Our previous post titled “Data Swamp and Document Messes = step 1 = admitting that our lives had become unmanageable” outlined the share and size of how organizations have lost control of their unstructured data. Bringing in technology and disciplines where they could with content technologies BUT also contending with ‘shadow IT’ solutions with network drives at the like.
This current state has caused many IT departments to take a step back and root out what caused this to happen in the first place. It has generally been found that:
- Technology people did not understand the problem
- They wanted to put some broad ‘scrum’ approach to solving it that required people, time and discipline non-technology people understood
- Technology evaluations were time consuming – vendor presentations, RFIs, RFPs, POCs, etc etc
- Risk big = Win big but also Lose big.
This is not new news. In an article 6 years ago titled “The ‘Why’ of ECM Failure and the ‘How’ of ECM Success” by Lane Severson, he stated:
Based on 20 years of industry data, we can say that nearly 50 percent of all ECM programs fail just from a technology perspective. And of the 50 percent that succeed, half of those fail to really provide value to the business.
As Mr Severson at the time worked for one of the leading ECM-focused firms in the world (Doculabs) and today is one of the primary Gartner analysts focused around content services, this quote comes from experience and has proven true over and over.
But these outline people and process issues. What has also happen over the last 5 years is this little thing called ‘the cloud’.
Not just making technologies available quickly, but better, cheaper and a chance to ‘try before you buy’ with free trials. This brings us to the new normal that should be realized around ‘risk little = win big’. But being able to take advantage of this new technology we can all buy with a credit card is not the panacea for all that is wrong. What about:
- Security – More important than ever.
- Integration – There are no ‘data silos’. Actions beget reactions.
- Re-engineering the work (aka BPM) – The old way of work needs to be re-engineered.
- Cleaning up the past and what is put into the new future
InfoDNA Solutions can help you accomplish this. Making amends for sins of the past with overpriced and complex technology has created trust issues. It caused network drives to be used, cloud sync-and-share tools to proliferate and old SharePoint systems to run on machines under desks. With the right expertise and tools to help you clean up the past to put in that new future is exactly what InfoDNA does every day.
