Information Wants To Be… Deployed

There is a saying from Stewart Brand, first coined in 1984, that “Information Wants to be Free.” Many movements, such as the Open Source world, and the proponents who would like to dismantle copyright, tend to tout this saying as meaning that information literally should be free from an economic standpoint.

And Establishing a Solid Foundation for eDiscovery, Records Management, and More . . .

In many organizations enterprise content management (ECM) is fragmented, deployed in silos, and tied to functional areas and/or specific business applications. ECM fragmentation is further exacerbated by the positioning of ECM component technologies and solutions such as records management, eDiscovery, compliance and search as individual technologies, as opposed to an integrated enterprise platform. Practices such as Knowledge Management and BPM also draw lines of demarcation and create silos in the enterprise. While each technology and practice arguably warrants its own strategy, each is better served and positioned by an underlying infrastructure. This best practice is Information Governance.

ECM—From Components, to Silos to Solution Platform

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems have been a part of the business solutions and IT toolbox for several decades. ECM began with the implementation of component technologies. ECM was not conceived holistically, but rather grew from the integration of point technologies that include search, imaging, electronic records management, document management, COLD/ERM, web content management, workflow, collaboration and hierarchical storage management. These point technologies were typically targeted at specific collections of unstructured content (e.g. documents) to solve targeted business issues.

Don’t Let Sleeping Dogs Lie: A New Look at Content Capture

Among the thousands of acronyms within the IT industry, one of the oldest is GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). The maturity of this acronym indicates its fundamental resonance; it is as true today as it was 50 years ago. Despite all the advances in Enterprise Content Management, if input into the system is flawed, the entire system is potentially flawed, and those errors will not only endure throughout the life cycle of the content, but create many more related problems.

Digitization, Opportunities and Risks

Corporate information can take a variety of shapes and sizes, from traditional paper (letters, memos, contracts, forms), to an endless array of electronic content (e-forms, Word docs, blogs, e-mail, etc.). While this information should be a “corporate asset” and be managed and processed as such, it instead becomes “information landfill” in the in-boxes, filing cabinets, storage boxes, and electronic information systems of many organizations. Our collective ability to produce content has far outstripped our willingness and appetite to actively manage and utilize content, and the problem is only getting worse, causing business flow to slow down as information piles around us.