To take an real advantage of newer technologies, an organization needs to best understand what they have in the first place. So many ‘transformational’ projects never realize their value. Today these focus on using cloud-based technologies to bring a nimbleness to an organization from both a technology and economic perspective. But so little time is spent on data veracity – just how clean and formatted is it in the first place?
This is especially hard around less structured datatypes like content, documents and email. Because it is an unstructured data type – it is perceived hard work. Regular corporate data that fits nicely into a relational database (all those ‘first names’, ‘last names’, ‘company names’ and ‘zip codes’) are easy to fix, dedup and clean up. But corporate contracts, labor agreements, sales agreements, lease terms and conditions are full of grammar and requires technologies that know how to work with these complex ‘objects’ and how to interrogate them.
So before getting all excited about moving all your chaos of files residing in network shares, old SharePoint repositories and a cornucopia of content management systems and putting into a new, shiny Box Content Platform in the cloud = consider taking a moment and:
- Having a proper strategy that fits your business today – and can flex to where the business may go tomorrow
- Assessing where and what you have across your repository portfolio
- Classify and define everything into a proper taxonomy with expected metadata
- Sweep everything up into a single ‘collection’ and compare across all heterogenous repositories
- Decide what is
- DELETABLE: Redundant/Obsolete/Trivial, Duplicate and otherwise disposable.
- ARCHIVABLE: What needs to be archived for retention purposes.
- ACTIVE: What needs to stay active and available to run the business.
- Execute a proper migration and a complete decommissioning of the old systems place. Unless you remove the old.
InfoDNA Solutions has the focus, expertise and technology to make this a reality. Don’t just move everything up to that new Box Platform and expect the ROI to be realized. A little work up front goes a long way in realizing true business value.
