Digital Landfill

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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You might also be interested in...

How is Big Content Different From Big Data? from John Mancini

Is IT Really the Villain? - Future of Technology in the Enterprise from John Mancini

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., @JohnJones 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

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 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 experiment by Google 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.

 

Today We Released Andy McAfee's 3 reports on Social Technologies and Business Process

The three reports can be downloaded directly from the AIIM web site (you need to login, but they are free) at THIS LINK.  

Here's the press release...

New Research Shows That Enterprise Social Technology Gets Work Done

Research scientist Andrew McAfee and the AIIM Task Force track the adoption rate of social business and reveal social business/Enterprise 2.0 best practices for three key business engagement models

 

Silver Spring, Md., January 25, 2012 - AIIM, the global community of information professionals, today announced the release of a three-part white paper series, titled “When Social Meets Business Real Work Gets Done” authored by Andrew McAfee, a principal research scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Digital Business and the AIIM Task Force on Social Business and Innovation.

The research, conducted over the past six months, revealed that companies are realizing significant, measurable benefit from the adoption of social technologies in the areas of marketing and sales, open innovation and enterprise Q&A, which is defined as the capability to let people ask and answer questions companywide. Despite the growth of external social networks for personal use, the adoption of similar social business technologies has lagged.

Based on this new research, businesses may want to re-consider this “wait and see” approach toward social business. The key findings included: 

• More than 60 percent of firms who did invest in collaborative frameworks achieved big gains in knowledge sharing and communication accuracy between marketing and sales.
• Open innovation delivers beneficial changes to both internal processes and external products, and is meeting the expectations of its sponsors. Open innovation helped realize major changes to the internal processes of 48 percent of responders and to the external offerings of 34 percent of responders.
• A 60 percent satisfaction rate was reported for organizations with a rewards-based enterprise-wide Q&A. Respondents said high-quality answers often come from unexpected sources indicating that social tools are cultivating advanced knowledge sharing. 

“All three areas addressed by the Task Force demonstrate that when people engage properly with each other and with technology, trust, self-organization, and good business results emerge," says Dr. McAfee. “The three use cases are true examples of social business because they depend on people with strong, weak and potential ties to organize their own workflows, roles and credentials."

Recommendations include “socializing” marketing and sales assets to reduce search costs and redundant work; focusing open innovation environments to improve both products and processes; and adopting enterprise Q&A structures that are frictionless to remove company-wide communication hurdles.

"We are clearly moving into a new phase in social technologies, one in which the critical success factor
will be the integration of social technologies into key organizational processes,” according to AIIM President, John Mancini. “The end objective should not be to simply set up social networks inside our organizations, but to actually make our organizations social. There is still a lot of work to be done to fulfill this potential, but the three use cases suggest that significant progress is happening inside business."

The “When Social Meets Business Real Work Gets Done” research papers on Connecting Sales and Marketing, Fostering Innovation and Enterprise Q&A are available to the public for download at: http://www.aiim.org/SocialMeetsBusiness.

Led by Andrew McAfee, the task force, launched in June 2011, included 18 executives from social business and content management companies. Its mandate was to study the implementation of social technologies in business and focus on three areas demonstrating success. The research included survey data published in the recent AIIM Industry Watch on Social Business Systems - Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Application. This 2011 Task Force built upon the 2010 Task Force, led by Geoffrey Moore, that resulted in the ground-breaking paper “Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT”, named in Forbes as the “Best Social Media Idea of 2011”.

About Andrew McAfee
Andrew McAfee (http://www.andrewmcafee.org) is a Principal Research Scientist at the Center for Digital Business, part of the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, MA. McAfee is a researcher, writer, and teacher about technology’s impact on the world of business. His book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges was published in late 2009 by Harvard Business Publishing.

About AIIM

AIIM has been an advocate and supporter of information professionals for nearly 70 years. The association mission is to ensure that information professionals understand the current and future challenges of managing information assets in an era of social, mobile, cloud and big data. Founded in 1943, AIIM builds on a strong heritage of research and member service. Today, AIIM is a global, non-profit organization that provides independent research, education and certification programs to information professionals. AIIM represents the entire information management community, with programs and content for practitioners, technology suppliers, integrators and consultants.

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I also put together a short powerpoint with some of the major findings.  CLICK HERE for the direct link, or check out the embedded version below...

McAfee and AIIM Task Force Findings

View more presentations from John Mancini

 

Get that Christmas shopping done early; yes Virginia, I do have a life outside AIIM

Looking for that perfect holiday gift?  Look no further than Will's Christmas List.

Imagine if you will, the following reviews.  If they had actually occurred, would you be likely to actually buy this book?

"I laughed until I stopped." (New York Times Book Review)

"This book could help bridge the gap between liberals and conservatives." (Barack Obama)

"The pages as well as the chapters are numbered sequentially. Amazing." (Kirkus Book Reviews)

"If there was a movie made of this book, the father would be played by Colin Firth and the mother would be played by Amy Adams." (Mary G. Mancini and John F. Mancini, in order to satisfy our respective fantasies)

This is a labor of love that I wrote over a number of years for my kids.  It has literally sold tens of copies over the years, assuring that the massive royalties I receive (in some years, well into double digits) will not be a threat to AIIM's continued claim upon my services.

I do like to do a bit of experimenting each year with the Long Tail Phenomenon and watch how modest numbers of units affect my ranking within the long tail on the best seller list.  

So here's the starting point.  Right now, per Amazon, Will's Christmas List is #4,210,041 in Books. Let's see where it winds up; I'll report back.

Have fun.