How I learned to stop worrying and love my capture solution

Say the word "capture" to holders of the CIP certification or other AIIM certificates and you'll be regaled with stories related to the textbook answer “getting information from the original source... read more

When OCR is too much of a good thing

As an information management consultant and best-practices instructor, I spend a lot of time touting the virtues of OCR, which we all know can save organizations gobs of time and money when capturi... read more

Don't just automate, innovate!

Properly conceived and implemented, information technology lets us save time, money, and resources on a daily basis by allowing us to automate the more predictable, repeatable, and painful of our f... read more

Hallelujah! Business is supplanting technology as a strategy touchstone

If two points make a line and graphically indicate a trend, then what do three, four, and six points make? A movement, perhaps an inevitability … Over the past several weeks, I have had essenti... read more

You’re Wasting Your Time: Says So Right on the Label

Earlier this month, I blogged (again) about the need to think deeply about what your information management problems actually are before you even think about thinking about applying technology to m... read more

Oh the irony! CIA invests in cloud-based collaboration; maybe you should too?

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CIA-backed In-Q-Tel this week made a strategic investment Huddle, a UK-based provider of cloud collaboration software, and all I could think was "how ironic is this!" At a time when my consulti... read more

5 common rationalizations for organizational inertia

Newton's first law of motion states that “an object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion.” Sometimes referred to as the law of inertia, we see it all the time as it operate... read more

Razors, blades, and BYOD

A great deal has been made lately about the trend towards BYOD – that's Bring Your Own Device and refers to the notion of allowing users to use their own personal smart phones, tablets, and other c... read more

When to declare your vendor independence

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Tomorrow being the Fourth of July, I thought it would be worth taking a moment to remind managers and customer organizations everywhere that it is OK to change your technology providers when your c... read more

Saints case proves there is more to discovery than strict legal compliance

Football coaches and records managers everywhere have just received a forcible reminder that there is more to document discovery than compliance with legal mandate. In case you haven't heard, t... read more

Big data and content management: why size shouldn’t matter

Is it me, or is the concept of big data gaining prominence in conversations regarding content management? Certainly I hear about it more since I launched my CIP classroom prep course, which covers ... read more

Why pay for a CIP course when the training videos are free?

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The question headlining this post is an eminently logical one for anyone with business on the brain, and, not surprisingly, I get it a lot because I am both the face on the free Certified Informati... read more

Microwave ovens and information systems

Nothing drives me crazier than see organizations throw gobs of money after information systems that were purchased without sufficient diligence being done up front about what they actually need tho... read more

Connect business problem analysis to change management by leaving no people behind

One of the more intriguing lines of inquiry at a recent meeting of the AIIM New England Chapter had to do with my assertion that there is a connection between analyzing your business problems and e... read more

5 Steps to (False) Indispensability

Want to make sure you always have work to do, and thus a long list of reasons your company should never let you go? Just follow these simple steps and you'll have all the overwork, backbiting, and ... read more

Why Miscalibrated Benchmarks Are Worse Than None At All

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As a consultant and instructor in the realm of information management best practices, I spend a lot of time talking about the need to develop performance metrics so that future improvements can be ... read more

AIIM 2012: A Corner Turned

Two days into the AIIM Conference 2012 (plus another for Chapter Leadership), it’s becoming clear that our association is turning a corner. No longer bounded by the decades-old delimiter known as “... read more

Saints Misbehavin’: Email as Smoking Gun

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If you are tuned into sports at all, then you've no doubt heard about the trouble the New Orleans Saints are in for awarding cash bounties to players who knock opponents out of the game by virtue o... read more

When More is Less

Though conventional wisdom holds that “less is more,” in content and process management circles, the converse is equally true. This pithy thought arose while reading an article published yester... read more

Change Management in the Process and Content Arenas: Let the Games Begin

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A funny thing happened on the way to process improvement: what began as an exercise in efficiency enhancement turned into a game theory application! It's a long time since I began equating chan... read more

Teach Your Children

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Dateline Rochester – “A new survey says more than half of workers don't always follow or are unaware of their company’s security policies.” Sounds kind of like my post last week about the prope... read more

The Ends, the Means, and Security Risk Mitigation

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A little over a year ago, I posted on the Top 10 Cyber Threat Trends of the day, one of which was “attacks via USB drives.” Well, new survey regarding SharePoint security has just echoed this theme... read more

When Instant Communication Isn't Fast Enough

Remember when e-mail was the ultimate in instant electronic communication? Short of the telephone, it was the best way to solicit information from someone on a timely basis – and it carried with it... read more

ECM, BPM, and the Cloud: First Things First!

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If you're like me – and I know I am – then you're probably sick of posts and articles with headlines such as the one above. But I am fresh off a number of conversations with both media types and en... read more

Virtual Interactivity: To the Mainstream and Beyond!

AIIM’s Virtual Conference on Social Business last week was absolutely fascinating to be a part of. Yes, the topic was compelling and the sessions generally good. But for this observer, one of the m... read more

Memo to Senior Staff: Wake Up and Smell the Value

In a relatively recent survey conducted by CIO for SAS, just 14% of responding IT and business leaders said their organizations are just starting to realize the value of the information at their di... read more

Take Two Tablets and Call Me in the Morning

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Got people on the road who need ready access to your organizational information? Need to capture information from the field on a device that is smarter and more multifunctional than a netbook but f... read more

Oh, the Humanity!

During my AIIM webinar last week on BPM and workflow, the conversation at one point turned toward how hard it can be to solicit information about how an organization’s business processes actually w... read more

The Three "E"s of BPM/Workflow Success: Flexibility, Scalability, Simplicity

Discussions before, during, and after an ECM Practitioner class I led last week again reinforced just how hard we can make things for ourselves as we deal with content and process management techno... read more

In Setting Retention Schedules, Precision is Everything

Take a close look at the photograph accompanying this post – it’s of the label on a bottle of a leading brand of dog flea and tick shampoo, where it says something very interesting: “Kills flea... read more

May You Live in Interesting Times

An old Chinese curse is said to say, “My you live in interesting times!” By my calculation, we already do, but not in the ways you think. Three weeks ago, I’m talking to a bunch of e-forms VARs... read more

I Sync, Therefore I Am

Remember when it was possible to replace a piece of software solely on the strengths of its features and functions? Can’t do that anymore since, in most cases, this one is connected to that one, an... read more

Expectations for SharePoint & ECM: Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid!

Our good friends at AIIM this week released a new Industry Watch study that digs into how well users believe SharePoint is meeting their expectations in the context of enterprise content management... read more

Can't we place a limit on terms?

It’s gotta be six months since I last railed against the endless debates over vernacular (see my post on January 6), but wouldn’t you know? Here comes another new bit of jargon guaranteed to obfusc... read more

Content, Records & Forms: Lands of the Lost

One of the (few?) perqs of being a consultant in this space is the opportunity to spend time in a number of professional disciplines. For me, the usual suspects are content management, records, and... read more

My Marxian Manifesto

“I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” – Groucho Marx “Looks like I now do!” – Steve Weissman This post marks my first as a certified AIIM Expert Blogger, and... read more

A Baseball View of "Suites" vs. "Breeds"

The manager and general manager of a Cape Cod Baseball League team once assessed their club’s ouster from the playoffs by telling me, “This team had a lot more individual talent than last year’s ch... read more

ECM as a Human Resource: Hiring Managers Take Note

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When the notion first arose that the adoption of social media, E2.0, and other modern conveniences could make employees happier, reduce turnover, and serve as a recruitment tool, I was skeptical. N... read more

Which Comes First, Your Content or Your Process?

With Passover and Easter now behind us, my brain is filled with deep thoughts surrounding the humble egg: symbol of new beginnings, new life, and a longstanding question about whether it or the chi... read more

Take it from ‘Glee’: New Media Can Be Anti-Social

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If you’re still among those who wonder whether or why social media need to be managed as part of an overall information strategy, then consider this latest example from the world of entertainment: ... read more

Enterprise Apps for Pad Platforms: Cool Technology, Hard Questions

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A recent sit-down with a new eforms-on-a-pad application sparked a fascinating conversation that underscored just how important it is to look beyond the technical specs of a new technology and cons... read more

Imaging Regains the Leading Edge

Still digging out after last week’s AIIM Conference/Info360 event, I see that my post-show observations made no mention of one of the more surprising and interesting trends in evidence there: the a... read more

AIIM/Info360 Lint in the Cranial Vent

After spending 3+ days at the AIIM Conference/Info360 event in Washington, DC, my brain is clogged with all kinds of interesting nuggets! Here are but a few of the more intriguing story lines ... read more

It's Only the Tools That Change

As if further proof were needed that nothing really changes in information-land but the tools, today’s Huffington Post describes a U.S military program that uses social media to counter anti-U.S. m... read more

Sun Microsystems Was Right: The Network IS the Computer!

Remember a whole bunch of years ago when Sun Microsystems ran an ad campaign stating that “the network is the computer”? Don’t worry if you don’t; it may just be because I have more … err… experien... read more

Forget the Gap: Mind the Fundamentals!

File these under the heading of “what you don’t know CAN hurt you!” “We have ‘search’ so we don’t need taxonomies or metadata to find things.”   “We keep everything so we don’t hav... read more

Map the Moving Parts of Your Content Strategy

Did you ever stop to consider just how many interconnected moving parts there are in the typical content and information management strategy? Client councils, vendor briefings, and association ... read more

3 Reasons Business Needs Don’t Precede Technology Decisions

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It never ceases to amaze me how almost any conversation about any information technology eventually comes around to the same thing: the need to identify the fundamental business problem that the te... read more

Are "Systems of Engagement" Really All That New?

I believe there is validity to Geoffrey Moore’s notion that content management is moving away from “systems of record” and toward “systems of engagement.” At the same time, though, I do not believe... read more

Two Reminders That There’s More to Value Than Just Economics

One of the speakers at a SharePoint users group meeting I attended last evening introduced himself as someone who works with customers to help them receive value from their software. Though the ens... read more

Microsoft, SAP Reinforce Importance of Interoperability by Reprising ‘Duet’

There’s a line in the 1987 movie “Broadcast News” in which Holly Hunter responds to the snide put-down “It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person... read more

Imaging’s 2.0 Image Makeover

Say the word “imaging,” and most people conjure up pictures of scanners and screens and storage systems in their heads. As such, too few imagine that there are any e2.0 possibilities in this corner... read more

Four of Top 10 Cyber Risks Relate Directly to Info Management

Since we’re on the subject of security this week, it seems appropriate to mention a new list of Top 10 Cyber Threat Trends that includes four we regularly discuss here: • Attacks via USB drives... read more

Chasing Security a Key Part of the Picture

There’s a scene in the animated movie Ratatouille in which the lead character swipes some important papers off a desk and is chased all over Paris by the antagonist. In typical Pixar fashion, the a... read more

Why We’re All G-Men (and Women) Now

Governance. It’s what content management, records management, business process management, SharePoint, and myriad other information systems have in common. It’s one of the things that complicat... read more

Take Time to Consider Time

A deadline-beating records retention discussion this week led into a very interesting dissection of time: how it is defined in computing terms, what it means for systems that are expressly designed... read more

Remember when workflow was two words? The concept is still just as relevant.

In a recent interview, I managed to score some laughs when I said I’ve been helping people manage their information “since workflow was two words.” In retrospect, though, the line serves as a good ... read more

Takin’ Care of Business: Geoffrey Moore on the Future of ECM

“Deep thinker” Geoffrey Moore recently spent time with AIIM International to help the organization and its acolytes get a handle on the future of content management. While this sounds like jus... read more

Is the Naughty/Nice List a Compliance Document?

It’s two weeks before Christmas, and the debate again rages over how Santa Claus can visit every qualifying child in the world, in just one night. As an information management professional, though,... read more

Why Mobile Banking Advances Should Signal Compliance Retreat

It’s been so crazy around here that I plumb forgot to talk about one of the more nerve-wracking announcements of the last couple of months – namely Bank of America’s plan to begin two-way text bank... read more

Think You’re Not Using the Cloud? Think Again!

It’s more than fashionable these days to debate the pros and cons of computing in the cloud (whatever that means – see my feeble recent attempt at clarity), but I’m growing ever more amused as I re... read more

Innovation, Thy Time is Now

A couple of weeks ago, I tweeted that “bad times can be great times to do something innovative,” and in conversations since, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms just how true this is. Pretty much ... read more

The Compliance Message Behind Facebook’s New Messaging System

Facebook this week announced a new messaging system that encompasses and integrates email, instant messaging, SMS, and, of course, Facebook messaging. The idea is to bring together these previously... read more

The Strategy IS the Work

Two days into an AIIM ECM Master Class I was teaching, a student raised his hand and asked, “This is all really good, but when do we start doing the work?” At that point, he and his mates had learn... read more

When Good Processes Go Bad

The Social Security Administration reported last month that it sent 55,000 stimulus checks worth $18 million to people who turned out to be deceased! Surprisingly, 41,000 of those payments were ret... read more

Foreclosure Crisis Highlights Need for Document Policy Enforcement

I've been writing lately about how politics are a rich source of document-policy lessons, but a discussion at the ECM course I taught last week centered on the need to stress policy enforcement as ... read more

Me-Mail and the Me/Myself Privilege

Last week’s trip down Politico Lane took us into the realm of propagating compliance out to the people and parties you work with on the outside. Today, we’ll gaze into the maw that is email managem... read more

Not Your Fault? Still Your Problem

If you have any doubt that having and enforcing document policies is important, then spend a little time on the political pages of your local newspaper or on the Web. Story after story depicts foll... read more

The Facts and Friction of Forms vs. IT

The migration of business forms from paper to electronic media is an established fact – as is the often considerable friction this causes between the corporate forms and IT departments. Because eac... read more

Jury’s Out on Which is Cloud and Which is SaaS

The question before the jury today is to distinguish between Software as a Service – that’s SaaS to you and me – and Cloud Computing, the latest and snappiest paradigm in play for all your processi... read more

SharePoint vs. ECM 'Suites' vs. 'Best of Breed'

We're sitting amidst a technology confluence of a sort we’ve never seen before, and an old argument recently seems to have gained new life: Is it better to buy an integrated ECM Suite from ... read more

Compliance and the Smaller Business

Remember when the government got compliance-happy a bunch of years ago (Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA), and smaller firms screamed because they knew they couldn’t shoulder the cost of compliance as readily... read more

E-Mailroom? Egad!

Pitney Bowes recently introduced a new electronic mailroom solution, and I just have one thing to say about it: - I do not believe there is any such thing as an electronic mailroom. This is... read more

Forms, SharePoint & InfoPath: Perspectives for the Fiscally Responsible (Part 2)

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When we last left this subject, we decided that the ability to embed forms in SharePoint Web Parts and to connect forms with line-of-business information and REST Web Services were two of InfoPath’... read more

Forms, SharePoint & InfoPath: Perspectives for the Fiscally Responsible (Part 1)

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the latest and greatest ways to manage information, then you’ve certainly heard of Microsoft SharePoint. The latest in a long line of Next Big Things f... read more

So, THIS (SharePoint 2010) is what happened to knowledge management!

Microsoft officially unveiled SharePoint 2010 yesterday to great fanfare, much of which actually was deserved.  The litany of improvements and new features the company outlined was lengthy, and not... read more

Ask not what SharePoint 2010 can do, ask what it can do for YOU

With the advent of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 well nigh upon us, much breath, ink, and screen space is being expended to assess what it does and doesn’t do. Often lost in the minutia, however, is th... read more