Life is Complicated

Written By John Mancini

Life as an Information Manager is complicated. How do you convince management to pay attention? How do you get funding for your records and governance initiatives? How can you leave behind the world of manual information management processes before your organization drowns in a sea of information chaos? I’ve been covering some of these challenges in my Reimaging Information Governance series.

 The challenges ahead are huge. Life within an organization operating at large scale -- in locations around the world -- triples the complication. More so than pundits like me operating at a distance sometimes realize. Organizations face not only records management challenges, but also broader information management challenges – and how to seamlessly integrate rising information volumes into the critical need to digitize the business.

To give you some idea, I was recently doing some work with a Fortune 500 company. Here is a list of the challenges this company is CURRENTLY experiencing – In a follow-up post, I’ll go through where they would LIKE to be.

●      Over 90% of our storage is ungoverned.

●      No descriptive metadata in file shares or device drives.

●      Minimal compliance with our internal policies on retention.

●      Inconsistent application of our internal policies on classification.

●      Access controls not enforced.

●      99% of enterprise applications with no retention or classification governance.

●      Digital Landfills are everywhere [Editor’s note: The name of my first blog!].

●      Little automation of retention applied to files.

●      Little measuring and metrics of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) compliance.

●      Confusing Business/IT model for ECM support.

●      Little utilization of electronic tools like e-signatures.

●      Too many Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial (ROT) files being kept for no reason.

●      Overspending on electronic and hardcopy storage.

●      No oversight on Global spend for hardcopy management of documents (outside North America).

●      Proliferation of collaboration tools (freeware).

●      Little understanding on the value and need for governed files.

●      Most of the governance occurs at the end of the information lifecycle.

●      Value and importance of information is increasing.

●      Confusion on the terms - information, content, data, records, and documents.

●      No formal representation at the function level to support ECM compliance efforts.

This is a real list. From a real company whose information management practices are ahead of most other large organizations. This is not a set of challenges that will not be solved by buying some software. It is a set of challenges that will require new ways of thinking about the challenge of information chaos, and an organizational commitment to make this journey a priority.

Is your organization experiencing similar challenges? How are you addressing them?

The critical immediate challenge for organizations – amplified through the pandemic -- is to bring information under some sort of managed control so that the underlying business processes can be digitized.

THIS is a priority that even C-level folks understand right now. And most importantly, this can be a useful driver in getting an organization to also do the right thing re records management and governance, an opportunity that we should not waste.

——-

John Mancini
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