Digital Landfill

You Won't Believe the Knowledge Worker Who Nearly Died Under a Pile of Documents!

More about my title in a moment.

Anybody on Facebook has noticed an explosion of those Upworthy articles and those very catchy headlines:

“14 Fact-Checked Things To Make Your Pessimistic Friends Realize 2014 Might Not Be A Factory Of Awful”

“9 Out Of 10 Americans Are Completely Wrong About This Mind-Blowing Fact.”

“While We Weren’t Looking, 1.3 Million People Just Got The Shaft. Happy New Year.”

“Watch A Student Totally Nail Something About Women That I've Been Trying To Articulate For 37 Years”

Those of us who are of a marketing bent in the B2B arena always struggle with the question of how to get people to pay attention in a cluttered landscape.  Add to this equation the fact that many of the people with whom I work are marketing content, records, and information management solutions, and the challenge becomes exponentially greater.  

This concept of content virality – and how difficult it is to attain – led me to this Upworthy Slideshare presentation. 

There’s lots of interest in this presentation, not all directly related to B2B content marketing, but a couple of points worth repeating in the context of how truly bad most B2B content marketing really is.  Some tips from Upworthy:

1. To get clicks, you must focus on framing things perfectly.
2. Facebook is where people share.  Other options: 1) reddit (good luck, if you crack it you are a god); 2) twitter (if you do it right, you can make a small dent); 3) tumblr (slow cook it to perfection).
3. It’s not as much about having a conversation as it is about being conversational.
4. Never stop testing your zany theories.
5. If you can give your audience some information that they are honestly surprised by, they’ll share it.
6. Middle-aged women are the biggest sharers on the Interwebs.
7. You have to write 25 headlines for every piece of content.

Which gets me back to my tongue-in-cheek headline for this post.  I will admit that I couldn't think of 25 Upworthy-ish headlines about our industry; I could only come up with 9.  (Maybe I've just been doing this for too long.)

The rest is up to you!  Post a comment with suggested Upworthy-ish headlines about our industry.  If I get any takers I'll gather them together and re-publish them (with attribution and a link) in my next post. Let the creative juices flow!

True Tale of Heroism:  I Built a Taxonomy in Less Than a Year!

You Won't Believe the Knowledge Worker Who Nearly Died Under a Pile of Documents!

A Tale of Personal Survival:  How I Found My Way Back from #InfoChaos!

How the Variety, Velocity, and Volume of Information Nearly Killed Me!

How Content Management Saved Me From Death by a Thousand Paper Cuts!

#InfoOpportunity vs. #InfoChaos -- My Agonizing Choice!

Say YES to Ending the Mess -- How I Beat #InfoChaos!

I Survived for 14 Days in a Records Management Hell!

My Terrifying Encounter with Metadata!

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OK, enough fun.  Back to work.  Get your Upworthy-ish titles in.  And while you're at it, make sure you register for #AIIM14.  Early-bird ends January 31 and the spots are filling up.  (We sold out in '12 and '13.)

 

The Death of Records

[Today's Guest Blogger is Nick Inglis.]

We’re dealing with an influx of information. Some information is on our local systems. Some is out in the “cloud.” Other information is on external services provided by Facebook, Google, and others. We have some information on local desktops and laptops, yet we have EVEN MORE information on phones, tablets, and other devices. How the heck are we supposed to manage all of this information?

To some, the solution is all about records declaration. If we train our staff enough and drill into their brains “risk reduction, risk reduction, risk reduction,” they’ll magically become records managers and declare and place information under retention (yeah, keep dreaming). 

To others, the solution is all about writing policy. In this, we’re again relying on our users to manage their information. Frankly, our users can’t organize their personal computers, how do we expect them to organize enterprise information or rely on them to follow policies in managing information? We can’t.

A History of Records Management & Risk Reduction

Let’s go back to the world of paper. Times were simpler then in reducing risk and managing information. We had paper created by our organization and we reviewed all of that paper. The papers that needed to be kept were filed away. Those pieces of paper were given a descriptive term: a record. Eventually, we were dealing with more paper than we could handle so we started relying on our user population to provide to us the paper that should be declared as “records.” For a time, that worked because we were still dealing with an amount of information that could be reviewed manually.

Then the PC revolution hit and we started the same process over once again. We now had digital content that we treated just like we had previously managed paper. We took “records” and filed them away in our digital representation of our file rooms. Eventually, the volume grew and we started relying on and delegating the art of records declaration to our users.

Now with email, social, and mobile, we’re dealing with volumes such that our users are being overwhelmed by the volumes of information they need to use to do their work (much less take the time to declare any information as a record). It’s time for a strategy change, a fundamental shift in how we manage our information.

What Is Past & What Remains

What still remains are our regulations and our compliance requirements. Not only do these requirements remain, they’ve also grown in their scope and force. The amount of risk due to negligence in managing information has grown as judgment sizes have grown. What remains is our need to dispose of information according to the information’s worth and it’s potential for risk.

What is dead is the concept of a record. We have been deluding ourselves into believing that our user population can accurately identify and file content as records. The fact is, that this experiment in user empowerment has failed. We’re declaring records in a haphazard manner where policy is being applied inconsistently, multiple versions of information are being declared (or not declared) as records, and our inconsistencies are one of the primary ways that we’re losing lawsuits.

So if our need to categorize and dispose of information remains, but our concept of a record has failed, what are we left with? We’re left with managing all of our information but the veiled curtain of records management has been torn. Instead of categorizing and retaining just these mythical creatures called records, all of our information, however, can be categorized and retained.

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Nick Inglis is an expert on enterprise software and is the author of the AIIM SharePoint Governance Toolkit. Nick provides consulting services, training and vendor marketing support and has worked with many of the world's leading organizations. When not adding to his certificate collection (he is AIIM SharePoint Master, AIIM Enterprise 2.0 Master, AIIM Enterprise Content Management Specialist, Inbound Marketing Certified Professional), he enjoys acting crazy with his son, Conor Atom Inglis. www.nickinglis.com.

Join Nick at AIIM14 in Orlando on April 1-3.

 

Inside #Content #Analytics -- 6 Key #ROI Trends

From AIIM's recent Industry Watch, "Big Data and Content Analytics -- Measuring the ROI," 6 key ROI Trends...(Downloads of full report are free)...

62% of actual and potential users would find content analytics applications “very valuable” including 20% who would say “hugely valuable”. There is particular value in linking structured and unstructured content together.

Biggest potential business value would be in improving data quality, detecting policy compliance and speeding up customer service. Improved decision-making and enhanced profitability also score highly, as do more accurate marketing and improved product quality.

60% of early users consider their ROI to be good. 30% are less certain due to high technology and expertise costs. Results for big data projects and big content projects are very similar.

56% of early users are feeding results into decision-making, including 6% using them as a basis for strategy setting. 7% of big data projects and 11% of big content projects have produced unsatisfactory outcomes.

The biggest issue for active big data projects has been immature and difficult to use tools (50%). Poor data quality has also been an issue (46%) – as has the over-hyped expectations of senior management (37%).

Similar issues apply to active big content projects, but setting the analysis rules has also been difficult. Compliance with data privacy laws has been an issue for 33%. 

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Early-bird deadline approaching for AIIM Conference. 

 

#InfoChaos Perspectives -- Using Openness to Harness Extreme Information

How often do you hear the buzz terms, "We are going to have to do more with less" or "This is the New Normal?"  These are not the only buzz terms being tossed around in the industry.  The effect of the slow growing economy is obvious, yet we are all being asked to build complex, integrated and adaptive systems.  These systems need to utilize the latest and greatest tools and be modeled for future growth.

This overall environment could easily lead to frustration and complacency, but MN Housing and Finance CIO Tony Peleska sees it as an opportunity to transform IT and our businesses through simplicity and data sharing.  Here's how...

 

Knowledge Networks in 3-D

[Today's Guest Blogger is Kate Pugh, Academic Director of Columbia University's Information and Knowledge Strategy Masters program and president of AlignConsulting

“Knowledge networks (or Communities of Practice) are collections of people who harness the power of social platforms to do great things.” Or, so it goes. In research Larry Prusak and I did for Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, “Designing Effective Knowledge Networks” (Sloan Management Review, Fall, 2013), we showed that, without leadership and intentional design, those platform-gazing groups just don’t stick around. Members lose interest, content becomes stale, and we wonder why we started in the first place. By contrast, networks that are well designed and led get great results: innovation, cross-organization coordination, problem-solving, and transformational learning.

In looking at leadership in effective networks we didn’t find a single charismatic guru. On the contrary, effective networks’ leaders acted as a group; guiding, coordinating, and modeling the type of democratic processes they wanted to see throughout the network.

But, even the cohesive leadership teams didn’t get those results without effort. They thought intentionally about design. Interviewing thought-leaders and practitioners, we found that it takes three types of design for a network to endure and prosper:

1.     Strategic dimensions involve leaders’ cohesiveness as a team; the visibility of the sponsor; the vocalization of a crisp and compelling purpose; an intentional balance of experts and learners; and, finally, clarity around target membership and member recruitment.

2.     Structural dimensions involve the operating model or roles and responsibilities (and how those are framed in a charter); convening structures, such as meeting spaces, social media, and wikis; and facilitation practices for getting people engaged and helping them collaborate or produce. (Yes, the knowledge network does produce. Another learning in our research was that the networks that were most enduring were not just social clubs or lecture series. They could point to compelling outputs, such as an event, an article, or successful petition.)

3.     Tactical dimensions involve measuring the networks’ accomplishments, incorporating lessons learned, and implementing some sort of reward system – be it intrinsic (e.g., social recognition) or extrinsic (virtual badges or award plaques).

Great leaders actually think about a logical flow from those design dimensions to outcomes. First, they see that good design results in dynamic structures, what we often call virtuous cycles (“I contribute to meetings because they feel productive, and my contribution keeps the productivity going.”) Next, they think about how structures enable network members to behave, such as sharing their connections and readily helping troubleshoot fellow members’ problems. Finally, they see how specific behaviors, such as collaboration, result in the bonafide results, such as members’ project cycles shortened, new partnerships, systematic incorporation of lessons learned, and faster response to industry and technology change.

Fifteen years ago, when we first imagined networks (we called them all “communities of practice”), we tried injecting our project management ideas and failed. We stamped out the tiny vestiges of creativity that our members had left after they’d clicked through our clunky, hyper-structured websites. Now, with social platforms, it seems that adding design would pierce the breezy, elegant simplicity of the experience. Not so. People crave substantial and transparent engagement. So many fly-by-night network “look-alikes” come at them – selling something or tricking them into doing their work – that they’ve starting to feel exploited. If we want our networks to live up to the promise of true, authentic collaboration, it’s time to design.

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Katrina (Kate) Pugh is Academic Director of Columbia University's Information and Knowledge Strategy Masters program and president of AlignConsulting, specializing in knowledge-based transformation. Pugh is the author of a book on conversation for knowledge-sharing, Sharing Hidden Know-How (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, April 2011). She has published in the Harvard Business Review, Ivey Business Journal, NASA Ask Magazine, Journal of Digital Media Management, MIT Sloan Management Review, and The Review of Economics and Statistics

Join Kate Pugh in Orlando for her AIIM 2014 session on April 3, The Frontiers of Engagement: Creating Employee Networks to Meet the Challenge of Innovation. She’ll explain why you should care about networks: theyyield lucrative innovation, coordination, local change, and even a refuge for the individual practitioner. Then, she’ll discuss with you networks that improve an organization's agility.

 

#BigData Adoption Trends -- 5 Things You Need to Know About #Content #Analytics Adoption

 From AIIM's recent Industry Watch, "Big Data and Content Analytics -- Measuring the ROI," 5 key Adoption Trends...(Downloads of full report are free)...

34% of respondents see that big data will be an “essential capability” for their business (up from 27% eighteen months ago). Includes 10% where it is already essential (up from 9%). The number of respondents who don’t know what big data is has fallen from 14% to 6%.

65% have somewhat disorganized content, 81% have limited search capability and 60% have only basic BI reporting. This is not a good place to start for big data projects.

Connecting and linking multiple systems is the biggest challenge for potential users, particularly joining structured and unstructured data sets and analyzing textual data.

Lack of in-house expertise is the second biggest challenge to getting started. 34% of early adopters have used outside help. 32% up-skilled their existing team by recruitment or specific training.

For 63% security is a major issue, including 19% who consider it to be a show-stopper. Potential exposure of personally identifiable information is the biggest concern, followed by sensitive financial or legal data. 

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Early-bird deadline approaching for AIIM Conference. 

 

A Lot of Product Announcements Today from #EMC on #ECM re Dealing with #InfoChaos

There seem to be a number of product announcements going today on at #EMC on #ECM.  

Per Rohit Ghai, SVP & GM, Products and Solutions, at the Information Intelligence Group:  "The Enterprise Content Management (ECM) market is quickly evolving with the advancement of Big Data, mobile, social, and cloud technologies, accelerating the sophistication of business user content and access. This growth is forcing enterprises to transform in a way that allows them to keep up with user demands and business requirements."

Here are a couple of links on the details I came across...

http://pulseblog.emc.com/2014/01/21/advancing-art-science-enterprise-content-management/

https://community.emc.com/go/ECMevolved

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BTW, EMC is a Platinum Sponsor of #AIIM14 -- I'm sure they will be going over some of these changes and launches at the Conference.

 

#InformationChaos Perspectives -- The Content Silo Problem

As it gets a little bit closer to #AIIM14 (April 1-3 in Orlando), I thought I would go back and share some of my favorite presentations from last year's event.  

First out of the shoot is Alex Colic with TD Bank and he will talk a little bit about the question of content silos.  This is a favorite issue of mine, because I personally believe that the question of content silos is about to get a lot more complicated for organizations as they try to address not only on premise silos but also silos in the cloud.

 

If you haven't made plans yet to join us this year, now is the time to act; early bird registration ($200 savings) ends January 31.

 

How to Make the Jump from Records Management to Information Management

[Today's Guest Blogger is Chris Walker.]

This is a little story about how the Principles of Holistic Information Governance (the PHIGs) were leveraged to turn a pure records management project into something the entire organization, and its stakeholders, could benefit from.

A partner asked me to help them out on a project for a public transportation company. Their project is to put together (and implement) a new Web communication and presence strategy. Where they asked me to help out is on developing a records management (RM) strategy. The two projects were to be separate from each other since the RM project was really to fill in some gaps in the client being compliant with legislation and in helping them to respond to Freedom of Information (FOI) requests. There was no thought given to integrating the two projects or to looking at how a holistic approach could benefit the entire organization and its stakeholders.

As all good analysts and consultants do, I started gathering as much information about the organization and the projects as I could. The two critical documents that I had access to were the Web communication project strategy (summary and detailed) and the organization’s 20-year strategic plan and roadmap.

There were obvious tie-ins to linking the RM project and the Web project, but selling them to the organization wasn’t easy as they just didn’t care all that much. They were happy to go forward with identifying what was a record, and subject to FOI, then just firing that content into their RM tool (which they don’t have yet). The real clincher to getting the organization to accept a PHIGed approach was the long-term strategic plan. In the plan were articulated six values and five major objectives.

Values:

1. Safety
2. Customer service
3. Sustainability
4. Integrity
5. Innovation
6. Collaboration

All six of the values can be directly supported by information, provided it’s properly governed and managed, from cradle to grave.

Major Objectives:

1. Develop financial sustainability
2. Support and shape liveable communities
3. Change the perception of Transit
4. Deliver operational excellence
5. Strengthen our people and partnerships

Like the values, the objectives will benefit from taking a holistic view of how information lives in the organization.

One of the other things that I did was to review the RM strategy document I was provided and link those objectives to the objectives in the Web communication strategy and the long-term strategy. It’s both funny and sad that folks get so focused on their own view of the world that they don’t see the bigger picture. The RM strategy probably had 85% of what was needed for an organization-wide (I’m trying not to use the word “enterprise” too much) information management strategy.

From a technology point of view there will be many different tools used to provide the solutions that the organization will, over time, implement. But, they’ll be underpinned by the PHIGs. The PHIGs are there to help organizations take a look at how and why information exists and affects all relevant stakeholders. The PHIGs aren’t about technology; they’re about business and doing it better by understanding what you need from information.

By reordering and rewording some of the RM strategy objectives, and adding a couple of new ones, we were able to change the focus from an RM project that would provide very limited benefits, to an organization-wide information management program that will benefit all stakeholders. Of course it’ll take longer to get to the end, but at least the client has taken the first step and realized the importance of information to the proper running of the business.

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Here's how Chris describes himself: "I am an Information Management consultant with over 25 years of experience. My focus is more on the business and functional side than it is on the technical / product side of information management solutions. I believe that information is a valuable asset and my goal is to help organizations leverage its full potential. Risk and compliance are real fears, however, I focus on the value and benefits of information management; I don't let fear take over. I am also a blogger, tweeter, and speaker." @chris_p_walker.

Join Chris Walker on April 3 at 2 in Orlando for AIIM 2014 as he discusses how to apply information governance holistically across the organization in his session: PHIGs: Principles of Holistic Information Governance.  Register today!

 

10 #InfoChaos Insights from the Big Bang of Social, Economic, Political and Evolutionary Change

As many of you know, well-known futurist Thornton May (and a former AIIM Board Chair) is one of the keynote speakers at #AIIM14 (April 1-4, in Orlando).  Thornton is one of those keynote speakers you won’t forget – suffice it to say, he is not a shy person!

I usually start my research for introductions at Conferences not by looking at all the boring CV/Resume data points about schools and jobs, but rather by looking at things a speaker has actually said and whether these things jar my conventional assumptions.  With Thornton, there is no shortage of great quotes.  

Here are a few samples to get your juices flowing for some of the issues we'll address at #AIIM14.  As I've told many people, our objective is to create a "head-scratching, this sure ain't a trade show, gosh I never thought of that" kind of Conference.  I think this short sample from Thornton will give you some idea of what we're up to...

“We are at the big bang of social, economic, political and evolutionary change.”

“The old think was that information overload is a problem. We’ve got to change our thinking. Having all this information available to us is not a bug; it’s a feature. Speaking realistically, there is nothing we cannot know.”

“There is so much waste in the enterprise today.  People don’t know what’s going on in their enterprise. We reengineered in 1995 and then stopped. The whole term ‘process’ has disappeared from the vocabulary. “

“IT is still relegated to the role of turning machines on and missing the real action. If you focus on integrating value-creating IT behaviors into every nook and cranny of the enterprise, the future will be bright.”

“For some reason, subscription research firms in our industry insist that the role of the CIO is in decline and will soon be relegated to the dust heap of history. This is patently absurd. Think about it. We are on the cusp of a digital renaissance. Yet the CIO will have no role to play in the new era that is dawning?”

“In the 1976 film Network, Howard Beale (a newscaster played by Peter Finch) induces his viewers to shout out their windows, ‘I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!’ In 2014, the IT community will rise up and with one voice shout, ‘We're mad as hell.’ My IT ethnography research reveals that our community is fed up with subscription research firms hiding behind a ‘nexus of forces,’ blowhards spewing erroneous stereotypes, and academics with 14 data points in their samples telling us that IT is doing a bad job. IT is doing a great job.”

“I suggest we all become chief ‘in your face’ officers when people start bloviating about IT's failure to create value.”

“I am pleased to report that in 78% of the Global 2000, IT does not suck…Most of the ‘turnaround’ CIOs who were airlifted into troubled IT shops have stabilized computational resources and succeeded in rendering enterprise IT nontoxic to key stakeholders…That was accomplished in the face of ridiculously low budgets, a vendor marketing approach in which more money is spent on golf outings and sporting events than on R&D or thought leadership, and a tragically tech-illiterate corps of executives.”

“Hardly any … people understand how all this gear works, where all the data that makes this magic happen comes from, how to fix things when they break and the implications of our technology usage behaviors on information security and privacy. This is the bomb that's ticking away in every infosec manager's nightmare: user ignorance. The question facing not just chief information security officers but all of us is, ‘How do we fix stupid?’”

“Bear in mind, though, that while IT may not suck at long last, that won't last for long. Change is upon us. Is your organization prepared for the disruptions associated with the ‘SMAC stack’ -- the mix of social, mobile, analytics and cloud? Have you adjusted your talent pipeline? Have you put in place the appropriate risk-adjusted "experimentation sandboxes" to gain experience with these technologies ahead of deploying them at scale? Have you created a network of smart people doing smart things on the edges?"