels these activities "run, grow, and transform."

According to Gartner in 2011, 66% of IT spending is focused on "run" (sustaining existing stuff), 20% is focused on "grow" (improving existing stuff), and only 14% of IT spending is focused on "transformation" (creating new value).

Now that doesn't mean there isn't a role for on-premise software. Far from it. But as we think about how to meet the challenge of rapidly deploying new Systems of Engagement, it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon or [insert other really smart people] to realize that something needs to give. We have to find new, more cost effective ways to deploy new systems and we need to find ways to save on legacy Systems of Record. Cloud solutions can provide a way to save money on our legacy systems, and also provide new ways of more quickly deploying transformational technologies.

A couple of data points to consider

• 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).
• 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).
• 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)

However, this is easier said than done. Cloud computing is a lot like teenage sex; not nearly as many people as doing it as are talking about it.  The data suggests that organizations are having a difficult time making the transition.

• 33% of organizations have a generic IT strategy for moving to the cloud. 12% do not, and 55% are still undecided. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• 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]

The net-net is that the business needs to DEMAND that IT embrace the cloud. Not just experiment with it or consider it or ponder it or look at it when they have a chance. Cloud be a part of every IT decision, not an afterthought. 

-----

Have you registered for the AIIM Content Management Boot Camp yet?

A few slots are left; the event is free, but first come, first served.  

May 01, 2012	Renaissance Houston Greenway Plaza Hotel	Houston, TX	Register/Agenda
May 03, 2012	Renaissance Dallas Hotel	Dallas, TX	Register/Agenda
May 08, 2012	Hyatt Regency Denver Convention Center	Denver, CO	Register/Agenda
May 10, 2012	Sheraton Anaheim Hotel	Anaheim, CA	Register/Agenda
May 15, 2012	The Westin Bellevue	Bellevue, WA	Register/Agenda
May 17, 2012	Palace Hotel	San Francisco, CA	Register/Agenda

9 reasons to attend...

1. Your organization needs to change the way they handle paper – it’s everywhere and it’s slowing down your business processes.
2. Your marketing team wants to reach customers where they are and how they consume content – social, local, and mobile.
3. Your company has offices around the globe and you need to collaborate better.
4. Your Business Executives want to put everything in the Cloud. Should you?
5. You need to build a strategy to handle “Big Data” in your organization.
6. You want to ban email in your organization - just for one day.
7. You want to find out how your peers are solving their business challenges and get some insight in to key considerations.
8. There are so many solutions out there. Which one do you choose?
9. For you records managers and information professionals, the event has been pre-approved for 4 hours of ICRM Certification Maintenance Program (CMP) credits when you attend. You'll also get CIP credits.

 

CMS Wire -- Virginia Backaitis -- Show and Tell at AIIM: EMC Unveils Documentum D2, Mobile App

Document Media -- Cheryl McKinnon -- Social Technology & Business: Halves of a Whole?

Fierce Content Management -- Ron Miller

• EMC releases Documentum iOS app
• Adobe hopes predictive analytics can transform enterprise decision making
• There's an awful lot of data in the enterprise 
• David Pogue Sings the iPhone Song at AIIM 12 (video)
• Why Can’t IT and Business Just Get Along?
• The Five Forces Driving the Consumerization of IT

Collaborative Planning & Social Business (blog) -- Keith D. Swenson

• AIIM 2012 Clay Shirkey Keynote
• AIIM2102 Dion Hinchcliffe Keynote
• AIIM2012 Ted Schadler Keynote

New Horizons Computer Learning Centers (blog) -- IT professionals honored at AIIM conference

SlideShare (web) -- Chris Riley -- 

Document Media --

SharePoint Stories (blog) -- Dan Antion

• Thank You
• Three Themes – One Goal

Strait (blog) -- Get CIP certified? You’re crazy! I’m too darn busy.

Bamboo Nation Your SharePoint Community (blog) -- Julie Auletta -- Greetings from the AIIM Conference 2012

Oracle WebCenter (blog) -- Christie Flanagan -- Taking AIIM at Social

TechTarget: SearchContentManagement -- Jonathan Gourlay

• AIIM’s take on information management and the mobile social enterprise
• Enterprise social media, mobile workforce targets of AIIM Conference

Oracle WebCenter Blog -- Peggy Chen -- San Joaquin County, California Wins AIIM 2012 Carl E. Nelson Best Practice Award 

EMA Blogs: The Compleat ECM Angle -- Gary MacFadden -- In Search of a Strategic Imperative for Managing Enterprise Content: Lessons from AIIM, ECM Vendors and the User Community

Steve Weissman on AIIM 2012, A Corner Turned

Jeff Shuey -- The AIIM Conference is a Hit!

Lubor Ptacek -- The Future of Content Management

Flickr Streams --

• R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO, Constellation Research -- 
• Susan Batimarchi, Editor, Information Management (Brazil) -- 
• From

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My keynote at #AIIM12 on Customer and Employee engagement