The Challenge

An interesting challenge for Records Managers, Knowledge Managers and CIOs is the newer document management paradigm of being asked to manage all content according to the ‘Records-In-Place’ paradigm, without a single central repository. That is, to be responsible for all content across a myriad of locations controlled by a myriad of applications and a myriad of departments/organizations and people.

We all realize that Enterprise Content Management, or Content Services as it is now called by Gartner, is a moving target, constantly evolving with new challenges and new paradigms.

For example:  

• How do we filter out only relevant information from social media?
• How do we avoid capturing personal data and being culpable under privacy laws?
• How do we capture all emails containing sexism, racism and bullying without being guilty of an invasion of privacy of the individual?
• How do we meet all of our compliance obligations when our staff are spread across multiple states/counties/provinces and multiple countries with different legislation and compliance requirements?

All weighty challenges for the modern Records Manager, Knowledge Manager or CIO. Now we have a new challenge, how to manage multiple silos of information without a central repository.

Multi-Repository (multi-Silo) Systems

In multiple-repository systems we find multiple document stores or silos, local files, network file shares, local data bases, multiple file servers, multiple copies of SharePoint and multiple Cloud repositories like Dropbox, Box, iCloud, Google Cloud Storage and other hosted document storage. The CIO may proudly claim to manage multiple information silos but what he or she really has is a laissez faire document management ecosystem that may well be centrally monitored (hopefully) but is most certainly not centrally managed.

In the multiple silo model, the documents in our multiple locations are ‘managed’ by multiple people and multiple and independent applications (e.g., SharePoint, Google Docs, Office 365, etc.). We may have implemented another layer of software above all these diverse applications trying to keep up with what is happening but If I am just ‘watching’ then I don’t have an inviolate copy and I don’t have any control over what happens to the document. I am unable to enforce any standards. There is no ‘standard’ central control over versioning or retention and no control over the document life cycle or chain of evidence.

For example, you wouldn’t know if the document had since been moved to a different location that you are not monitoring. You wouldn’t know if it had been deleted. You wouldn’t know its relationship to other documents and processes in other silos. You wouldn’t know its context in your enterprise and therefore you wouldn’t know how relevant this document was. The important distinction is that under the multiple silo model you are ‘watching’ not managing; other multiple pieces of software are managing the life cycles and dispositions of the documents independently.

All you really know is that at a certain point in time a document existed and what its properties were at that time (e.g., historical ‘natural’ Metadata such as original filename, author, date created, etc.). However, you have no contextual Metadata, no transactional Metadata, no common indexing and no common Business Classification System. In this case, you don’t have a document management system, you have a laissez faire document management ecosystem, an assortment of independently ‘managed’ information silos. Most importantly, you are not able to link documents to business processes that transcend organizational structures and silos.

What are the issues?

Sure, SharePoint and Cloud silos make collaboration easier but at what cost? What can’t we do with this multi-silo ecosystem? Why doesn’t this solution meet the best-practice objectives of an enterprise Document Management System? What are the major areas where it falls short? How does the proliferation of multiple silos and content repositories affect us? What are our risks? Here is my assessment of the major shortfalls of this ‘Records-In-Place’ paradigm.

We are unable to: 

1. extract the critical insights that enterprise information should provide
2. define all the relationships that link documents to enterprise business processes
3. find the right information at the right time
4. provide a single access point for all content
5. Implement an effective, consistent enterprise-wide document security system
6. effectively protect against natural or man-made disasters
7. produce evidence-standard documents
8. minimize document handling costs
9. guarantee the integrity of a document
10. guarantee that a document is in fact the most recent version
11. guarantee that a document is not an older copy
12. minimize duplicate and redundant information
13. meet critical compliance targets like Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and the HIPAA
14. create secure, searchable archives for digital content
15. effectively secure all documents against loss
16. implement common enterprise version control
17. facilitate enterprise collaboration
18. Improve timeliness
19. manage enterprise document security and control
20. manage smaller and more reliable backups
21. achieve the lowest possible document management and archiving costs
22. deliver the best possible knowledge management access and search
23. guarantee consistent content
24. optimize management and executive time
25. standardize the types of documents and other content can be created within an organization.
26. define common use template to use for each type of document
27. standardize the Metadata required for each type of document
28. standardize where to store a document at each stage of its life cycle
29. control access to a document at each stage of its life cycle
30. move documents within the organization as team members contribute to the documents' creation, review, approval, publication, and disposition
31. implement a common set of policies that apply to documents so that document-related actions are audited, documents are retained or disposed of properly, and content that is important to the organization is protected
32. manage when and if a document has to be converted from one format to another as it moves through the stages of its life cycle
33. guarantee that all documents are treated as corporate records, that common retention policies are applied determining which documents must be retained according to legal requirements and corporate guidelines
34. guarantee enterprise-wide Regulatory compliance
35. produce an enterprise-wide audit trail
36. share information across departmental and/or silo boundaries
37. centrally manage the security access to documents/information across different areas of the organization
38. consistently classify documents as each repository may be used by a different department and be classified differently  
39. identify duplicates based on document name
40. easily find things based on metadata, as it wouldn’t be common across repositories
41. control access via AD single sign on
42. access all enterprise documents using a single license
43. centrally audit access and changes to metadata

What are your risks?  

Your risks are huge!

I run an application software development company called Knowledgeone Corporation that develops enterprise content management software applications. My customers are generally big business and big government and part of my job as the designer of our applications like RecFind 6 is to predict what my customers are going to ask for in twelve or twenty-four months’ time.

I read a lot of technical papers and forecasts and blogs and try to ingest and evaluate as much as I can about where our business is moving so that I can make the changes necessary in our products to meet future demand. I have been doing this for twenty-nine years and like most pundits, sometimes I get it right and sometimes I get it wrong.

Like Gartner (that never seems to get it right) I have been silly enough to publish a number of my predictions as white papers and they make interesting reading years later. Some examples are listed below:

2009   Windows 7 – Frank’s views

2007   Technology as a Tool – Where is Records and Document Management Heading?

1998   The Thin Client – The Next Panacea?

1997   Knowledge Management – The Next Challenge?

1996   Information and Records Management Towards 2000 – Electronic Document Management Principles.

1995   Document Management, Records Management, Image Management, Workflow Management,…What? The I.D.E.A.

I have also published more predictions in my blog, a few examples follow:

09/2011        Will developers, Corporates and Government upgrade to Windows 8?

11/2011        Mobile and Web – The future of applications?

12/2011        The real impact of mobilization – how will it affect the way we work?

01/2012        Will desktop virtualization be the final nail in the computer room coffin?

03/2012        What is the future of software applications in 2013 and beyond?

The obvious problem with publishing prediction is that you can’t always get it right and you will be judged at a later time when everyone is a lot wiser. However, people in my business have to predict the future because we start working on a new product a year or more before we are able to sell it. In a way, it is a silly business. We invest man years and large amounts of money designing, building and testing software applications long before we can get any kind of return on our investment.

Games makers have a similar problem, they have to invest millions and many man years long before they know if their game is going to be a success or not. This is why we have to predict the future and why we need to get it right more times than we get it wrong.

Right now I happen to believe that the world of software applications is going through a major paradigm shift. The advent of powerful mobile devices that really began with the first iPhone has changed the way most people want to work with applications. Like the PC network paradigm change of the early 1980’s, this one is also end-user driven, not IT Department driven. In fact you may conclude that the often reactionary IT heads of the commercial world have been dragged kicking and screaming into this revolution just as they were in the early 1980’s.

The availability of smarter and more powerful mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad have already had a major impact on PC and notebook sales and have caused major vendors like Intel to re-evaluate their product lines and strategies. In Intel’s case it first tried to leverage off old technologies with the promotion of ultra-books and now it has announced a move into new processors for mobile devices to rival those from companies like ARM and Qualcomm. Similarly, Microsoft, late to the party as usual, is now focusing on its new range of surface tablets and new versions of Windows 8 to support mobile devices.

As I said above, it is significant than none of these major changes have been driven by the usual suspects like Microsoft and Intel, they have been caught napping and are now in catch-up mode.

So, what are my chances of correctly predicting the future if giants like Intel and Microsoft with their huge budgets and research departments can’t get it right? Or, is the problem not one of budget but one of corporate arrogance? I will leave that judgement to you.

In my view the move to faster, smarter, more powerful and more user-friendly mobile devices is inexorable. When I now look at my office with its bulky PCs and masses of wires and connections it looks like a museum honouring the 20^th century. My iPad in contrast, looks like the beginning of the 21^st century; still not there yet but definitely the progenitor of coming office computing.

I see the same picture when looking at enterprise application software. Most of it, including my product RecFind 6 (based on the very latest Microsoft .NET technology), needs to be completely redesigned for the coming mobile world and this is the real challenge.

Everyone now knows (or should know) how to design games and small simple apps for mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad but most of us are still struggling with the redesign of heavy-duty, feature-rich and enterprise-strength applications like RecFind 6 for the new mobile platforms.  We can’t just scale them down, we have to come up with a completely new way to communicate with our mobile end users. We have to discard the technology we are most familiar with and re-invent our solutions using new and unfamiliar technology.

Just like Intel and Microsoft we have to change our game and we have to do it fast because this particular revolution isn’t being driven by us, it is being driven by end-users and the innovative people at companies like ARM and Qualcomm and Apple all of whom have had very little impact on corporate application software in the recent past.

The current paradigm shift is still in its early days but it will completely change the way we all run our businesses in the near future. If only I could predict exactly how.