DMS Expo: Workplace 2025 -- The Reality TV Show

Editor's Notes

1. First, do a – focused, quick -- Current State Assessment of your organization’s situation, particularly with respect to ECM and SOEs – mobile, social, and the cloud. Address the ECM categories: people, process, technology, and content. There’s a solid methodology for doing this. But address and document the important SOE issues. Look for your Social Media policy and provide one if you don’t have one. (If you don’t have one, download a starter policy and tweak it.)   Assess and document the important SOE categories and issues, such as: the division of labor between IT and users, the capabilities used, the configurations, the types of devices (such as smart phones, Blackberries, iPads), and the types of users and user scenarios.   You’ll see lots of Fragmentation : uncontrolled diversity , failed enterprise synching , and lots of system of engagement problems. For basic ECM health these need to be managed at the enterprise level. You can tackle them while you address the Specific Applications , but these are more important than Specific Applications because the Fragmentation Problem will destroy you if you ignore it.   Second, Implement general baseline principles across information silos, content formats, devices, business units, and organizations.   Third, address over-retention. This is a huge problem that would have plagued us without the explosion of SOEs and fragmentation -- but it’s far worse with them. Think of email and twitter feeds, distributed repositories inside and outside of your firewalls and organizations, and so on. Organizations have been over-retaining electronic information and failing to dispose of it in a legally defensible manner when business and law will allow. It’s an issue you must address if you’re going to be letting folks seriously “engage” with Systems of Engagement.   Almost all organizations over-retain but this problem is far worse for bigger organizations. So if you’re a small firm you may be in pretty good shape. But if you’re big, you may have hundreds of TBs or even PBs of information that is compounding. So you must address it to meet General Adequacy.   The best way to address this monster problem of over-retention is to break it into 2 more tractable sub-problems: day-forward information disposition and historical informational disposition.   Addressing day-forward over-retention is much easier to address than historical retention -- even though addressing it messes with employees’ day-to-day activities. The key is to initiate information lifecycle (ILM) practices on a “day-forward” basis first, so any new content created or saved is assigned a disposition period. Then provide employees with very clear and explicit guidance for the acceptable use of available tools for dynamic content and their associated retention periods. An example is “retain non-records for 3 years, and retain official records per the retention schedule.”   Address historical content over-retention by using a defensible disposition methodology. The good news is that there’s a methodology to follow. It’ll be a long haul and you may be at it for years, but you can tackle it incrementally and you’ll start getting immediate benefits