Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/atomicjam

First of all excuse me for not being PC – but our best ‘person’ behind the wheel doesn’t sound right to me

I was playing Gran Turismo 5 at the weekend and my excuse for buying it was “it’s a visual masterpiece” (the wife really bought that line). I like it because it gives me the opportunity to drive my car the way I would like to drive it – fast, without worrying about damage, on the open road and on a good road surface (the joys of motoring in Sydney!).

Anyway, I was racing around Trial Mountain against my 12 year old son and he chose something ridiculous to race in (I think it was the Pagani Zonda) and I chose the Mazda RX8 (an exact copy of the one that sits either in my garage gathering dust or in traffic on the Pacific Highway!). Now the Zonda is easily the more powerful car (by about 500 BHP) but I won the race with ease. Now I could say it’s because I’m technically a superior driver, but the fact is that I understand how to drive a car and what to expect from the technology (front mounted rotary engine, RWD, brakes, etc), as well as what to expect from the external environment (weather, road surface, physics, etc). In addition, I’m more experienced, I knew I could afford to pace myself, when to take risks and when to play safe and I knew my competition.

On the other hand, my son understood that the Zonda had more power but that was it…

Then today I came to work and read this article The State of ECM 2010.

This was a blog post regarding AIIM’s State of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) 2010 report and it was interesting in that it seems that many organisations are not putting their best man behind the wheel – in fact many of them seem to have bought the car, jammed down the accelerator and let it rip. No wonder many of these projects come off the road on the first corner….

The point is made that 47% of organisations do not have true executive support for ECM, despite 86% having an ECM ‘solution’.
The report also points at the reasons for having ECM. These are the ‘usual suspects’ of compliance and cost reduction – very little of gaining competitive advantage or delivering a better level of service to customers.

Information Management is key to an organisation’s success, yet it seems that it is still not taken seriously; it needs to be a key part of an organisation’s strategy and driven accordingly.

It’s no use giving the keys to the Zonda to the boy who cleans the windscreen and telling him to go and win the race… you need the best person behind the wheel

Case Management · Documentum · ECM · Enterprise Content Management

Photo attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koencobbaert/

I recently read this blog post on the Australian political blog site ‘Larvatus Prodeo’ regarding ‘spam’ freedom of information (FOI) requests placed on the Climate Research Unit at University of East Anglia. This was then followed by the hacking of the CRU computers and the releasing of emails that lead to the ‘Climategate’ scandal.

The whole article (IMHO) is tainted by a political view (after all the Larvatus Prodeo site is openly ‘left of centre’) but it raises some interesting points.

• Should organisations on the public payroll be able to withhold information requested in FOI requests?
• Is the cost / nuisance value of FOI requests sufficient to justify not replying to them?
• How do we audit to ensure that FOI requests have indeed been accurately responded to?

You can read the article here and some of the other links in the post are worth a read too.

The apparent shift towards freedom of information by governments of Western democracies is going to cause a lot of headaches for organisations – not only are internal processes going to need to change, protocols around communication (especially informal comms such as TXT messages, IM and social media) are going to have to be put in place (and enforced) and there will need to be a significant shift to a connected government model which is going to require a much larger investment in Content Management solutions, not only content repositories and EDRMS but also email archiving, eDiscovery and Case Management.

Enterprise Content Management · Freedom of information · Government · legal cost

The EMC marketing guys are being fantastic with providing prizes for these surveys (the data gathered must be of great quality). The most recent survey on process efficiency was a great success and we had a lot of valuable feedback from the respondents so we thought we’d run a third and final survey in 2010…

This one is aimed at surveying how Government can provide better service to citizens and make the state sector more efficient in the process – I’m sure all of us have suggestions on how best to achieve this and we expect many of the responses to come from those that actually understand how Government works (i.e. public service employees), and so we’ve taken a different approach to the prize.

The prize is a $500 donation to the charity of your choice and the winner will also get from free publicity for the charity on my blog when we post the winner!

ECM · Enterprise Content Management · records management · Survey · Win