The OxyMorons - How do I get started with governance?

This OxyMoron journey with special guests Charley Barth (CB) and Shukra Kichambare (SK) looks at the Cummins ECM program from its start (2015) all the way to their current 3-year road map (2025). The story will show how Cummins had to think differently to get out of a century of Digital Landfills and into global, governed information platforms.

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This OxyMoron journey with special guests Charley Barth (CB) and Shukra Kichambare (SK) looks at the Cummins ECM program from its start (2015) all the way to their current 3-year road map (2025). The story will show how Cummins had to think differently to get out of a century of Digital Landfills and into global, governed information platforms.

What was your favorite COVID TV binge?

SK: It was my kids’ favorite TV show, Avatar: The Last Airbender. According to Wikipedia, the source of all human knowledge, “The series is centered around the journey of twelve-year-old Aang, the current Avatar and last survivor of his nation, the Air Nomads, along with his friends Katara, Sokka, and later Toph, as they strive to end the Fire Nation's war against the other nations of the world. It also follows the story of Zuko—the exiled prince of the Fire Nation, seeking to restore his lost honor by capturing Aang, accompanied by his wise uncle Iroh—and later, his ambitious sister Azula.” [Editor’s note: I’m not sure what all that means.]

CB: Mine was 90 Day Fiancé. Again, per Wikipedia, “90 Day Fiancé is an American reality television series on TLC that follows couples who have applied for or received a K-1 visa, available uniquely to foreign fiancés of U.S. citizens, and therefore have 90 days to marry each other. The series has sixteen spin-offs including 90 Day Fiancé: Happily Ever After, which documents past 90 Day Fiancé couples after their marriage; 90 Day Fiancé: Before the 90 Days, which follows couples who met online but have not yet started the K-1 visa process; and 90 Day Fiancé: The Other Way, a series where the American partner moves to their partner's home country instead of vice versa. [Editor’s note: I’m not kidding.]

What is the scale of the content problem that you tacked at Cummins?

SK: Our assignment was to tackle digital landfills on a gargantuan scale. Cummins is a great company, but it's got 100-year history. Imagine how many documents, files, and electronic repositories have been created over the course of 100 years. So much knowledge, so much information.  We have 55,000 employees and petabytes of documents within our file shares. In addition, we have 1000s of applications that create structured and unstructured data.

What prompted Cummins to start their ECM journey?

CB: In 2014, an internal audit took a hard look at how Cummins was managing its records and its documents. The results of that audit led our board and our leadership team to create the first ever ECM program in our 100-year history. Just simple compliance with our retention policies was called into question. And so, we've been on a seven-year journey to change decades of behavior.

We're a 100-year-old company, and employees were very set in how they managed information and content. Our focus has been to introduce them a different way of managing information. Our goal was to manage information as an asset and manage it as one Cummins versus 55,000 unique employees. So that was a major, major challenge. Another big obstacle was explaining what information governance is to senior executives, why they should care, and why it should be just as important a priority as all the other things they have on their plate.  So those two challenges really played a role in how we found executive sponsors, how we developed a vision and mission, and how we began understanding those 1000s of legacy environments we had out there to build an effective business case.

What kind of OxyMoron balancing act did change at large scale require?

SK: Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”  There were a lot of established norms that we had to break, and a lot of cultural shifts that we had to introduce. But we did not tackle them all at once. We focused on a specific problem and adopted a phased approach. Let’s understand the problem, let's define it, let's see if we can measure it, and let’s determine how we can bring about change. Let’s really engage the end users and stakeholders in defining the roadmap. I wouldn't say we are done yet.

CB: How do you balance information security with information access? How do you balance governance with working your own way? How do you achieve compliance with your record schedule, while keeping your employees sane? These are all contradictory objectives that we still deal with on a day-to-day basis. This is a marathon, not a sprint. We try to focus on those small wins that over time are going to turn into bigger wins.

What are some of the mistakes you’ve made along the way?

SK: We think we're inundating people with all kinds of messaging about what we’re trying to do, but the reality is that we’re under-communicating. If I were to do it again, I would tell everyone almost every week that there is an automated retention capability in place. That it’s going to delete files automatically after three years. That the years where you're just keeping stuff forever are gone. If I were to change something, it would be more communication – a lot more. We're still not there, but now we have the right stakeholders in place.

CB: Initially, we broke one of the golden rules of IT by putting the solution first and the requirements second. When I started at Cummins, we were just moving from being an IBM-centric company to a Microsoft-centric company. So, a SharePoint rollout was going full-speed, and our ECM initiative needed to get on board fast. We had to tweak our requirements to fit that SharePoint architecture. Another mistake was assuming that those audit results that triggered our ECM initiative would have long life, and that senior executives would always remember how important and critical ECM was. Wrong. You must remind them every time you have a discussion with them. You must send them consistent news feeds of ECM updates, progress, and kudos to ensure you are still on their radar. Lastly, you must be uber prepared with project plans, roadmaps, IT architecture, marketing, and training to even have a chance to succeed. You know, when you're talking about this kind of scale, if you're missing one or two of those elements, it's going to be twice as hard to accomplish your goals.

Initially, we didn't really have an employee experience team to make us think more like our employees.  We can talk about information governance and information management all day long. But we use a lot of technical jargon and acronyms that make the eyes of most people just glaze over. If you come at this from a pure IG perspective, you're immediately going to lose 95% of your audience. I think incorporating the employee experience factor into your training and marketing campaign is key.

What do you know now that you wish you knew then?

SK:  First, it's very difficult to overturn entrenched habits. And never underestimate the resourcefulness of the workforce. They will always try to get around restrictions that you place upon them. Our employees were always one step ahead of us and would find ways of storing and managing information that were outside our control. That has been a learning curve for me.

CB:  The biggest thing for anyone in this profession is to just accept that you will never achieve nirvana. Do not let perfect be the enemy of good. There are plenty of opportunities to do incremental good in this space – but there are zero opportunities for perfection. It's just a reality that you must accept. Focus on those smaller manageable wins. And make sure that your goals are commensurate with the size and budget of your ECM team; you can only do so much with the people you have and with the budgets and resources that are given to you. Another thing I’ve learned is to find a trusted partner or trusted partners who will listen and are passionate about your journey and will support you. Another lesson is to not forget about paper. Paper is still alive and well, and you can't forget about governing that. Speaking of governance, pick the right governance model for your company early on. Lastly, listen to the voice of the customer, the voice of the business.  No matter how smart you think you are, no matter how you think they're going to react to certain technologies or processes, if you go forward without true customer business input, you're probably going to be in for a rude awakening.

Charley and Shukra will be sharing their journey at the MER Conference, May 10-13. Their presentation, Case Study: Cummins, What a Difference a Decade Makes, will address:

Where do you start when your company has little to no ECM program?

What does success look like?

How do you make all of this work for a Global, Fortune 500 company?

What kinds of creative thinking as needed to make it all work?

Registration for MER is HERE.