Enterprise Content Management 2010 and Beyond: The Future of Information Intelligence and Governance

Although individuals still create more than 70 percent of digital information, enterprises eventually end up with responsibility— or liability—for 85 percent of it.

World-class athletes constantly train to improve performance. Beyond practicing the skills their individual sports demand, they spend hours in activities as varied as Yoga, Pilates, and Tai Chi to maintain supple joints and increase their range of motion. Today’s commercial enterprise certainly needs to maintain and probably increase its “competitive range of motion”—the ability to successfully meet the rigors of a rapidly changing marketplace without injuring its long-term health. One of the best ways for an enterprise to increase its competitive range of motion is through leveraging its information assets.

Next to people, information is the most valuable enterprise asset. Yet it can also be the most problematic. First, there is so much of it. In 2008 alone, the digital universe grew by 487 billion gigabytes.¹ And although individuals still create more than 70 percent of digital information, enterprises eventually end up with responsibility—or liability—for 85 percent of it.²

Second, volume isn’t the only problem information presents. Information is a source of innovation and competitive advantage, but it’s also an equally potent source of legal, regulatory, and operational cost and risk. Today’s enterprise cannot afford to focus solely on extracting value from information. It must also safely manage information on a variety of fronts.

The trick is to maximize and extract information’s value—the innovative and competitive upside—and minimize its potential downside. Of course, these are not simple tasks. They require effectively “governing” Swanson’s exaflood, very little of which—only about five percent—sits nicely contained in databases. The other 95 percent is unstructured, and of that, 85 percent goes unmanaged. In turn, effective management rests on a balanced combination of information intelligence and information governance, which then enables the competitive enterprise to:

• Manage information growth—or be overwhelmed by it 
•  Employ information to drive innovation around customer needs
• Extend access to information to streamline the collaborative process
• Secure information to protect intellectual property and meet regulatory mandates

Improving Information Intelligence and Information Governance
Plenty of technologies can be applied to the task of creating information intelligence and improving information governance. There are social computing capabilities, virtualization, cloud storage and grid computing, as well as standards, protocols, and languages that are designed to make information easier to exchange, process, and interpret. The essential question is how best to employ them to create an infrastructure that maximizes information’s value (intelligence) while minimizing its risk through good information governance. What we need is a conceptual roadmap that gets us to that endpoint—a disciplined way to approach the four critical areas where information intelligence and governance must be applied.

Information Relevance
Information volume may grow tenfold over the next five years, but our ability to read and assimilate it will not. We clearly need a way to get the relevant information in front of us, without wading through and being numbed by the irrelevant. If you’re hungry and on foot in Paris, relevance is about having a guide that shows restaurants within easy walking distance from where you are.

As the volume of information grows, the amount any individual needs shrinks in proportion; the haystack gets bigger and the needle smaller. The purpose of information relevance is to make it easier to find the needle. Enterprise knowledge workers spend approximately 25 percent of their time searching for information and another 25 percent evaluating it.³ Nor is this phenomenon limited to the “rank and file.”

A recent study found that 52 percent of executives spend valuable time searching for critical information.⁴ The same study cited another equally revealing statistic: Nearly two-thirds of executives say that rapid decision-making is a defining attribute of an agile business.⁵ But it’s hard to make decisions quickly without the right information. Information intelligence makes it easier to find the needle through excellent indexing, search, and analytics technologies. But those alone are not enough.

Finding the needle—the relevant—is also contextual; it depends on what you’re doing. A meaningful information environment helps users visualize and probe the relationships between different types of data and create personalized information views.

Information Location 
The more information an organization accumulates, the more likely it is to be located in many places—and therefore difficult to retrieve and manage. This is not a new problem. Siloed repositories have been around for a long, long time. In theory, repository consolidation makes sense. Yet knowledge workers are most productive when the environment in which they work brings together structured and unstructured information, including information that originates on paper, with the business processes that use it. This demands an information infrastructure that can understand and manage content and data and coordinate systems that integrate paper and paper-handling processes with digital information. Such an infrastructure revolves around user capabilities and needs, not where information resides.

One of the promising tools of information governance is virtual information management— policies, metadata proxy objects, and enforcement procedures that are managed centrally while data remains with its parent application and, in terms of function, is controlled by that application. Virtualization solves the problem of siloed repositories.

For example, with an infrastructure that leverages virtual information management, an enterprise could:

• Manage business performance through a broad range of information sources including competitive websites, analyst reports, and SEC filings in addition to traditional databases of revenues and costs
• Assess experimental drug effectiveness by integrating pharmaceutical trial outcomes with research publications and peer discussion forums
• Track inventory levels in near real-time across multiple suppliers, combining information across systems with different SKUs, product descriptions, and product groups to optimize the supply chain
• Enable electronic medical records where individual objects like X-rays and MRI scans or test results reside with their clinical applications but can be accessed through a common records interface
  Of course, building such an infrastructure requires some heavy lifting on the IT side. The technical challenges include:
  • Dealing with varying degrees of structure in information sources
  • Dynamically locating and accessing information securely
  • Understanding the meaning of information
  • Integrating federated, heterogeneous sources
  • Facilitating user navigation, visualization, and analysis

Despite these challenges, the outcome is simple yet powerful— all the information that should be available is.

Information Sharing and Collaboration 
The traditional paradigm for business decision-making relies on in-house knowledge. It may involve a project-specific SWOT team analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), but it does not tap into the broad universe of information that could influence the decision or project outcome.

Information intelligence launches a new collaborative paradigm—one that is community-based, bidirectional, and conversational, with extended boundaries that include partners, suppliers, research institutions, and customers regardless of location. In community-based collaboration, people find each other and share ideas, experiences, and perspectives. Conversation-centric collaboration lays the groundwork for accelerated innovation.

But extended collaborative boundaries put extraordinary pressure on an organization’s information governance capabilities, especially if those boundaries leverage shared infrastructure and application services via cloud computing.

One of cloud computing’s most attractive features is multi-tenancy, which delivers the economics of a shared infrastructure. Yet, while enjoying those economics, most organizations will still prefer the security of a dedicated infrastructure. Likewise, compliance can often be at odds with the shared infrastructure and utility model of cloud computing. Compliance demands IT transparency, while cloud computing emphasizes easy-to-use interfaces that hide much of its infrastructure complexity.

A next-generation infrastructure that blends information intelligence and information governance will enable expanded collaboration with virtual services based on the Open Virtualization Format (OVF), a standards-based, platform-independent, extensible packaging and distribution format that enables efficient, secure software distribution and facilitates the mobility of virtual machines. QUOTE: The more information captured, retained, and aggregated—either actually or virtually—and, made easily accessible, the greater the potential risk that it will be misused or end up where it shouldn’t.

Information Compliance
The more information captured, retained, and aggregated—either actually or virtually—and, made easily accessible, the greater the potential risk that it will be misused or end up where it shouldn’t. The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies has only increased these risks.

Web 2.0 scares IT and not without cause. Collaboration and information sharing on the Web tends to be public and anonymous— two characteristics that don’t mesh well with the good information governance that compliance requires.

Domestic regulatory compliance is a moving target; regulations are added and changed constantly. International regulations such as the UK’s Data Protection Act, the section of the Basel II accords that concern disclosure, and the EU’s Safe Harbor Privacy Guidelines simply add more complexity to an already difficult regulatory environment. The more complexity, the more potential opportunities to be out of compliance.

So an information infrastructure with good governance at its core must securely accommodate Web 2.0 technologies while managing compliance across all types of content, applications, and platforms. And that includes protecting sensitive information wherever it resides—within or beyond the firewall.

To accomplish this, information governance technologies are moving away from application-centric management to information-centric management. Application- centric management suffers at the hands of two significant drawbacks. First, information policies can’t be applied universally and consistently if there are scores or hundreds of applications in the environment. Retention, records management, and compliance become very difficult if managed by the application. Second, application-centric management makes it difficult to leverage information that might have value to more than one application. <

On the other hand, central, policydriven management and movement of information delivers integrated compliance, risk management, and archiving. It reduces the costs and risks associated with information retention and disposition by deduplicating information, leveraging tiered storage, and boosting archiving efficiency across many applications.

Information Governance Compliance
How do we get there from here? To increase its competitive range of motion, an organization needs to make the most of its information assets across the areas of relevance, location, collaboration, and compliance. From a technology perspective, that means creating a flexible and adaptive information environment. But how? We believe enterprises need to change the way they develop and maintain functionspecific business applications.

Traditionally, developing a robust lineof- business application meant a great deal of custom coding. But not only is custom coding labor- and time-intensive, changes and integrations require more coding—and the results are often fragile. One stray line of code and application performance may severely degrade or cease altogether.

There is a development alternative, however—the composition platform. A composition platform brings together all the key technologies required for creating line-of-business applications while adhering to a well-formed, services-oriented architecture. Application services enable users to apply a standard work paradigm: initiate, gather information, evaluate and assess, communicate, and close—to their business processes. A composition platform delivers agile, flexible solutions that reduce total cost of ownership, while they:

• Facilitate the sharing of business information within organizations and across internal and external boundaries
• Improve the effectiveness and efficiency of business processes
• Identify common processes across work groups that can drive system and functional consolidation
• Support multi-functional teams with collaborative tools
• Strengthen compliance efforts through policy-based records and retention management

We also believe that the next generation of content management platforms will contain all the necessary tools, including the composition platform, to provide information intelligence and information governance for tomorrow’s enterprise. Our vision of enterprise content management empowered by information intelligence and information governance has four concrete deliverables:

• Value—Application development and composition platforms help you effectively leverage information across heterogeneous repositories.
• Efficiency—Dynamic, policy-based storage and archiving enable you to do more with less, implementing new systems at lower cost and extending the life of those you already have.
• Choice—A flexible infrastructure lets you realize the benefits of next-generation technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, and social media.
• Control—Information-centric management reduces risk and keeps your information from those who shouldn’t have it while helping you meet corporate governance and regulatory compliance obligations.

Mark Lewis is president of the Content Management and Archiving division at EMC Corporation. To learn more about the EMC vision for information intelligence and information governance, visit EMC and read Mark's blog.

1 The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe; IDC; May 2009
2 Ibid.
3 Feldman, Susan. "The Hidden Costs of Information Work." IDC Update (2006): 2-3.
4 Economist Intelligence Unit, (2009). Organisational agility: How business can survive and
   thrive in turbulent times.
5 Ibid.