“Cloud First” is the new tagline in so many organizations. You want to subscribe to bring cost cutting, more nimbleness and a much easier consumability of technology to all users – whether they are inside or outside of your organization. This thing we call ‘digital transformation’ makes complete sense except for one small fact – we all have decades of ‘stuff’ running to operate the business today. For 99% of us it is a mish-mash of technologies, conflicting processes kept together by people and a degree of ‘shadow IT’ that is out of control. In a document management world this idea of ‘Shadow IT’ has been evolving over the last 20+ years.
- Generation 1: Physical media – floppies, CD-ROMs, RW-DVDs, memory sticks. Always getting cheaper, faster and defined “sneaker net”.
- Generation 2: Network drive – how many of us use some combination of Z-drives to share files. It was the first move away from ‘sneaker net’ with floppy disks or burning CD-ROMS.
- Generation 3: SharePoint – Microsoft made this easy to run on some random machine under a desk in a remote office to evolve the network-drive into something to include more collaboration and a pretty web interface.
- Generation 4: Sync-and-Share – Vendors like Dropbox, BOX and Microsoft OneDrive to name a few. You can start with a free version to now share with anyone inside – or outside the company.
All the while as people inside a company evolved in their use of the ‘next best option’ the previous ones never went away. When do those all come to light you ask?:
- Litigation and eDiscovery – Bankers boxes, dark suits and defending an organization’s actions can uncover all of this.
- Internal Audits – CISOs, Chief legal officers and records managers maintain a more and more regimented schedule of these.
- External Audits – Whether by outside accounting firms, a government agency or a boutique firm brought in to evaluate ‘organizational readiness’.
- Compliance due-diligence – A government agency requires re-licensing or evaluation of your information readiness.
- Merger and Acquisition – Whether you are buying, being bought or spinning off a division by divestiture, this due diligence by outside firms drive extensive efforts to identify important documents that define every piece of the business.
- Implementing a new corporate platform – Turning on a new system where these documents should be housed will have a need to assess and extract each and every contract, agreement and business relationship.
InfoDNA is an expert at helping you get out in front of all these motivations and technologies. Their decades of expertise in this area include their Topla product suite that allows you to not just look at a single repository for evaluation, but also compare them all together to identify ‘one version of the truth’.
Learn more at www.infodnasolutions.com
