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| Management Briefings
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Darwin's theory of content management: Noz Urbina & Marc Speyer, Mekon (July 10)
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Modern organisations face a major challenge of multiplicity – multiple content sources funnelling
into multiple content deliverables for multiple audiences in multiple languages, geographies and
formats.
This content will typically be sourced from engineers and subject matter experts who feed
information to publishing teams to place in deliverables like technical manuals, product
datasheets, online help, training material, websites or packaging. These are often tailored for
audiences with different skillsets, interests or user roles.
For example, say a company manufactures two main products and has four variants of those
products – lite vs pro, Windows vs Mac, EU vs USA, or other types of variation. For each variant, it might easily have around five related documents – the packaging, a
brochure, administration documents, training materials and user manuals.
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New technologies, new risks: Tracey Stretton, Kroll Ontrack (April 2010)
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Information can now be created and distributed in so many different ways that it is becoming
increasingly complex to separate business records that need to be retained from other
information that can and should be deleted.
The constantly evolving data landscape, growing volumes of data and the hundreds of statutes
and regulations that affect companies’ document retention requirements means that
implementing and maintaining an up-to-date and compliant retention policy is much easier said
than done.
And now that most companies have complex networks and systems that store information in
different locations, it’s equally challenging to maintain a well-organised information store. New
storage options like cloud computing add to the complexity as data regularly moves dynamically
between external data centres located in many countries.
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Watch this space: Mark Whitehouse, SolutionChannels (February 2010)
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Whether we like it or not, we live in the TV generation where multimedia-based communication
– rather than the written word – is the preferred means of receiving, accessing, reviewing and
absorbing information. As a result, the use of video and multimedia communications is
exploding within enterprises.
The idea is that because multimedia communication stimulates more senses (ie, hearing and
sight) simultaneously, it helps people to accelerate and improve their understanding, increase
their productivity, make faster decisions, absorb and retail more information and generally keep
up-to-speed more effectively.
Of course, multimedia was originally the domain of mainly the largest companies with the
biggest marketing budgets. But with advances in digital technology and the wide choice of
multimedia-enabled devices now available, companies of all sizes and budgets have the
opportunity to create and distribute messages using this medium.
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Paper patches?: Deirdre O'Neill, Kainos (November 2009)
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There was a time – and many die-hard environmentalists still cling to it – when the vision of a
paperless office seemed an easy and not-too-outlandish one to fulfil. And in some ways, we
have come close.
Many invoices are now sent and settled electronically, printing out emails is socially frowned
upon, and all the major service providers, from banks and travel companies to utilities and
phone companies, enthusiastically encourage consumers to manage their accounts online,
switching off the option of paper statements.
In this sense, office and home life is gradually becoming much greener in the way it consumes
paper.
But will the original goal of the paperless office ever be practical or achievable? The statistics
suggest not. As much as staff and customers may try to cut back on unnecessary paper use –
therein lies the rub: ‘unnecessary’ doesn’t and can’t always apply. Just as there are always going
to be people (young as well as old) who prefer to handle a proper newspaper or book on the
train rather than an electronic gadget or laptop computer – the same holds true for the office.
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Strategy for stewardship: Chris Saunders, Detica (June 2009)
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Information is now widely acknowledged to be an organisation’s ‘lifeblood’, a precious asset which must be protected against
threats to its confidentiality, integrity and availability.
However, many organisations fail to protect their data adequately or to make the most of its value. This is because the function
of data stewardship is often under-prioritised by organisations and there is a lack of senior commitment to the task, along with
a failure to recognise the relevant skills needed in the various data stewardship roles.
Yet data stewardship is one of the most important issues that companies and governments need to consider. Failure to
respond effectively to the data management challenge can mean security risks, regulatory breaches, increased cost and lost
profits. With the explosive growth in data that all organisations face, the problem is heightened because data is becoming
increasingly complex and difficult to manage.
When data quality isn’t up to scratch, organisations often struggle to put together a convincing business case to address the
issues. However, there has never been a greater need to implement a well-planned strategy for managing information so that it
can be converted into actionable intelligence.
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Right data, right place, right time: Dennis Tsang, Hitachi Consulting (April 09)
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Organisations often struggle with ‘silos of information’, which affects their business decision making and operational efficiency.
A number of common and perennial challenges exist – and they’re getting more difficult to deal with due to changing business
and technology trends: searching within the ever-growing information pool. As data and content volumes grow rapidly, it is getting more difficult to
search for accurate and relevant information. Information overload (too much detail to turn into meaningful information) and
duplication (the same version of information in multiple locations) have become a growing problem for organisations; multiple information access points. Over time, information has been stored in multiple new and legacy systems, such as
databases, shared drives and content management systems. This not only increases overhead and maintenance costs, it also
reduces the usability and efficiency of all information systems. Information consistency and security become more difficult to
manage as well – more and varied controls are required.
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Search for a solution: Charlie Hull, Lemur Consulting (January 2009)
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Everyone’s talking about recession. Everywhere we read stories telling us the economic outlook
is bleak and that companies must tighten their belts. We’ve already seen City banks and house
builders making redundancies on a significant scale.
Of course a savvy company sees a negative economic climate as an opportunity to make its
business more efficient. ‘Recession’ forces businesses to trim the fat.
There are many ways a company can slim down – reducing supplier expenditure, renegotiating
overheads or cutting staff numbers. But to increase productivity, a major area for businesses to
focus on is the speed with which staff can locate information within the company, or customers
can find data on a website.
This is a huge area of almost intangible spend. According to IDC, 90% of the time that
knowledge workers spend in creating new reports or other documents is actually spent recreating
information that already exists.
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Key to collaboration: Andrew Watson, WTG (October 2008)
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People are at the heart of every business. And access to information allows them to do their
work better and faster. But this information needs to be shared, collaborated on and enriched to
ensure organisations gain efficiencies, effectiveness and new capabilities.
Collaboration technology can change the way a company works, by using web-based systems to
connect the extended enterprise and provide a secure infrastructure for all business information.
Collaboration technology is having a direct impact on the way people work,
how they interact with IT and how they are trained.
For example, a company can enhance its productivity using a collaborative platform that
facilitates more effective communication and information sharing between workers. This enables
users to go beyond documents and across repositories to unlock information, making it easier
to find people and locate expertise both within and outside the organisation.
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Is EDRM mainstream?: Malcolm Beach, AMTEC Consulting (June 2008)
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The electronic document and records management (EDRM) market has continued to grow over
the last few years. Awareness of EDRM is increasing and many technology implementations
have taken place.
Within the public sector, much of this increased interest has resulted from initiatives such as
Modernising Government, which focused government organisations on electronic records
management. The private sector has also had regulations and compliance requirements
imposed on it. And all organisations have had to address the growth of information.
So has EDRM come of age? Is the implementation of systems to support EDRM commonplace
enough for them not to be seen as unique projects? Is introducing EDRM a standard
consideration for organisations across all sectors, just like implementing an email solution? In
short, is EDRM mainstream?
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Challenge of Web 2.0: Jeremy Miles, PICS (May 2008)
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One of the biggest IT revolutions in recent years has been in the area of web-based
collaboration – and the first adopters of this Web 2.0 phenomenon are today’s teenagers.
The business community have been slower to embrace the potential benefits offered by this
development in the use of the web, partly because it challenges some of the fundamental
principles of information management and partly because it takes control away from arguably a
monopolistic IT community.
However, advocates would argue that unless the concepts of collaborative working are fully
embraced, large organisations will lose out to the smaller, more agile organisations – both in
terms of IP leakage and talent migration.
Despite this, a recent survey commissioned by the National Computing Centre found that less that 30% of the companies
surveyed had identified a role for Web 2.0, or shown any inclination to adopt the technologies as core to their business
architecture.
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After MoReq2: Europe at a crossroads?: Rory Staunton, Strategy Partners (Mar 08)
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The recent completion of the records management standard MoReq2 and its acceptance by the
EU is a step forward for records management in Europe.
If users and vendors can pick up from the work carried out on this standard by archivists and
consultants, new simpler standards for records management could emerge. This could
stimulate the market for software, solutions and services that meet current and future
regulatory compliance for specific markets in government, finance, life sciences and
environment.
But if we do nothing, MoReq2 could be a lame duck and the costs of future systems will
increase. MoReq2 was developed to provide a simple specification for buying records management across Europe. The final
specification is huge (over 200 pages). The timetable for delivery was six years since the initial MoReq1 specification was conceived.
In comparison, MoReq2 is complex and enormous and late – but at least it is here and we can build upon it.
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Information intelligence: Martin Waldron, In-Form Consult (January 2008)
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In many organisations, there is no clear understanding at Board level of the business drivers for corporate records
management. This results in companies making a commitment to manage records properly – but not knowing how to do it to
meet their corporate business drivers.
Without realising it, many organisations have implemented systems that are deficient in what might be called ‘intellectual
information architecture’. IIA is the tools and rules that govern how records are managed and how users interact with
information management and record-keeping systems.
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Shooting for the moon: Paul Phillips, CSC (November 2007)
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Information is important to companies and individuals throughout every stage of the working day
and in every decision they make.
Everyone knows that incomplete, late and incorrect information hampers their work and reflects
poorly on their organisation. And while your company has probably already tried to develop a
more strategic approach to managing its information services and technology, in reality it could
well have reached its current state as a consequence of short-term tactics, reflecting a lessthan-
strategic IT approach.
Of course, there is no simple way to relate disparate sources of information for analytical or
comparative work, or guarantee the accuracy of information. But by developing an information
strategy, your company can start the process of tackling many of the root causes of poor-quality
and silo-based information.
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Mastering the content revolution: Joe Gollner, Stilo International (Sept 2007)
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After decades of evolution, the technology for managing and publishing organisational
content has reached the threshold of being a core enabler for the way business is
conducted.
But while content management moves centre stage, the problem user organisations face is that
the technologies involved continually change and develop. So not only have companies been
forced to come to terms with the emergence of web content management, now they face other
innovations such as ‘Web 2.0’ and the ‘semantic web’.
What do these trends mean? What direction is content management heading in, and how can
organisations exploit the technologies involved? To answer this, it is worth examining how
content management has evolved since the web first arrived.
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Why BPM products suck: Jon Pyke, The Process Factory (June 2007)
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Business process management (BPM) is starting to look as though it sucks. Now what on earth
could lead me to such a conclusion?
First, you need to take a look at the product market and the associated messages. At a recent
Gartner BPM event in London (March 07), I took some time to visit all the ‘BPM’ vendors to
see what’s happening and assess how the product side is evolving. On the face of it, it all
seems very encouraging. There are some fantastic-looking, seemingly well-engineered
products that appear to do everything one would expect from a good, robust process support
system.
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Infrastructure ECM: Nick Millman, Accenture (April 2007)
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The explosion of unstructured data is one of the biggest challenges facing business today. The quantities of documents,
images, email, web content, audio and video are all growing at an astonishing rate. Within corporations, unstructured
data currently accounts for an estimated 80% of a company’s overall data, and the amount of unstructured data in a
company is doubling every two years.
Effective information management is key for an organisation to achieve high performance – and yet the sheer
abundance of unstructured data causes a number of challenges. For example, the cost of data management has
increased; finding the right information is difficult; information is not well leveraged among partners; and it is not coming
together in ways that would yield useful new insights about employees, customers or market opportunities.
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Busting a glut: Richard Edwards, Butler Group (February 2007)
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There is a perennial discussion about the ‘information glut’ or overload. Whilst precise figures
are difficult to pin down, a number of surveys have concluded that an information-based worker
spends between one and 20 hours each week searching for information. This act of searching
is non-productive time – time wasted that could be spent more effectively putting the information
into use.
It is also estimated that about 60% of labour spend is related to ‘information work’ – and this is
no longer the sole domain of the so-called white-collar worker, with many blue-collar workers
also handling and processing information. Field workers, and those employees whose jobs
bring then into direct contact with customers and the general public, regularly have to answer
queries and obtain information.
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Portals for pragmatists: John Horton, Getronics (December 2006)
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Merely launching an information portal is not too complicated. However, deploying a portal in such a way that it delivers
tangible benefits is no mean feat. Portal implementations are sometimes referred to as never-ending – but the fact that the
project is always ongoing, should not stop it from attaining its objectives.
This article describes a simple and pragmatic way to implement and deploy a portal, while simultaneously guaranteeing the
tangible benefits you expect. Companies implement portals because they add value, both to the enterprise itself and the users who utilise them.
Organisations sometimes expect their portal to generate hard ROI figures. But quantifying the ROI for an internal portal is often
a complex exercise, and simply running data through ROI calculation sheets often leads to conclusions that can hardly be
considered meaningful.
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Insight not hindsight: Eddie Short and Ramesh Harji, Capgemini (October 2006)
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Organisations continue to invest millions of pounds in technology to create, manage and store business data. Yet the volume
of data in all its forms being generated is accelerating at an unprecedented level – and consequently most organisations are
finding it harder to harness this data so that staff can act on it to generate real business value.
Without successfully harnessing the information in their data, organisations fail to realise opportunities for generating
competitive advantage, and critical decisions are often made on the basis of historical and often inaccurate data stored in
innumerable spreadsheets and documents.
As a result, organisations are failing to get a return from the investment that they have made in the generation of this data. Too
many people in the organisation are holding up their hands and saying: “We are getting it wrong. We’ve got too much data, but
not enough information.”
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Putting people first: James Gunn (August 2006)
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Over the last 25 years, various approaches have been taken to improving or re-engineering business processes – Work study,
Method study, TQM, BPR, etc. And as process managers become increasingly sophisticated in their approach, organisations
are now deploying combinations of Six Sigma, Lean and JIT, similar to the legendary Toyota Production System.
IT support to business processes has also evolved from several directions, principally workflow/document imaging and
enterprise application integration – but it has also been influenced by artificial intelligence, simulation and modelling elements.
The IT picture has also been clouded by a range of different standards and prevailing technologies, while the implementation
of supporting IT systems is being automated to a greater extent every day.
So, given that organisations are continually striving to do ‘more with less’ and meet new regulations, and many organisations
have some sort of BPM project underway, why don’t we hear more success stories? Why are so many process improvement
programmes struggling? Is this only another technology-led fad or is there something more substantial waiting to be
unearthed? And if so, how do we dig it out?
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BPM: show me the money: Rory Staunton, Strategy Partners (June 2006)
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The BPM market is a set of technically advanced components, middleware, applications and
services that are all growing – but at different rates. Strategy Partners has been tracking BPM
since 1997, and our research shows that the different elements have grown steadily, but
numerous approaches are confusing buyers.
There is an over-supply of products and a lack of skills to exploit them. The vendors could
almost be called victims of their own success, as many organisations have many non-standard
approaches to describing processes that are preventing company-wide initiatives superseding
old approaches.
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ABC of e-workflow: Adrian Boucher, 1nfometrics Consulting (April 2006)
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At its most basic workflow is, to quote the Workflow Portal: “The automation of a
business process during which information or tasks are passed from one participant to
another for action, according to a set of procedural rules.” This is predominantly an
activity-based view of workflow, emphasising the quantity of work or tasks that flow
through the various stages in an organisation to achieve a satisfactory outcome.
Naturally, what counts as ‘satisfactory’ depends on an individual perspective; it could
vary from the number of items processed to an improvement in customer service and
support, and all points between.
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Push and pull: David Martin, Ether Solutions (March 2006)
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There are a number of emerging trends in the world of content and document
management – and like many trends they obey the laws of physics. Sir Isaac Newton
defined some of these basics truths, one of which is often paraphrased as “for every
action there is an equal and opposite reaction”. I am sure Newton was not thinking about
content management when he was doing his research, but the reality is certainly with us
today.
One key trend is the need for compliance driven by some high-profile incidents where
content, often in the form of documents, has not been properly controlled and in some
cases deliberately destroyed. This is leading to the requirement for enterprise-level
systems to control and enforce appropriate retention management disciplines on all
documents.
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