AIIM

From Document Manager Magazine Vol 20 No 03 - May/June

Next month's AIIM Roadshow for document and enterprise content management offers some fascinating new insights into the changing shape of information management over the next decade…

The International Association of Enterprise Content Management (AIIM) has seen the role of information professionals change significantly over the past decade - with the 'value-add' for information technology in organisations shifting from the technology itself to its stewardship, optimisation and the application of the information assets themselves.

Last year, Gartner published a report entitled "CIO Alert: The Need for Information Professionals." The core findings of the report concluded that the vast majority of organisations clearly understand the need to manage information as an enterprise resource (rather than in separate 'silos', departments or systems) but they often don't know how to begin to tackle this major challenge, as it has become so large.

In the future, Gartner believes that professional roles focused on information management will be different to that of established IT roles and an 'information professional' will not be viewed as one type of role or skill set, but as unique combination of specialisations. This is a view shared by AIIM on both sides of the Atlantic.

To meet this need, AIIM has been working with a range of industry experts and focus groups, to define the body of knowledge necessary for these new information professionals to be successful. Based on this work, it has built a new certification and test that is available at locations around the world and has also created a set of free training materials to help information professionals prepare for the examination.

Speaking at the AIIM Roadshow, the international President of AIIM, John Mancini, will be examining how the nature of information technology has come to change so quickly and so dramatically - examining the implications of this change for the new breed of information professionals.

Over the past decade, there has been a "perfect storm" of change driven by mobile, social, and cloud technologies. These changes were first evident in the consumer sector. In the course of a decade we have evolved from an environment in which very few people used or cared about technology outside of the context of work, to one in which technology is everywhere and virtually everyone has access to it. Ten years ago the most innovative technology a person had was normally handed out by a central IT department when people took a new job. Now, those cutting edge technologies are more likely to be at home.

It was only a matter of time before these experiences started moving from the consumer sector to the enterprise. The "appification" and "consumerisation" of the enterprise is revolutionising the way we think about enterprise information and IT - and the kinds of skills we need within our organisations. AIIM describes this revolution in a white paper by best-selling author Geoffrey Moore: "Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT: A Sea Change in Enterprise IT".

The paper notes that over the past few decades, the focus of enterprise IT across multiple technology transitions has been the construction of "Systems of Record" - essentially the initial digitisation of paperbased records and processes. Initially, these Systems of Record created competitive advantage for those who implemented them before their competitors. But no longer.

As Geoffrey Moore explains: "The thing to register about systems of record is that they are mostly and largely complete, particularly within larger organisations.

Are they perfect? No. But these systems of record are no longer a source of competitive differentiation for organisations. They are a necessary condition of doing business. Once you have an interstate highway system, the era of the great build out comes to an end, and the era of maintenance comes to the fore, and that is precisely what has happened with enterprise IT as we have known it."

Organisations are now focused on taking the next step. They are focused on applying the lessons of the consumer world, and building 'Systems of Engagement' - systems to connect, engage, and automate relationships with their partners, their customers, and their employees.

"Organisations are facing an avalanche of information, in forms and formats and via devices that weren't even on the radar screen five years ago. Images and documents are the core of systems of record. Conversations - in a wide variety of forms and on a dizzying array of devices - are now the challenge," says Moore. "Best practices in this new world are scarce, the pressure by the business to implement is accelerating, a generation of networked millennials is ready to enter the workforce, and connections back to the familiar world of systems of record are tenuous. Our traditional definitions of control and governance must adapt to meet the changes of this new world."

The challenges here are enormous. Expectations of enterprise IT are rising and, still reeling from the crash of 2008, businesses are questioning the rigidity and cost of legacy systems. The focus of IT is changing from a traditional focus on standardising and automating back-office manual processes (i.e. a focus on control) to a focus on empowering and connecting knowledge workers and improving knowledge worker productivity and innovation.

In the world of Systems of Engagement, no one on the user side cares about any of this. But because these systems are being used by enterprises, they will inevitably be subject to the same legal and social restrictions as traditional enterprise content, and therein lies the rub.

Today that rub is significantly limiting endorsement and adoption of consumerstyle communication and collaboration facilities around the world. It will continue to do so until the content management industry and its customers develop protocols and policies to address its issues.

This revolution in how business processes are conducted and deployed creates six key imperatives for all organisations:

1) Make everything mobile Redefine content delivery and process automation to take advantage of mobile devices and mobile workforces.

2) Digitise your processes Drive paper out of processes and automate process flows.

3) Make your business social Integrate social technologies into processes rather than create standalone social networks.

4) Automate information governance Acknowledge that paper-based records paradigms no longer work and focus on automating governance and disposition.

5) Mine big content Find insights and value in massive aggregations of unstructured information.

6) Commit to the cloud Break down monolithic "enterprise" solutions into more "app like" solutions that can be deployed quickly independent of platform and in the cloud.

You can get the inside track on all these developments (and more) at next month's AIIM Roadshow 2012, the UK's leading event for document management and ECM.

Each day, you can hear lively keynote sessions from John Mancini and Doug Miles, Director of AIIM Market Intelligence, plus an illuminating perspective on SharePoint from independent analyst, Alan Pelz-Sharpe, and a wide range of case studies, live discussions and briefings on the latest innovations.

AIIM