Building an Enterprise Vision of Content Management
ARMA conference workshops in 2006 and 2007 revealed strong anecdotal evidence that RM professionals are being tasked with developing a records/knowledge continuity program as part of their mandate. This wave of retirement and resulting workforce shift is the next major corporate risk for information professionals. Working with HR, IT and increasingly, corporate counsel, experienced records and knowledge managers are seen as best suited to develop a continuity initiative. But to be successful, it must go far beyond the typical desk cleanup and box handover routine that is typical today.
Demographic inevitabilities are becoming disruptive forces within many organizations. Beyond the looming retirement issue, companies need also to consider other similar mass personnel shifts in the business: mergers and acquisitions in private sector; elections and agency consolidation in government. The organization that values information governance and articulates its strategy and best practices to all staff is building a framework against which to reduce risk during such periods of turnover. Managing, maintaining, protecting and sharing key corporate content across generations and geographies is critical to minimizing shocks to the internal operations and maximizing productivity. A C-level-sanctioned information governance strategy is an essential component to meeting this challenge.
A second new risk to the organization is the adoption inside the corporate environment of productivity and collaborative tools previously used for personal networking purposes. Technically savvy information workers expect feature-rich, intuitive content collaboration spaces. Content creation is rarely done in a vacuum. Authors need to search, retrieve, copy information and discuss, review and share content with colleagues who often reside across geographies.
Businesses are facing new compliance and electronic discovery pressures and are expected to articulate, communicate and enforce internal programs in anticipation of possible litigation or other forms of compelled disclosure. A common issue is an insufficient rate of user-participation in records capture. A parallel problem is an increase in decentralized and distributed work as organizations grow, merge, reorganize and build cross-functional teams. The ability to interact with colleagues regardless of geographical location is required to support agile and fluid work practices.
Increasingly, information workers are adopting ad hoc, unsanctioned free tools, non-secure chat and messaging for collaborative work, multi-tasking, content review, and simple task escalation. Where IT has not proactively delivered these tools, technically savvy end users are installing their own or using hosted temporary offerings. The rules of engagement in most companies are unclear regarding the sanctioning of blogs, wikis, discussion forums, ad hoc intranet or project sites. Beyond collaborative tools, new storage and communication devices, such as camera phones, text-enabled handhelds, USB drives and even iPods, all present risks to corporate content that require access controls, preservation and capture policies that are inline with evolving e-discovery precedents.
An information governance strategy allows the enterprise to elevate content-centric appropriate use, disclosure and preservation practices to an abstraction level beyond that of basic file format and authoring tools. Content creation in the course of business activity, as part of a work task done in support of a corporate process, is then subject to consistent guidelines regardless of originating device or application.
A third threat to the enterprise mitigated by an information governance strategy is that of business continuity and emergency preparedness. With controversy swirling over the patterns of our weather and climate, organizations need to view disaster recovery as a critical part of ensuring that business operations can be re-established quickly, efficiently and at a level of cost that preserves shareholder value. Effective recovery of operations can only occur when the business has a clear and accurate vision of its content stores and can prioritize the data that requires most immediate resurrection. Not all documents are created equal when the clock is ticking on the preservation window of opportunity. Records management programs routinely identify items that are of a "vital" or "essential" nature, but organizations often fail to communicate emergency action plans to a broad enough range of staff who may find themselves on the front line to act if they discover fire, flood or other physical damage to paper files or electronic storage media. Where are the most vital records and how are they stored? Who has the phone number to a cold storage company and knows the value of freezing as a salvage technique for water-damaged paper?
The hierarchy of corporate information needs to be assessed and documented in advance of disaster. Protocols outlining the salvage or restoration—potentially very expensive propositions—need to be established to focus on the most critical content. An information governance strategy includes risk assessment based on geography and regional risks—flood, tornado, hurricane or earthquake. An effective governance model can outline the level of risk that is acceptable to the enterprise and make storage and recovery decisions influenced by these factors.
Succeeding in the Knowledge Economy
To succeed in the knowledge economy, business needs to develop a level of discipline and rigor in protecting its soft, intangible intellectual assets as traditional brick and mortar shops would use to preserve traditional furniture- and fixture-based assets. The language of preservation and asset usage needs to be more consistently applied to content artifacts—records, documents, discussions—items generated while executing a business process.
Stewardship, quality, metrics, transparency, accountability. This is the new vernacular of enterprise content management. Compliance-driven records programs can serve as the starting point for many organizations, but compliance must be viewed as an end result of the intrinsic value a company places on its content. Innovative businesses in the knowledge economy have recognized that information is power, a resource that can be harnessed throughout its creation, collaboration and distribution lifecycle.
Open Text is an independent provider of enterprise content management (ECM) software. The company’s solutions manage information for all types of business, compliance and industry requirements in the world’s largest companies, government agencies and professional service firms. For more information about Open Text, visit www.opentext.com.
1 Gartner Research Note, May 18, 2006. "Governance is an Essential Building Block for Enterprise Information Management," David Newman and Debra Logan. p. 3.
2 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, OECD Corporate Affairs Division Report, December 10, 2006, "Intellectual Assets and Value Creation: Implications for Corporate Reporting," p. 5.
3 cio.gov/documents/CCASurvey_2003_Analysis_ Report.PDF, p 10.
4 Public CIO, November 2004. www.govtech.com/gt/ articles/92113
5 Transportation Safety Board of Canada, www.tsb.gc.ca/en/reports/rail/2005/r05v0141/r05v0141.pdf, p. 30