Digital Landfill: social business

August 09, 2013

Good Free Stuff. On #content.

These recent reports and new infographics from AIIM Market Intelligence are free to download.

Winning the Paper Wars – capture the content and mobilize the process troops

The amount of paper flowing through businesses is increasing in 41% of organizations. But for 19% it is actually decreasing. Is your business among those winning the paper wars? Download here.

The Compliance Conundrum: providing secure collaboration for financial services content via mobile and cloud

Research has shown that 33% of organizations expect to see “half or more” of their employees using iPads, tablets or digital clipboards for filling in forms in 5 years. Is your business ready to handle this shift in a responsible and secure way? Download here.

Defending the Authenticity and Integrity of SharePoint Records

This short paper takes a close look at two of the main ways for organizations to maintain competitive advantage - keeping a close rein on intellectual property (IP), and ensuring that they don't fall foul of compliance and regulatory issues. Download here.

Cloud Access to Public Sector Content – securing sensitive content through hybrid ECM

With only 4% of organizations using cloud services experiencing any security or reliability issues, where does the perceived lack of security come from? Don't let suspicion dictate what's best for your content management. Download here.

Document Output Management – so much more than print

Two thirds of respondents to this survey stated they do not have an integrated output system, leading to data not being readily accessible and bottlenecks. What is the other third of organizations doing right? Download here.

Forms Processing – text and handwriting recognition (OCR/ICR)

Do you re-key data from scanned forms? A lot of organizations do. This infographic highlights the importance of OCR, ICR and improving your business processes. Results are from a recent AIIM survey are available for download here.

Posted at 10:33 AM in cloud, Industry statistics and research, sharepoint, social business | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

June 25, 2013

Am I the only one who thinks #cloud vendors need to get more out in front of the #NSA/#PRISM story?

Well, we're about two weeks into the NSA/PRISM story, and it just doesn't seem to be going away.

I keep having this feeling that cloud vendors need to get further in front of the story than they currently are. Most of the responses to the story have centered around company-specific best practice with regards to managing security and privacy. I certainly think that this is a story that needs telling -- many organizations still inexplicably think they can do a better job at privacy and security in a small or medium-size business environment versus what can be done by a cloud provider at scale -- but that is not the story that needs telling in this particular context.

The story that needs telling, and users are going to be struggling with this issue for the next few years, is how are users who wish to implement cloud-based solutions supposed to deal with the myriad number of geographic restrictions that are inevitably going to arise as a result of the NSA/PRISM story?

In my younger life I spent time running the lobbying activities at the American Electronics Association. At that time, the worst thing that could happen was when legislators and regulators started wandering into the area of technology-specific legislation and regulation, rather than pointing legislation at desired outcomes. The reason this was so inefffective is that when legislators got involved in specific technologies, they almost always attack yesterday's technologies and yesterday's problems rather than what would come next. Technology-specific legislation -- as opposed to outcome-defining legislation -- was almost inevitably a disaster.

So now we find ourselves in an environment in which there inevitably will be an increasing volume of country-specific legislation pointed specifically at cloud and privacy concerns. And users will be left trying to sort through all of this as they consider the economies of cloud-based solutions.

I guess what I would like to see at this point is more aggressive work by the cloud solution providers to help their users prepare for these coming challenges. For many organizations, moving to the cloud is a somewhat controversial approach to begin with, especially for those with more traditional IT staffs. If you start adding requirements to the cloud that require a particular piece of information to be held in a particular server in a particular country, you have massively increased the complexity of cloud solutions for user organizations -- and have added a significant hurdle to adoption.

So instead of simply describing how good their own privacy and security is, I would like to see some of the cloud companies get out in front of this issue. They need to start evangelizing the concept that country-specific restrictions relative to the location of cloud-based information is an oxymoron in the first place. That won't stop this this legislation from occurring in the face of the NSA/PRISM revelations, but it may slow it down a bit.

Posted at 04:17 PM in cloud, nsa, social business | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: cloud, nsa, prism, snowden, technology

Defining the Future of Content Management – Part 2 – Emergence of the Extreme Buyer

In our first post on the future of content management -- Defining the Future of Content Management – Part 1 – Evolution of an Industry we talked about the changes that have swept through the content "space" (going all the way back to microfilm), the acceleration of those changes over the past few years, and voiced the opinion that the "ECM" term is started to feel a bit tired.

In this second post, we'll talk abut how the buyer has changed. Driven both by the mainstreaming of content technologies and the entry of consumer technologies into the enterprise, there has been a dramatic evolution in who buys content management and how they approach the content management buy decision.

If you think about the typical buyer profile of the past, he/she usually would fall somewhere into this hierarchy (click on the diagram to enlarge it):

In this world, much of the following was/is true...

The focus of IT was on cost reduction.
Senior executives were largely technology oblivious (one CEO recently told me, "I viewed IT as a big hairball I just hoped would go away.")
Job security was found in system complexity.
As mobile and social entered the world of systems of record, initially just their sheer existence was a source of competitive differentiation.
System implementations were long and paid for by capital expenditures (CAPEX).
Technical skills in and of themselves had value.

As a result of the consumerization of IT in the enterprise, there is now a buyer migration in progress, largely reflected in the "other" side of the above pyramid (again, click to enlarge the image):

In this new world, much of the following is/will be true:

The central mission of IT is value creation.
Senior executives are now technology aware. (Note this is different from technologically-competent, but that's another story.)
The coin of the realm is now simplicity rather than complexity.
We have quickly moved into an environment in which mobile and social are becoming table stakes rather than differentiators in an enterprise IT strategy.
The desired purchase mode is by the drink rather than by the gallon -- OPEX instead of CAPEX. Oh, and also don't talk to me about implementation cycles longer than a quarter.
The really desireable technology players are those with domain/technical skills, but in a business context. Technology staff who can think more like engineers ("How can I fit the pieces together for systems that we didn't necessarily invent here?") have increasing value.

Often I talk about the above migration in this chart:

Now the challenge is that when I talk to people -- both on the buy side AND the sell side -- and ask them where the world is headed, they inevitably point to some version of the right side of the above chart. But when I ask them where all the action and money and effort is NOW, they point to the left side. When I ask them how they will make this migration and how long it will take and what they need to get there, the answer is almost always uncertainty.

And therein lies the central challenge of the next 2-3 years. Our mission at AIIM is to help organizations understand how they build content and governance strategies to navigate the transition. How can we help?

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January 02, 2013

December 05, 2012

The Days of "Social for the Sake of Doing Social" are Over - Process Integration is Key

If you haven't seen our new Industry Watch on Social in the Flow, you need to get a copy. Downloads are free.

I put a few thoughts on the findings together in the attached video. I think it will give you an idea of the richness in the full Industry Watch report.

In addition, I would also like to highlight a post by Deb LaVoy from OpenText on a related topic.

The post is 2013 Prediction: Social Business Tech will Stop Blaming Culture for Failure and highlights 5 key developments we'll see in 2013. It's well worth reading. My favorite quote? "In 2013, Technology will peek out from behind Aunty Culture’s skirts and lead." Here are the 5 developments to watch:

A language and a better feature set for “collaboration.”
Shifting from enabling “Social” to enabling “Complexity”
Social objects will grow to include teams, projects and processes
Measures of employee engagement will pivot toward measuring cognitive and emotional attachment to core business objectives
A rigorous understanding of how information flows

Posted at 05:02 PM in social business | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: open text, opentext, process, social, social media

November 15, 2012

7 Articles Recapping the #SharePoint Conference - #SPC12

Here are 7 articles I found interesting re the just concluded SharePoint 2012 Conference:

SharePoint Conference 2012: The Time Machine Question

blogs.gartner.com11/14/12

SharePoint Conference 2012: The Time Machine Question. by Craig Roth | November 14, 2012 |

Windows IT ProMicrosoft addresses Yammer integration plans at SharePoint conferenceComputerworldMicrosoft started to address those burning questions on Monday at its SharePoint Conference 2012 in Las Vegas with an initial integration road map for the ...

Here at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas where things are in full swing, I attended Geoffrey Edge's presentation on "Planning for the Lifecycle of Your ShareP ...

SharePoint 2013 To 'Supercharge' Enterprise Social Networking - Redmondmag.com - Microsoft officials kicked off the company's annual SharePoint Conference this week with a few announcements. The company's keynote talk on Monday offered a "reimagined" Share ...

All Things Digital - Microsoft Talks About Its Plans for Yammer - Socialize Everything - Arik Hesseldahl - News - AllThingsD

http://allthingsd.com/Nov 12

At a SharePoint-oriented conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced today that the kind of social features that Yammer provides — and which SharePoint was widely criticized for not having, or at least for not having executed well — are now just part of every business application.

www.huddle.com SharePoint alternative Huddle crashed the Microsoft SharePoint Conference (#SPC11) with a marching band and cheerleaders. Yes you read that right! First we gave you the Huddle movie trailer and now we have the behind the scenes footage...

() Nov 14, 2012 ... The enterprise social features are much easier to use and they resemble the big social networks, as you can follow just abou ...

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Might also be of interest --

What Happens in Vegas by Daniel Antion -- Vice President Information Services for American Nuclear Insurers

Automating ERM with SharePoint -- http://pages2.aiim.org/ERMSharePoint.html

AIIM SharePoint Training on Governance and ECM

Learn best practices for managing and sharing information on the SharePoint platform.

AIIM SharePoint Training on Collaboration

Learn how to use SharePoint 2010 as a collaboration platform.

Posted at 04:37 PM in sharepoint, social business | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: #spc12, conference, microsoft, sharepoint

June 25, 2012

Is Your Organization Worried About Archiving External Social Activity? - Here's a List of 14 Solutions That Might Help

One of the issues I spend some time worrying about is how to balance my enthusiasm for social technologies with the very real concerns that exist as organizations consider the control and compliance realities.

That was one of the reasons we developed our new Social Media Governance course. This course is a MUST for any organizations deploying social systems, whether they are systems that are externally facing and designed for outside the firewall marketing and communications, or those inside the firewall and designed primarily for customer engagement.

In the context of thinking about this course, we've done a bit of research on the question of whether there are any solutions to help with the following specific use case:

I want my people out promoting our company/organization on external sites (like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter), but I also want a want a way to archive and retain what they are saying. And I don't want to do anything clunky like: 1) doing individual screen scrapes and somehow archiving them; 2) copying/pasting content from public sites to my internal RM systems; or 3) pre-screening activities BEFORE they do it and push that into some sort of retention system.

Here are some solutions that I have found with the assistance of my colleague Jesse Wilkins. If I've left any companies out, let me know via a comment and I'll add it to the post.

Note: All information below comes straight from COMPANY WEBSITES. I have not at this point attempted to validate the claims made, I am just trying to get the companies all in one place. Perhaps those experienced with a particular solution might post a comment (no fair competitors slamming others; I'll delete you). I have also not yet noted in the post which ones are AIIM members and which ones are not, which may be an issue for users to consider in the context of industry commitment.

Some of the companies that follow are great big enterprise solutions, and some are more modest.

In alphabetical order...

Actiance -- http://actiance.com/default.aspx

Socialite Enable provides granular control of Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, controlling access to more than 200 features and content areas Socialite Enable also provides pre approval, post review management and archiving of traffic routed through the solution. Socialite Enable includes a number of key features for securely enabling the use of social networks, including:

Identity Management - the ability to establish a single corporate identity and track users across multiple social media platforms (e.g., on Twitter is the same as JohnHJones on LinkedIn).
Data leak prevention - preventing sensitive data from leaving the company, either maliciously or inadvertently
Granular application control - enabling the access to Facebook, but not access to chat or downloading and installing any of the applications in the gaming category.
Pre-approval or Moderator control - for Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, where content is required to be pre-approved by a Corporate Communications Officer or other third party.
Activity control - the ability to manage access to features, such as who can read, like, comment upon, or access nearly a hundred features.
Log conversation and content - capture all posts, messages and commentary made to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter in context, including exporting to an archive of choice for eDiscovery.

Aleph Archives -- http://aleph-archives.com/

The two main obstacles one encounters when keeping a digital document are that of the fragility of storage medium and that of technical obsolescence. Websites archiving, moreover, raises the problem of selecting and gathering data from complex websites (national libraries for example). As digital documents, websites are particularly complex elements. They are made of several types of media : text, images, sounds, animations and streams. There are two ways to consider how to archive a website :

Manual or semi-automatic archiving, which aims at collecting sites according to a determined selection.
Automatic archiving with the help of indexation robots. These robots visit websites on a regular basis and capture them either partially or totally (as snapshots).

Web collecting platform CAMA^® is part of that last category and aims at completing the following :

CAMA^® robots collect contents regardless of internal website architectures and publishing platforms.
As opposed to other tools which can change your way to view a Web archive, accessing an archive in CAMA^® is natural, smooth (click-and-run model) and completely logical (no URL rewriting, no Javascript injection, etc.)
Your stored data’s authenticity is guaranteed by CAMA^® as unaltered by human hands.
CAMA^® gives you the choice to use your archives with other analysis tools (such as linguistic software) as it is based on a open and normalized WARC storage format (ISO 28500:2009).
CAMA^® offers a friendly and natural access to your archives. Access servers are available within your infrastructure or on-line as PaaS (Platforms as a Service)

ArchiveSocial -- http://archivesocial.com/

ArchiveSocial is a social media archiving solution for business compliance and legal protection. ArchiveSocial automates record keeping from networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. It is designed to address record keeping challenges for businesses in industries including financial services, insurance, healthcare, government, and education. Key benefits:

Designed for social media: ArchiveSocial interfaces directly with each service to archive records regardless of device or network used to post content. Unlike solutions built on email and web archiving technology, ArchiveSocial preserves social media records in their native format. This enables far superior search, export, and records management capabilities.
Built for compliance and legal protection: ArchiveSocial satisfies strict industry regulations including those such as SEC 17a-4 and FINRA 10-06 in financial services. Records are digitally timestamped to prove authenticity and can be utilized as legal evidence. Data is stored safely and securely in a SAS 70 Type II-compliant data center.
Accessible to business of all sizes: As a pure cloud based solution, ArchiveSocial enables any organization to sign up online and start archiving in a matter of minutes. We offer subscription plans suitable for any business ranging from individual business owners to enterprises. There is no software to install and no long term contract required.

Arkovi -- http://www.arkovi.com/

Originally built by financial services professionals for financial services professionals, Arkovi today also serves the social media archiving needs of companies and entities in the pharmaceutical, government and education fields. As you archive your material, you can monitor it to learn more about your customer base. Analyzing stored content can help you develop fresh insights that can be applied to new initiatives.

Key benefits:

Archive Rather than “archive and forget” (until there is a problem), users can tap into the hidden power of their social media and web site activity in real time
Access “Always on” archiving provides instant access to users for all stored content 24/7
Analyze Use “lessons learned” in real time to apply to your next communications effort
Monitor Checking social media conversations keeps marketers informed of new possibilities – and problems to avoid
Convert When you tap into the energy in your archive, you open the door to converting prospects into new clients
Engage Multiple users can set rules and coordinate all activities through customized analytics and content dashboards

Backupify -- https://www.backupify.com/

Simple, automated backups of your personal, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter and other social media & web apps accounts. Perfect for personal users, small businesses and social media professionals.

Next Point (CloudPreservation) -- http://www.cloudpreservation.com/

The Cloud Preservation service automatically crawls your web properties at chosen intervals, building an archive of html source code and resources, high quality snapshots, and a robust full-text search index. It's your secure, forensically sound answer to regulatory obligations and e-discovery readiness.

The service makes it a breeze to go back in time with all of your Web sites, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts to search content, preview records, and produce or export your data.

Hanzo Archives -- http://www.hanzoarchives.com/

Hanzo provides comprehensive and dynamic website archiving products and services, which enable you to collect, archive, preserve and produce your social media interactions and conversations. Our social media archiving is based on the same proven technologies and methodologies we use for website archiving, used by our clients in many regulated industries and sectors, as well as in e-discovery.

Being native format web-based technology, we’re capable of collecting any web content, including publicly accessible websites, blogs, forums, Video, Flash, and wikis. This native format approach to archiving social media enables us to offer the broadest support for many social networks, and indeed enables us to expand on the usual definition of social media, beyond Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, to include your blogs, blog commentary, question and answer services, customer forums, YouTube, wikis, etc.

As with our website archiving services, our social media archiving services are backed up by our technology leadership, SAS-70 certified data centre, FINRA and SEC 17a-4 compliance, and more.

Our website and social media archives can be integrated with other enterprise archives using our Web Archive Connector, including the market leading enterprise archive platform from Symantec, with Web Archive Connector for Symantec Enterprise Vault.

Iterasi -- http://www.iterasi.com/

Archive social media content from accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Authenticating and connecting through these network's API's allows us to capture both publicly available data and data stored behind password protection (e.g. Direct Messages on Twitter and Messages on Facebook).

Capture many types of social media data—status updates, group discussions, photos, videos, private messages, friend lists, events, profiles, pages and more.

Our capabilities grow every day. If you need to archive data from other social networks we can capture content through RSS feeds, page capture and other methods.

LiveOffice (Symantec) -- http://www.liveoffice.com/

Many organizations are looking for the safest way to integrate social media platforms, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, into their regular business communications. However, the attractive qualities of social media, such as its immediacy and broad reach, also make it a potentially risky business tool that must remain discoverable in the event of a lawsuit.

As a result of social media's rising popularity in the corporate world, many organizations are searching for ways to properly capture and supervise this content type. The good news is that some archiving solutions now offer built-in functionality that can help organizations meet their e-discovery and compliance requirements surrounding social media communications.

Below are questions to ask archiving vendors about their social media capabilities:

Can the solution capture all messages from LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in a centralized repository?
Are all messages/posts searchable in the event of an e-discovery request or compliance audit?
Does the solution allow administrators to define specific usage privileges?
Does the solution allow designated personnel to review, approve or reject messages before they are posted?
Does the solution automatically enforce pre-determined policies?
Does the solution meet FINRA guidance for social media capture? (Applies only to registered securities firms.)

Page Freezer -- http://pagefreezer.com/

PageFreezer uses crawling technology, similar to that of Google, to take snapshots of your website. Archiving is an automated process, saving you time. Only new webpages and changes to webpages are archived, saving storage space. PageFreezer offers the unique feature to browse through a website exactly as it appeared live online on a specified date.

PageFreezer places a digital signature and a digital timestamp on each archived page. The Digital Timestamp is evidence of the time the page was archived and the Digital Signature provides evidence that the page was not changed since it was archived. These features can be used in court to demonstrate that the archived page is the page as it existed on your web site at that time.

Archives are securely stored in a SAS-70 compliant data center with excellent firewall protection. For added protection against disaster, a copy of your website archives is stored in a second location thousands of miles away. When requiring a local copy for any reason, you simply request a data export in XML format of all media, including HTML, PDF, TXT, Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, XML, CSS or even Flash.

Smarsh -- http://www.smarsh.com/

End-to-end social media compliance solutions from Smarsh give organizations of all sizes the preservation, supervision and policy controls to embrace the emerging regulatory requirements to review and archive content from social networking sites Linkedin, Facebook, and Twitter.

Firms can automate policy company-wide, define which social networking features employees have access to, and review, approve, or reject messages before they are posted. Compliance officers and inside legal counsel will be able to monitor both static and interactive corporate communication with ease and intelligent functionality. All messages are captured, preserved in their native form and indexed in the secure Smarsh archive. Postings will be indexed and searchable via message criteria, including date and content keywords.

Selected postings can then be produced on-demand, assigned to multiple reviewers, or marked or tagged as "complaint" or "advertising" for compliance and supervisory review. All administrator activity is logged and quantifiable, illustrating policy enforcement and evidence of review for social media compliance. An audit trail captures data on every visual inspection of each posting in the social media archive and compliance officers can quantify social media data with comprehensive reporting functionality. Customizable organizational usage reports and evidence of supervision/policy enforcement can be created for review as evidence of a reasonably designed policy

Socialware -- http://www.socialware.com/

Reduce time and effort developing your company’s social media compliance policy. Start with best-in-class templates we have created from our work with more than 125 financial services firms. Then, use our industry-leading compliance software to exercise feature-level accesss control. Manage an unlimited number of group policies so that thousands of employees can seamlessly and directly access Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Compliance teams easily scale social media coverage across thousands of financial professionals using Socialware workflows and automated processes. Users create profiles and submit them for approval in an intuitive manner. Compliance officers are notified automatically about profile changes. This lowers the burden and barriers for compliant user access and also social media supervision for your compliance team.

Social media compliance requires firms to capture, record, and archive 100% of social conversations. Compliance officers know that, using Socialware, all data is retained correctly regardless of device. We provide native integration with email archiving systems to conform to your existing processes. Because context is vital for compliance, our software also records complete conversation threads.

Sonian -- http://www.sonian.com/

Sonian Social Media & Instant Message Archiving for Businesses. Sonian IM Archive™ is powering the next generation of message data management solutions. Designed for the broadest range of supported communication formats, low cost of provision, and seamless integration with existing systems, Sonian IM Archive is the ideal fit for today’s IT challenges and completes any message product offering.

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instant Message are Becoming the Preferred Form of Business Communication. Critical and casual business communication is taking place every day via Instant Messaging (IM), Text Message (SMS), and Social Media. Addressing these mediums are a necessary part of achieving better business practices. Sonian IM Archive™ integrates IM, SMS, and Social Media data with present future messaging solutions, helping to achieve compliance and reduce the cost of eDiscovery research and regulatory oversight.

Deploy your Instant Message or Social Media Archive Quickly with Zero Maintenance. Sonian IM Archive™ is easy to deploy, requires zero maintenance, and automatically adapts to the evolving IM, SMS, and Social Media technology landscape.

Your Social Media, IM, & SMS Communications Should be Compliant. It is important to know that IM, SMS, and Social Media are subject to the same industry and governmental regulations as email. Sonian works with you to bring compliance obligations within your reach.

ZL Technologies -- http://www.zlti.com/

Through its suite of social media archiving solutions, ZL Unified Archive® enables businesses to capture, index, search, review, preserve and produce chats and messages from Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and RSS Feeds in order to meet legal and regulatory demands.

System administrators can monitor social media communications and promptly report on irresponsible corporate use. With extensive auditing capabilities, ZL is able to capture all user or administrator actions, changes, and configuration modes. Administrators can quickly quantify data by creating customized reports detailing audited activity.

ZL UA uses deep content analysis and contextual filters to provide supervisory review of all outbound and inbound communications. Messages are flagged using a lexical system that can be edited to align supervision requirements with internal and external policies.

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AIIM's Social Media Governance Course covers the topics below. Contact us today to find out how to set up a private course for your organization and/or how to access these courses on-line.

The course covers the concepts, processes, and technologies required to govern social media tools and processes, both internal and external and across the enterprise. The course is available online or as a two-day instructor-led classroom course.

Information Governance in the Age of Social Media
How to Develop Social Media Policies
How to Conduct a Social Business Assessment
How to Identify Organizational Social Media Accounts
How to Identify and Capture Social Content as Records
Social Business Content and Public Records Requirements
Internal vs. External Social Media Tools
How to Use Social Technologies in Regulated Industries
How to Produce Social Content in Response to Legal or Regulatory Requests
How to Monitor Social Media for Relevant Discussions
The Social Business Roadmap
Social Media Roles & Responsibilities

Get more information on AIIM's Social Media Governance Course.

Posted at 01:26 PM in certified information professional, Compliance and records management, social business, Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: actiance, archivesocial, archiving, arkovi, backuptify, facebook, hanzo, iterasi, linkedin, live office, nextpoint, pagefreezer, smarsh, social media, socialware, sonian, twitter, ZL

June 22, 2012

It's Not too Early to Make Plans for the "Real" AIIM Conference - #AIIM13

Here in the Washington, DC area, it's the second day of summer and the temperature is 100 degrees. I don't know about the rest of you, but we haven't even closed Q2 of 2012. So it may seem like a strange time to be thinking about plans for 2013. But it's not too early.

The REAL AIIM Conference will be March 20-22, 2013 in New Orleans (#AIIM13). The awesome keynotes already confirmed include Seth Godin, David Pogue, David Weinberger, Connie Moore, John Underkoffler, and Thornton May. The theme? Extreme Information: Volume, Variety, Devices.

The reason I say the "real" AIIM Conference is that a lot of people still confuse the AIIM Conference with the Info360 event. This past year -- for the first time in a decade -- we launched a brand new AIIM Conference in San Francisco. The intention was to create a new kind of event -- decidedly NOT a trade show, but an intimate event designed around networking, world class content, the best keynotes we could find, the edges of technology, and most importantly -- drumroll, please -- it was designed around the needs of the actual paying attendees of the event. The event was an overwhelming success -- we sold out both the sponsorships and registration weeks before the event. My favorite comment summarizing everything we were trying to do in our launch was a post-event tweet from an attendee who said he had been to both South by Southwest and the AIIM Conference, and AIIM was way cooler.

Hence the comment about the "real" AIIM conference, and also the need to make advance planning. We don't want to leave anyone out.

A couple of links that may be useful in your planning...

The AIIM Conference 2013 web page is now live – www.aiimconference.com

There is a call for Papers - http://www.aiimconference.com/Call-For-Papers/Call-for-Papers-Guidelines (There’s a link to the form on this page)

A PDF outlining sponsoring opportunities is available - http://pages2.aiim.org/AIIM_2013_Sponsor_Inquiry.html

If you'd like to get notified when the program information is ready and online registration is available, you can get on the list here - http://pages2.aiim.org/AIIM_2013_Get_Notified.html

See you in Nawlins!

Posted at 09:10 AM in certified information professional, Industry statistics and research, information certification, social business | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: aiim, certified information professional, content, ecm, forrester, godin, information, new orleans, pogue, technology

March 07, 2012

The Future of Work in a Time of Radical Technology Disruption

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.

What does it mean to live and work in a time of radical technology disruption?
Why is employee and customer engagement so important to surviving periods of rapid technology change?
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 Brynjolfsson make 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 both work 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.

Posted at 12:03 PM in certified information professional, Industry statistics and research, information certification, social business, Web 2.0 | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)

Technorati Tags: AIIM, CIP, cloud, content management, ecm, local, mcafee, mobile, race against the machine, social

November 21, 2011

Geoff Moore () and the #ECM coolness factor

I recently blogged on the theme The Cool is Back in ECM, reflecting on my attendance at two widely varying industry events, the Box.Net BoxWorks conference, and IBM's Information on Demand. My conclusion, based on my data point of whether my kids had heard of the entertainment (ECM passed the test this year!) is that the Cool is Back in ECM.

I did find myself after writing that post wondering, "How could both statements -- 'BoxWorks was Cool, IBM IOD was Cool' -- be true within the same content management space?"

I came across this diagram by Geoff Moore in his new book that started me thinking, as Geoff's stuff often does. Good book; get it. (Some of you may remember that Geoff did some work for AIIM last year on Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT.)

Here's the diagram...

So per this diagram, there are two flavors of content solutions, one focused on a sweet spot that is rich in complexity and depth and focused on a finite customer set with enough scale to take advantage of information complexity and deep analytics (e.g., IBM, Oracle, Open Text, EMC). The second is a set of solutions that have been built from the assumption of simplicity and scale and focus on a very broad customer set (e.g., Box, DropBox, SkyDox, Yammer, Google Docs).

And yet even within the dichotomy of this model, there seems to be some nuances and complexities to think about relative to our industry.

The kind of scale represented by volume operations and often introduced via a freemium to premium deployment model offers all sorts of value to small and mid-sized organizations that used to be shut out of the content management solutions space. SharePoint started here, working its way into the enterprise initially as a freebie through IT types. Google Docs did as well, starting with individual consumers. Companies like Box and Yammer started here as well, often with customers in organizations frustrated by the limits of their own IT departments.
But at the same time, the longer term dynamic has gotten progressively more complex. The volume game initially plays out through the prism of the number of customers, and that lends itself well to the freemium-premium model. But the game in our industry ultimately plays out through the number of seats that someone is willing to actually pay for, and the place for that volume to ultimately be found is among the companies who are often customers on the complex systems side of the house. Thus it creates a need for the volume players to connect themselves to the complex systems game.
And if that wasn't complicated enough, the expectations for simplicity and ease of use and ease of implemention in the volume game ultimately carry over into the complex systems game. Driving prices down for users and creating a demand for simplicity.

Gets me a bit dizzy. I guess I should take some comfort in the F. Scott Fitzgerald quote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." [Note: My wife would likely question both the intelligence part and the ability to function part.]

Posted at 05:23 PM in e20, ecm, Industry statistics and research, social business | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Digital Landfill

Latest data, trends, and statistics on content management and social business, scanning, BPM, SharePoint and ECM from AIIM President John Mancini -- home of "8 things" and #OccupyIT

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