A look at Information Management in the Digital Age
Last week the Optimation team headed to Sydney for OpenText’s annual “Innovation Tour”. In case you missed it we’ve compiled a summary for you, but you can also search twitter for #OTInnovate.
Unsurprisingly “digital disruption” was a major theme of this year’s conference. We heard again about the disruptive nature of Cloud, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Mobile, Security & Digital. Software as a Service (SaaS) remains at the top of wishlists for both senior IT executives and business executives as we bring more consumer behaviour into the work place. Our milennials we are told expect to have the same kind of mobile, ‘app’ and easy to use toolsets as they have at home, on their consumer devices. Smart devices have changed our expectations, but is the workplace keeping up? With all of this consumer technology sending vast amounts of data to servers across the world, our devices being constantly ‘on’, an increase in our digital footprint, you have to wonder how we manage all of that data. Well here is a number to think about, according to Adam Howatson, there are estimates that $32B will be spent on big data by 2017; developing software, services, and infrastructure That’s only two years from now… let’s just take a moment to let that sink in people!
If we look beyond 2017… well by just a little to 2020; IoT related revenue is expected to reach $8.9 trillion.
I must confess that I have no idea what that number even means - it feels like the GDP of a small country! But why the drama, why the hype? And where did these numbers come from?
Well if the experts are to be believed, the answers reveal themselves in our new digital reality. We have seen an increase in BYOD usage in the workplace, and now wearables are on the rise. Our multi-generational working environment is a space where young people (I feel old now) are expecting to be in an uber-connected environment; working anywhere and everywhere, at any given time, and in a very much more social environment that their counterparts and predecessors may be used to.
Adam Howatson, the Chief Marketing Officer for OpenText mused that most of your customers have made a decision about whether to buy from you based on the information and data that they gather online. That’s before they even meet you… before the ‘sales pitch’… before you have extolled the virtues and case studie - their decision is already made!
So what does this mean?
A great question! I must confess to perhaps being a little cynical in my old age, so I asked myself that question – so what? And here are a couple of thoughts:
- If staff want to work anywhere, any device, any time: how do we servicetheir information and data consumption needs
- How do we collaborate effectively cross generation, cross-platform, and cross-geo locations
- If customers are making decisions on doing business with us before they even know how awesome our team are: what can we publish and how do we engage them in a personal and responsive way (without meeting them personally)
- If we are mobile all the time, is it acceptable to ask people to VPN into the system, or use a token or login to a Citrix farm
- Do we know our staff and our users well enoughto tailor their services, their information feeds so that they are constantly driven to the next engagement and have no need to leave our awesome family
- How can we leverage structured data analytics processes and tools to guide us through effective decision making and encourage utilisation of unstructured data assets
- What does the modern capability model look like for Enterprise Information Management
Where was the cool stuff?
Enterprise Content Management (ECM) implementation
One of the most frustrating things in my line of work is seeing clients heavily invest in Enterprise Content Management but then only to use the base document management functionality. Kind of like the human brain where we have massive potential, a huge capacity for storage and processing, but are only using the tiniest portion of this functionality. The ECM/EDRMS debate is something of a hobby horse for me and something I am watching very closely in the New Zealand ECMaaS program.
Conference speaker Megan Cappelleri, Manager Information Management at Gold Coast Commonwealth Games Corporation, spoke about the journey her team has gone through to use their ECM/EIM platform as it was best intended. Yes creation and capture but also collaboration - realtime collaboration between officers onsite at the Glasgow Games and staff in its Gold Coast office. As well as the use of forms to aid data collection and so much more.
Two key takeaways from Megan’s presentation:
- We are only here for a short time so need to be effective and efficient from Day 1
- We have a duty to the next Games, the Federation, and the public to share information, knowledge, approaches, and some of the incredible artefacts that have been (and will be) created
Megan’s is a great anecdote highlighting the wide-reaching uses for ECM – more than just a repository for final ‘stuff’, it can also be a real time collaboration tool, a process efficiency enabler and a means to drive more value through reuse not recreation of information assets. This is something that we as a community often neglect to promote around ECM: the end goals, the improvements, looking at the possibilities and dare I say it – making them real.
Financial Services – acquiring and retaining those all important clients.
I found this session pleasantly surprising.
Albert Tay, Sales Director of Financial Services at OpenText shared some useful insights from the financial sector. I particularly liked his examples of how the financial services industry is changing its modes of communication. If you, like me, get your credit card statement and feel a little bored, well, maybe its time to move providers.
Move to the organisation that personalises your statements based on the knowledge the organisation has about you; changing the colour scheme of your statement, for example.Or how about the company that embeds video files into your statements so that the company can deliver you relevant messages. For example my financial institution can see that I don’t have life insurance so into my next statement they embed a video clip reminding me just how important it is. Now that’s service! Not necessarily in itself but because of what it means. It means that we are bringing the structured knowledge sets from our CRM and transactional systems and merging them with our unstructured information to drive some incredible customer experiences and new service delivery methods.
Which leads me nicely into Actuate
Those of you familiar with OpenText will know that the company grows by acquisition as much as it does by organic growth. OpenText recently acquired data analytics company Actuate, plugging the gap in the EIM world quite neatly. The Actuate acquisition allows OpenText to; deliver personalised dashboards (making the records manager in me squeal with delight ); embed analytics to allow you to drill into data sets to isolate trends, patterns, issues or opportunities; and create interactive data visualisations.
I’m going to come back to this topic in a later blog but I do find it interesting that we are seeing such a convergence in the IM and BI domain. Perhaps my colleague Yvonne Bishop is right, they are bookends on the same shelf.
So what does all of this mean to us in the Enterprise Information Management world?
Well, if you believe the industry analysts then ‘digital leaders are more profitable than their industry competitiors by 26%’. With all of the things we have mentioned above, it’s clear that EIM has a central role to play in this disruptive approach.
It’s our job as practitioners, designers, implementers, and regulators to enable our organisations to simplify their business – to transform themselves into a digital first paradigm and accelerate its delivery, services, growth, and value
At Optimation we have a philosophy - ‘start with the end in mind’. We look for outcomes - and go from there. But if the world is becoming so disruptive, or rather disrupted, how will we ever know or be able to predict what the outcomes are?
But then is that any different to a normal day in our lives – you tell me.
