Digital Landfill

My story begins with this series of pictures, taken 27 years ago.

At the time, this seemed like a cool idea for a Mother's Day gift, and maybe one that would begin a bit of a tradition.

 Well, 27 of these little photo montages and 2 more kids and one daughter-in-law later, I'm still at it. 

[Editor's note:  One might ask why am I still at it 27 years later, and why this fabulous idea has not yet been turned over to one of my kids.  THAT is a very good question.]

 Over the years, the process to create these works of art has changed.  The "Happy Mother's Day" changed to "We Love Mom" as the gang grew.

It used to be difficult to find mats and frames that suited my purpose.  Something must have changed in the matting and framing space over the past 25 years, because this is now a piece of cake (usually at Target).  

I used to take actual photos, and get actual film developed. To be on the safe side, I usually took at least 10 of each "we" and each "love" and each "mom" in order to make sure that at least one good one of each came out.  All of the outakes exist in some box somewhere. I had to get started about a week or so in advance in order to save time to get the pictures developed.

A byproduct of all our technological progress - as well as the dispersion of kids to multiple geographies - is that creating this annual project gets later and later each year (It's Mother's Day again? It's in early May this year?).  Well, this year took the cake, but in the process it also highlighted for me a great example of what it means to be a process revolutionary in the age of Social, Local, and Mobile (SoLoMo) technologies.

And my award as this year's Mother's Day Process Revolutionary - for really understanding how to adapt processes to the SoLoMo era - goes to Walgreen's (Founded in 1901).  That's not a misprint.

This year, Mother's Day was at Duke University, where that little guy in the photo at the beginning of this article (Joey, now "Joe") was getting his MBA from the Fuqua School.  Again, one would think with this going on, I would have prepared my Mother's Day montage months and months ago.  Ha ha ha ha ha.  My goodness, you do not know me very well.

 [In my defense for all that follows, my wife DID say to all of us, "Don't worry about Mother's Day this year.  It will be present enough just for all of us to be together."]

In my defense, I did have a frame. 

I also had a photo from MBA boy and his wife in my email.

And that was it.

So Saturday, I got to work, put my iPad into use, and sneaked outside during brunch first with #2 son Will for the "love" photo shoot.  Got it.  Then I grabbed Erin (the "Mom" role) and dragged her out on the porch during a break in the action.

Confident that I had been extremely sneaky in order to preserve the "surprise," I put the project on standby until after the graduation ceremony (and turns out after a party afterwards).

Fast forward to 12:15 a.m., back at the hotel.  Technically Mother's Day. 

And as I lay in bed with my iPhone, I pondered a fundamental question of digital and analog technologies: How exactly am I going to get these daggone photos out of my iPhone and printed in order to stick them in the frame?

And then I fell asleep.

I woke up before everyone else at 7:48.

My first thought was, "There must be a Walmart or a Target around here somewhere," and hid out in the bathroom, armed with my iPhone, in order to find the answer.  I used the store locator on each web site to find a few nearby stores, but there was no way to determine once I got there whether there would be a way to print from the iPhone and whether there was any way to get it done in an hour.

Then I heard a voice whispering, "Google the Problem, Grasshopper."

At first I resisted, and then the voice again, "Google the Problem, Grasshopper."

I entered "one hour photo" in my search bar and the first Walgreens SoLoMo smart move paid off.

 

Walgreens Win Number One - someone made the decision to purchase the right Adwords and had the right SEO strategy to get Walgreen's at the top of the heap for my search. 

And then Walgreens Win Number Two - someone noted that there was an available app, right in the ad, and provided a link to it.  This was starting to get promising.

App downloaded and opened.  And Walgreens Win Number Three - a specific and exactly clear statement of the value proposition of the app - "Print pictures right from your phone and pick them up in about an hour." Ha Ha! Life was getting better!

And then the next screen, Walgreens Win Number Four.  Not some clunky web interface in 2 point font to transfer the photos, but upload options integrated into my normal IPhone albums.  Sweet.

Walgreens Win Number Five.  After uploading, a process flow to allow me to select the size of photo.  This was important to me because I had a frame with 5x7 holes.  If everything defaulted to 4x6, I was done for.  Check, 5x7.

Then Walgreens Win Number Six.  I should have perhaps thought of this before I started this process, but where was the nearest Walgreen's? Were they open on a Sunday? How would I get there? The app popped in, "Find Nearest Walgreen's?" I checked yes, it gave me 4 options, I chose the one 2.47 miles away, was told that my pictures would be ready at 9:18 am (in less than 30 minutes), and the app provided a map. 

I clicked "Finish" and the app surprised me with Walgreens Win Number 7 - it required only the information that was needed at this stage of the process.  No lengthy set of questions. No credit card. No "how did you find us?" No "set up your communications preferences." Just first name, last name, phone, and email.  Bang. Zoom. Done.

I carefully opened the bathroom door.  Ahhh....everyone still asleep.

I grabbed my keys and headed to Walgreen's.

This is the point at which many processes run into trouble - the crossover between all the digital, no people stuff and actual analog, people side stuff.  Walgreens Win Number Eight.  Waiting for me when I got to the store was Kyle Gray, waiting to hand me the pictures.  I even had a few minutes to pick up a card and a cool red wrapping bag on the way out the door.

I ran out to the car, put the pictures in the frame, put the frame in the bag and headed back to the hotel, where folks were just getting up.  And ready for Mother's Day breakfast. The finished product is below.

They reason I go through this is that none of this is particularly challenging or impressive from a technology perspective.  What was impressive was how it was packaged and how it was delivered.

Becoming a Process Revolutionary and tapping the full value of Social, Mobile, and Local technologies means: 1) thinking through what each of these clusters of technology means for your customer; 2) thinking through how they can be applied to solving a particular business problem; and 3) taking the time to design an elegant solution.  Not an acceptable solution, but an elegant one.

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]

I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a while, and as a result, the post is a bit longer than normal. I would welcome your thoughts in the comments section.  What do you think?  What rings true?  Where do you think I’m nuts?

There are three questions I would like to address in today’s post.

1. What does it mean to live and work in a time of radical technology disruption?
2. Why is employee and customer engagement so important to surviving periods of rapid technology change?
3. How do social, mobile, and cloud technologies revolutionize how we need to look at the question of customer and employee engagement?

Let's start by thinking about what it means to live in the period of radical technology innovation.

The first yardstick we usually use in thinking about technology change is Moore's Law.  Moore's Law, originally stated by Intel President Gordon Moore in an article in the 60s, contends that our ability to lay down transistors on a semiconductor essentially doubles in capacity every 12 months.  That was later increased to once every 18 months, but even at 18 months you can get a sense of the exponential impact of technology change on our ability to improve hardware.

In Race Against the Machine (which is a terrific read, BTW), Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssonmake the point that the impact of Moore's Law is just beginning to hit its radical phase.   Andy and Erik use the analogy of the fable of the invention of chess as  a way to talk about what happens once the power of exponential improvement really takes hold of processes and people and technology.

The way the fable goes is as follows.  Supposedly the inventor of the game of chess showed his creation to the Emperor.  The Emperor was so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward.  The inventor was a clever man, and so he asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows:  one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third and so on with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous one.  The Emperor agrees, thinking that this reward is far too small for such a fabulous game.

He is reassured in his thinking during the early phases of the rice doubling because it really doesn't seem that impressive initially.  Even after 32 squares, the Emperor has given the inventor only about 4 billion grains of rice.  Now that's an awful lot of rice, but it is only about one large field’s worth.  However, it is in the second half of the chessboard that volume of rice becomes overwhelming. In the second half of the chessboard the Emperor ultimately realizes that the number of grains of rice is equal to 2 to the 64th power - 1, or about enough rice to make a mountain the size of Mount Everest.

The point that Andy and Erik make with this fable in terms of technology is that we are now starting to move into the second half of Gordon Moore’s chessboard.  It is in the second half of the chessboard that technology change accelerates.  And if the changes and improvements in hardware technology (as represented by semiconductor capacity) are not impressive enough, our ability to create software and algorithms improves even more quickly than our ability to improve the hardware.

This leads to a situation in which technology gets sophisticated enough to be able to perform tasks that we previously thought machines were incapable of. 

Here are some of their examples.

One way in which humans have been thought to be far superior to machines is in the ability to perform complex pattern recognition tasks, for example a task like driving a car.  No sane person would have thought 10 years ago that a machine was capable of driving a car and performing all of the tasks that are required to do so.  However we now have an  in which a fleet of cars have been driven 1,000 miles without any human intervention intervention whatsoever and have been driven 140,000 miles with only minor human intervention.

Another example of a task that was previously thought too complicated for machines is  the translation problem.  We are clearly getting to the point where machine translation is a fairly good proxy for human translation.  Andy and Erik cite an example in which Chinese and Spanish customers interact with an English-speaking customer service representative using chat and then were asked to describe their satisfaction with that process.  Overall the experience was 90% positive.

A third area in which machines were often thought incapable of competing with humans was the area of sophisticated and nuanced interpretation of unstructured and unorganized information.  Machines have long been great at performing rote tasks of analyzing and interpreting very structured pieces of information, but when it came to inferring intelligence from huge quantities of unstructured information, machines fell short.  The Watson Jeopardy example illustrates that machines have gotten to the point where they are able to understand and respond to complex and nuanced inquiries -- think about the tongue in check kinds of questions you often get in Jeopardy -- and find the answers in vast quantities of unstructured and unorganized information.

All of this translates into rather astounding improvements in the nature of productivity moving forward.  It also creates, as Andy and Erik discuss in the book, very important and overlapping sets of challenges with regards to winners and losers in our economy.  These include the competition between high skilled and low skilled workers, the competition between superstars and everybody else, and the competition for resources between capital and labor.  I will leave the policy prescriptions necessary in order to address these questions for another day.

For now, I would like to use Andy and Erik's platform of radical technology innovation and think about the nature of work and how value is added to the business in the face of all this technological change.  So let me pose two concepts that I think every organization needs to think about if they are going to race with the machine rather than against it.

The first concept is the idea that one key to winning the race against the machine is the ability to engage our employees and customers in much more meaningful ways in the future of our business and its processes.  In an increasingly automated -- and often seemingly impersonal world -- understanding what engagement means and why it is important will be an increasingly important success factor for organizations.

The second concept I would like you to consider is that the technologies we deploy will play a role in determining the degree of employee and customer engagement.  Mobile and social technologies are at the core of what engagement will look like in the years ahead.  And more importantly, we can no longer assume that engagement and collaboration will happen serendipitously in our organizations.  We need to think strategically about engagement and the information systems that are necessary to make engagement happen.

So let’s first think about this rather amorphous thing called “engagement.”  Is it important and does it impact the effectiveness of organizations?

Gallup has done some very interesting work in researching this question. 

Gallup aggregated 199 research studies across 152 organizations in 44 industries and 26 countries. For each study, they statistically calculated the relationship between employee engagement and performance outcomes. In total, they studied 32,394 business units, including 955,905 employees. They studied nine specific outcomes: customer loyalty engagement, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism, patient safety incidents, and quality.  Some of their conclusions are as follows: 

• Within the US workforce alone, the cost of actively disengaged employees is $370 billion per year in lost productivity.  
• Fully engaged customers generate a 23% premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth.
• In top performing organizations (as measured by productivity and profitability), the ratio of engaged to disengaged employees is 9.57 to 1.  In average organizations, the ratio is 1.83 to 1.
• According to Towers Watson, companies with a highly engaged workforce improved operating income by 19.2% over a period of 12 months, while those companies with low engagement scores saw operating income decline by 32.7% over the same period.
• According to the Institute for Employment Studies, a 1% increase in employee commitment can lead to a monthly increase of 9% in sales.
• Per Gallup, organizations in the 99th percentile of engagement are nearly five times more likely to deliver high performance than those at the 1st percentile.

 So if engagement -- especially among our employees -- is critical to success, how are we doing?

The reality is that much of the experience in the workplace is a lot like The Office, whether you are talking about the US or the UK version.

• Out of 10,914 workers surveyed by Blessing/White in the 2011 Employee Engagement Report, only 31% are engaged.  Nearly 1 in 5 (17%) are actively disengaged.
• Per Gallup, 33 percent of workers are engaged in their jobs, 49 percent are not engaged, and 18 percent are actively disengaged. Gallup defines the categories as follows:
  • Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.
  • Non-engaged employees have essentially “checked out.” They sleepwalk through workdays. They put in time but don’t approach their work with energy or passion.
  • Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what engaged co-workers accomplish.

 So what do we do about this?  All organizations face a significant disconnect as they think about the nature of work in the future, and it’s a challenge that is as old as time itself, but is particularly exacerbated in times of rapid technology disruption.  And that disconnect is that our decision-making tends to be dominated by those whose frame of reference is structured by past rather than future technologies.

Or in the case of our immediate disconnect, many current technology decision-makers tend to view the world through the prism of work that is done in an office.  Decision makers of my generation tend to view collaboration as something that is centered around in-person meetings and email. We tend to worry about what our employees are doing when they are not in the office.  We tend to still equate “social” with “Facebook” and worry about what domains we should restrict (except of course for those crazy marketing types, we’ll let them go wherever they want).  We think about the question of “What might happen?” far more often through the prism of Sarbanes-Oxley and Enron and litigation and control than through the prism of opportunity and new business and flexibility.

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 bothwork and play.

There’s a lot to digest here in terms of the future of our information management systems.  Let me offer a few suggestions to get started.

If you are of the email generation, hop into the waters of social and mobile:  

• Embrace engagement as a core strategic objective.
• Don’t ignore the “control” side of the control/engagement continuum, but also don’t allow it to always trump engagement.
• Work in a Starbucks for a day and see how well your “in-house” systems hold up. 
• Access your critical systems on a smartphone and a tablet and a laptop and see if they work. 
• Get off your high horse about Facebook and Twitter and your proclamations of “I don’t have time for that” find out what is so compelling about them.  
• Get rid of prohibitive policies constructed around specific technologies by IT people and view the question of desired employee behavior in the world of social and mobile as an HR issue.

Lastly, assume that your employees will use multiple devices for work, some of which you own and some of which they own.  Assume that those “this device is only for work use” policies are a joke. Against both of these assumptions, think about what the organization really needs to control, jettison old approaches that were based on manually controlling a finite universe of paper-based documents, and begin to think about how you will help your organization prepare for the future.

Of course, there is another side of this equation, which is, “What do young professionals need to do to future-proof their careers as the world drives toward the second half of the technology chessboard?”  We at AIIM think that the Certified Information Professional program has a lot to do with that. 

But I’ll save that for another day.