The Junk Drawers and Bank Vaults of Enterprise Content Management
Third, there’s the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. As Yee says, this asks the question, “If someone is looking for a piece of content but they can’t find it, does it really exist?” If you can’t find what you’re looking for, even when you turn your junk drawer upside down, it could mean you no longer own that item or that gremlins moved it out of the junk drawer into a different drawer.
Interruptions are a powerful productivity killer, as Yee acknowledges in his fourth tactic. Finally, there’s the question of who’s actually using the content that’s been created. If there’s a disconnect between the content in a repository and what’s actually being consumed, there’s a productivity gap. It makes little sense to spend time creating content that doesn’t match up with what others need. Thus, knowing what is being used, by whom, and how often could optimize the entire content creation process and guard against having content consigned to a virtual enterprise junk drawer.
From Junk Drawer to Bank Vault
The exact opposite of the junk drawer is the bank vault. Into your safe deposit box goes important papers and other essential items, things that need to be secured and readily available, not what you would spend time hunting through random drawers to locate. Using this analogy, Dave Jones, VP of Product Marketing for Nuxeo, describes a success story for ECM. By modernizing an aging information management architecture, a global financial services institution both strengthened its regulatory compliance and enhanced its competitive advantage.
The bank did this by taking the idea of a safe deposit box and applying it to the digital world, creating a “digital data vault.” In the vault, customers could access every bit of their bank-related information. They could upload, store, and view personal documentation. Plus, it gave the bank the ability to comply with legal regulations.
The entire process was in line with business goals. No technology for the sake of technology, just a total concentration on why this was necessary from a business perspective. The technology perspective came from connecting content and data. This didn’t mean migrating every piece of data from the legacy system, just that they were accessible from the new system. A third important piece of putting together a successful project was the implementation of common metadata. As Jones puts it, metadata is the marriage between content and data.
Digital transformation can only bring value if it supports what the business is trying to achieve. Viewing information as a single entity, connected through technology, is crucial to positioning modern organizations to cope with the challenges they face in a rapidly changing business environment.
Jones calls 2019 the “year of modernization” while Yee asks if this will be the year we “rise up” and conquer Content Mismanagement. Sounds like exciting times ahead! I’ll be happy if I can locate the measuring spoons that are supposed to be in the junk drawer.