So just how do you go about doing multi-stream capture?

Step 1 is to find a way to get these information streams into your organization.

Step 2 is mainstreaming them. By “mainstreaming,” I mean making them as efficient as your best paper capture processes, using OCR, automatic document recognition and classification, QA, and getting them into the downstream workflows just like the images of paper. Reduce or eliminate the exception-handling.

To do this, however, you not only have to treat these information streams the same as paper images, but also treat them differently when they should be treated differently. So for example, attachments have to be stripped from emails. And faxes may have to be treated differently if you are doing OCR on them. Faxes are TIFFS, but have a lower dot-per-inch count than paper images, so OCR is going to be more difficult.

If all of these incoming formats are a real problem for your organization, you might consider another option. An alternative to accepting multiple streams and dealing with all their respective complexities is to have a single mandatory or highly recommended way of ingesting information:  a customer portal for submitting electronic documents, where you can limit – maybe down to just one! – the ways that documents get submitted to you. Some of our clients in the financial services sector are doing this successfully. They continue to use their capture technologies for classification, indexing, QA, and release to the downstream document systems. This kind of approach is great if you can do it, but you obviously need very compliant document submitters.

What’s important if you are doing any kind of complex or high-volume multi-stream capture is that you do some modeling and evaluation.  As you probably know if you’ve been dealing with complex systems (like production capture and workflow that’s integrated with downstream business systems), it’s not enough that the technologies have to “work”. Sure, the scanner and capture software and OCR engines and imaging or document management systems have to “work” – but they also have to work together. The capture software has to run the scanners and other channels, and the OCR engines have to work with those things, and they all have to integrate properly with the ECM systems and downstream business systems and workflow.

But even that’s not good enough! The whole contraption has to work cost-effectively. Which is to say it has to save you money, or make you money. This is an extension about what you probably already know about when to do OCR, versus when to just hand-key the data from documents or forms: Sometimes you have too many errors, and QA and error correction makes OCR inefficient. It’s just more efficient to do it manually!

So there are lots of moving parts, and the way to make the right decisions is to model it using spreadsheets and some visualization graphics. Then do “what if” scenarios to see what happens – e.g. to see whether you should try to do OCR on faxes or just hand-key the indexes. Or maybe the OCR on faxes is inefficient, but you can still get your scanning crew, as opposed to the more expensive downstream employees, to do the QA – so it’s the best option even though it wasn’t immediately apparent.

And finally, as part of your planning and execution, you must pay attention to a lot more than just what technology to use. Here are eleven areas that we at Doculabs consider to be important to assessing any capture operation:

1. Primary Processes
2. Supporting Processes
3. Technology Capabilities
4. Supporting Technology
5. Human Resources
6. Quality Mechanisms
7. Customer Satisfaction
8. Operations
9. Business Continuity
10. Vendor Management
11. Financial Management

We suggest that you should be managing these and measuring them as you proceed.

Granted, eleven areas is a lot to bite off on. But note that Doculabs regularly conducts benchmarks of capture operations and service bureaus. We can provide you with information on each of these criteria – as well as an assessment of just how your own organization’s capture operation stacks up.

As you would expect, Microsoft is being predictably tight-lipped about the next release of SharePoint, but that doesn’t mean we’re not all anxiously awaiting SharePoint 2013/14. In January 2012, 2 years after the release of 2010 and 5 years after the release of MOSS, dynamic document management is at an interesting crossroads.

1. Those of you who have SharePoint 2010 in place (particularly if your footprint is large or usage is mature) are wondering whether you should continue full steam ahead or wait for some indication of where Microsoft is taking the product with the next release.
2. Those of you who have older versions in place (MOSS, WSS, etc.), and are feeling the increasing pain of being a version (or more) behind, are wondering whether you should bite the bullet and upgrade to SharePoint 2010 or continue limping along to wait for the next release.
3. And those of you who have no SharePoint in place (all six of you), are wondering whether you should finally dive in now (and begin reaping the benefits of using SharePoint rather than shared drives), or stick it out a little longer until the next version.

Although the answer to each of these will depend on many factors peculiar to your organization, I believe there are some clear right and wrong answers and, despite being a strategy consultant, I’m going to shoot straight here and tell it like it is.

#1. SharePoint 2010 in Place

Of the three, the right answer to this one depends on how you’re currently using SharePoint 2010.

If you have a fairly vanilla install with little customizations or third-party add-ons (NewsGator, KnowledgeLake, etc.), then you can continue supporting and extending your SharePoint 2010 environment with low risk that this will make the move to the next release more difficult — as long as you don’t change your approach to begin customizing or deploying third-party add-ons.

If you have a highly customized environment or use third-party add-ons, things will likely become more difficult when you move to the next version, so you have to think long and hard about extending your SharePoint footprint (if that entails more customization or add-ons), as the gains you might get in the near term will have to be weighed against the difficulty in moving to the next release.

A prudent thing to do would be to evaluate the customizations and add-ons in place to determine whether they are truly necessary. Especially for folks who moved to SharePoint 2010 from MOSS, WSS, or even earlier versions, you may have ported over customizations or add-ons that were needed in those earlier versions but could be replaced with SharePoint 2010 functionality — if you knew that when you moved versions. You may also find that you created customizations early on that are now provided by add-ons, which, if they’re from a viable, reputable vendor, will certainly have new versions when the next release comes out. The same can’t be said for your customizations, so it’s worth evaluating a move to these newer add-ons in order to sunset the homegrown customizations.

#2. Older Versions in Place

This is perhaps the easiest dilemma of the three to my mind: Stop reading this post and move to SharePoint 2010. Now.

Here’s why. Will it be difficult to move to SharePoint 2010? You bet. Whether you decide to upgrade your current sites (if it’s even possible) or just start from scratch and migrate, there will be big pain involved.

But will it get easier to move to the next release of SharePoint? Not a chance. And if you think it will, believe me, you’re kidding yourself. If the track record of other enterprise software is any indication, the path forward only gets increasingly difficult with each new release of a software product, and the further behind you get, the more weeping and gnashing of teeth it will take to move to the latest version.

I haven’t done all the math (and I’m not even sure it could be done), but I think if you took all the costs and effort of moving to SharePoint 2010 from your current version and compared it to the cost and effort of supporting your current environment over the next 18 to 24 months added to the cost and effort it will take to move to the next version of SharePoint, there’s no way it wouldn’t be cheaper to move now.

#3. No SharePoint in Place

This one’s a close second to #2: Stop reading this post and get SharePoint in place. Now.

Here’s why. Won’t the next release of SharePoint have way better functionality than SharePoint 2010, and won’t I have to do lots of work to do to move to that version once it comes out (or to the next version after that in 2017/18)? Sure.

But if you look at the volumes of unstructured content you have on your shared drives and hard drives and the likely increase in those volumes over the next 18 to 24 months, the support costs (online, offline and archive storage costs, plus the cost of FTEs to support) alone should tip the scales.

Add to that how increasingly cumbersome it’s going to get to try to find documents on your shared drives and hard drives given the likely increase in storage volumes, and the decision gets easier still.

And – the last nail in the coffin – as lawyers get more sophisticated in their e-discovery requests over the next 12 to 18 months, we’re going to see an steep increase in shared drives as an in-scope repository for e-discovery. When that happens, your e-discovery costs and risks are going to go through the roof. Managing your content more effectively using SharePoint isn’t going to make these discovery requests go away, but if you use SharePoint properly, it will help you reduce them substantially.

The Final Word

There you have it: my take on what you should do about SharePoint at the crossroads. Acting on that advice won’t be easy, but in the end, it will be easier than doing nothing (or doing the wrong thing).

As always, I’d love to hear what you all out there think. So dive in, and let’s get the conversation started.

Government organizations are under a particular burden: a responsibility to the citizenry they serve to make their information available to the people. It’s called transparency, and the fact that so much information is now stored in electronic formats is a victory for advocates of open government. Search capabilities, for instance, allow constituents to easily identify information on a subject of concern for purposes of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. And digitized records can be accessed from any location, making it far easier to research that subject of concern.

That’s the theory, anyway. But it assumes the records have been preserved in the first place – which, depending on the state you live in, may not be the case.

Take Massachusetts, for example. As first reported by the Boston Globe, when Mitt Romney left office as governor at the end of 2006, he received permission for his aides to buy the hard drives from their state office computers for $65 apiece, and then to spend $97,000 of taxpayer money to replace computers and to wipe clean the servers, including the one in which the governor’s office emails were stored. On top of all this they also received what Reuters terms “legal permission” to destroy 150 boxes of paper records from his term of office.

In effect, Romney’s people were able to take with them all government emails and other electronic records from his administration.

All of this comes to light as journalists, historians, and Romney’s opponents in the 2012 Republican presidential primary campaign have been submitting FOIA requests on Romney’s term as governor of Massachusetts – e.g. requests about the genesis of the health care insurance mandate Romney enacted in Massachusetts. Surprise, surprise: Most of those requests are coming up empty, because the Romney people either cleaned out or took the information with them when they turned out the lights.

As reported by MSNBC, a spokesperson from the Romney campaign says that Romney “followed precedent in the handling of documents in his office….It was all done in accordance with the law, and approved by an independent board overseen by the Democratic Secretary of State.” Technically, this is true; a 1997 decision by the Massachusetts State Supreme Court asserted that records generated by the governor’s office are not public records under state law.

But maybe the operative precedent is one that not just Romney, but many officeholders are looking to avoid – i.e. the case of Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. Back in the early 1980s, Kerry dutifully deposited in the Massachusetts State Archives all the records from his term as Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor. These records were then exploited by Kerry’s various political enemies – both during his subsequent Senate races and his Presidential run. Kerry’s experience appears to have been a lesson learned for many politicians who would rather not face that kind of scrutiny themselves, or provide that kind of fodder for “oppo” research, in future election cycles. Accordingly, legislatures in many states have passed laws exempting their members from state and federal records laws, effectively making legislators’ records out of bounds for FOIA requests.

Yes, Romney and his people violated no state laws or policies. But to the average Joe, an assertion like this doesn’t pass the smell test. Why aren’t these electronic records part of the public record? Mark Feldstein, formerly an investigative journalist and now a professor of broadcast journalism at the University of Maryland, interviewed by MSNBC, said pointedly, “These records don’t belong to Mitt Romney or his staff. Those computers were paid for by the taxpayers, and they were working on taxpayer time.”

The issue is raising some questions in Massachusetts as to whether it might be time to revisit state laws on the management and disposition of official records – laws which, Massachusetts officials acknowledge, have not been updated in years and which address electronic records in only a very limited way. In fact, the vast majority of state laws regarding preservation of electronic information are out of date, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

The question is whether this episode will be no more than a kerfuffle on the 2012 Presidential campaign trail, or whether the public will begin to demand greater transparency on the part of the officials they elect to public office.

But finally, you have to wonder, too, as does Feldstein, just “how historians are going to write the history of our times, if so much is on email and so few emails are preserved.” In the past, public officials archived their papers and restricted the access. But blowing away your hard drives and wiping your servers clean when you leave office? There oughta be a law – against it.

The Center’s most recent report, “Why Americans Use Social Media,” caught my eye, if only because of its finding that two-thirds of online adults (66%) now use social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace or LinkedIn – a pretty impressive statistic. I decided to reality-test their findings against the experience of my friends and myself.

Herewith, the five major findings from the report – and my highly informal gut-checks for each.

1. Staying in touch with family members is a major factor across a range of social media users, but it’s especially important to women.

This rings true, particularly with younger family members. I know that if I email my nieces or nephews, my message will enter a black hole. But if I post to their wall or send a Facebook message, I stand a chance of hearing back from them. Same thing for texting. Far easier to catch younger family members – and certain older ones, too – via text message. But as I’m finding out, you almost have to keep a running list of people’s preferences. I have a friend who’s retired who goes online maybe once every two weeks – but then that’s her way of getting people to call her on the phone.

2. Staying in touch with current friends and reconnecting with old friends is most relevant for those under the age of 50.

I’m a bit surprised at this one. I’d have thought baby boomer usage to reconnect with old friends would be, um, booming, as retirees would likely be using social media to stay in touch with far-flung friends or to look up people they knew in high school, college, etc. The “Vows” column of last Sunday’s New York Times was a case in point: a man and woman who never quite got together in college some 30-plus years ago, but who reconnected via Facebook, and, long story short, just got married. (Cue the violins!) And then there’s the undeniable value of LinkedIn for staying in touch with former colleagues.

3. Middle-aged and older adults place a relatively high value on social media as a tool to connect with others around a hobby and interest.

I guess I’m not of this cohort just yet, although I know a few people who are. I get their posts about the latest crafts fair, or ballroom dancing competition, or bird-watching expedition, and then I remember: Well yeah, they’re retired – they have time for these things! But I guess I can count sports as an interest. This fall I was posting a lot about the Chicago Bears – up until last Sunday’s pretty much season-ending debacle, that is.

4. Connecting with public figures online is relatively popular among Twitter users, as well as African Americans and Latinos.

“Relatively,” the report says, but the numbers aren’t huge: “Fully three-quarters of users say that [the ability to read comments by public figures] plays no role whatsoever in their decision to use these sites.” But then the study found that people who use Twitter tend to be more interested in connecting with public figures than are social media users who do not use Twitter. That would be me. I’m not an active Twitter user, but I know people who are – and some of them “follow” certain celebrities and politicians and hang on their every Tweet. It sounds to me like a self-selecting phenomenon.

5. Finding potential dating partners is at most a minor element of the social media experience.

Apparently this item was the big lead-up surprise, which is why they put it last. “Very few social media users say that finding potential romantic partners or people to date plays a role in their use of these sites….more than eight in ten do not use these sites for that purpose at all.” But then there’s the aforementioned “reconnecting with old friends,” back up at number 2 (above). I know of plenty of people, just like that “Vows” couple, who went trawling Facebook, looking for old boyfriends/girlfriends or for old friends who they hoped might become present-day boyfriends/girlfriends. A minor element for most; perhaps an incidental benefit for some?

One thing I do notice, though: It becomes increasingly difficult to imagine returning to a life without social media. These communications tools most definitely have their utility. And the ability to quickly and easily share information – whether photos, links to web sites of interest, videos (goofy or otherwise), or quick messages – is something many of us have come to rely on.

Not quite a year ago in this space I wrote about the dangers of Tweeting or blogging while impaneled as a juror on a case before the courts (see “FYI: Jury Duty is NOT a Good Place to Go Social,” January 10, 2011). Well, last week, the Arkansas Supreme Court threw out the 2010 murder conviction of a death row inmate because one of the jurors had been Tweeting during proceedings.

In remanding the death-sentence conviction of the defendant for a new trial, the Court specified the actions of the Tweeting juror, identified as “Juror #2,” as well as reports that another juror had fallen asleep during testimony, as misconduct that “calls into question the fairness of his trial.”

The juror in question reportedly Tweeted repeatedly, even after being warned to stop. Some Tweets were relatively innocuous (“The coffee here sucks,” or “Court. Day 5. here we go again”). Attorneys for the defense called the juror’s behavior to the judge’s attention. The judge then spoke to the juror, but since the Tweets mentioned no case-related specifics, the judge declined to release the juror.

But, as reported in the New York Times, then there was this philosophical, and more suggestive, Tweet: “Choices to be made. Hearts to be broken…We each define the great line.” And then, shortly before the jury announced its verdict, the juror Tweeted: “It’s over.”

Defense attorneys sprang into action, characterizing it as a “flagrant violation of the Circuit Court’s instruction against twittering,” pointing out that one of the juror’s Twitter followers was a reporter.

Still, the lower court judge dismissed the defense motion for a mistrial. Upon review, however, the State Supreme Court said that use of Twitter constituted inappropriate public discussion of a trial while in session. As reported in SocialMediaEsq.com, the court’s conclusion was as follows: “Because of the very nature of Twitter as an on online social media site, a juror’s Tweets about the trial were very much public discussions. Even if such discussions were one-sided, it is in no way appropriate for a juror to state musings, thoughts, or other information about a case in such a public fashion.”

The case clearly sets the rights of social media users against the rights of defendants in criminal or civil cases. As I pointed out previously, a number of State Supreme Courts are waking up to the potential dangers of jurors who Tweet or blog while impaneled on a case before the courts and are now proposing amendments to their respective Rules of Civil Procedure.

This case also suggests that some jurors (representative, perhaps, of those younger demographics we hear so much about with respect to Twitter and Facebook  usage?) have a difficult time understanding how their social media usage could affect the integrity of the judicial process. You have to wonder whether amendments to the Rules of Civil Procedure will be enough to address the issue of potential juror misconduct; not to go all Big Brother on you, but I can envision some form of online “sequestration,” limiting jurors’ access to mobile devices (or at least to their social applications) for the duration of jury service, as a direction the courts might potentially take.

1. The rise of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)
2. The evolving relationship between compliance and social media
3. ECM goes viral
4. Realistic retention
5. Mainstream Enterprise 2.0
6. Mid-tier ECM steps up to the plate
7. SharePoint decision time

I’ve covered #1 through #3 already (so start there if you missed it). Let’s turn now to the rest of them.

#4 Realistic Retention

This is a big one, because it’s the culmination of more than a decade of electronic records management efforts that have pretty much failed at large organizations. And this failure is not due to incompetence or negligence on the part of corporate records management functions, but rather that records management (RM) as typically practiced (and as it grew out of paper records management) is untenable, for two reasons:

• Retention schedules are too complex for business users to follow or for technology to support
• It’s designed for paper inboxes managed by RM specialists and doesn’t work for electronically stored information (ESI) managed by end users

The result is that most ESI is retained forever, on multiple systems, and in multiple media, despite all our best efforts at records management.

In response, forward-thinking organizations are trying more practical approaches to RM – not to circumvent laws and regulations, but to find actionable ways to comply with laws using the currently available technology. The two most promising of these are big bucket classification (i.e. three records categories, as opposed to 300) and doing away with event-based retention by finding non-event-based retention “triggers” to drive retention and disposition.

The jury’s still out on how successful these practical RM approaches will be, but we’ll definitely see increasing numbers of organizations moving to them in the coming year.

#5 Mainstream Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 has been a hot topic for some time now, but for most organizations it’s been more theory than practice, for several reasons:

• The technology is not yet mature.
• The staying power of E2.0 remains uncertain.
• There are few precedents for real-world success beyond branding and marketing domains.

However, in the last year or so, E2.0 technology has matured to the point where it’s better able to integrate E2.0 processes with core E1.0 business processes (e.g. customer service, product development, HR). Furthermore, every day it seems like there are new examples of E2.0 successes across a range of verticals, not just organizations like Starbucks or Dell.

The upshot is that E2.0 is now a requirement for organizations in most verticals to remain competitive, and in those where it isn’t, it will be shortly. So 2012 will be a year of intensive E2.0 activity for more organizations than we’ve previously seen, across many more verticals.

#6 Mid-Tier ECM Steps Up to the Plate

Once upon a time, the ECM market for large organizations was heavily diversified, populated by many players, each with its own different approach to enterprise content management solutions.

Since 2009, however, we’ve seen ECM for big organizations consolidate down to a market largely dominated by a few key players (IBM, EMC, OpenText, Oracle), as shown in Figure 2. But in the last year, mid-tier vendors (most notably Hyland) have stepped up to try to compete with the Big Four and making inroads to large organizations beyond the departmental installs they’ve typically been limited to.

2012 should be a big year for some of these mid-tier vendors, and I expect to see them competing for business (and winning) against the big four at larger and larger customer organizations.

#7 SharePoint Decision Time

Okay, so this isn’t so much a trend as it is an observation about where a lot of organizations will find themselves in 2012. Having waited to jump on the SharePoint 2010 bandwagon, these firms now find themselves in a tricky spot:

1. They can decide to implement SharePoint 2010 and spend the next 18 months getting the enterprise up and running – just in time for the next version of SharePoint to be released.
2. They can stick it out and keep using what they have today (MOSS, WSS, or maybe no SharePoint at all), but find themselves with 18 to 24 more months’ worth of ESI to deal with in the meantime.

If you ask me, I would encourage you to go with Option 1 for a number of reasons:

• Known knowns – and known unknowns: SharePoint 2010 is pretty much a known quantity at this point, whereas SharePoint 2013 (or whatever Microsoft decides to call it) is a complete unknown (or nearly so). You could wait around, only to find out that SharePoint 2010 would have given you the bulk of what you needed sooner, cheaper, and with less risk.
• Near-term risk: Speaking of risk, don’t underestimate the huge risk that 18 to 24 more months’ worth of poorly managed ESI poses to your organization, both operational and legal – not to mention the risk to your eventual SharePoint 2013 project from having to deal with 40 percent, 50 percent, 60 percent (or more) additional legacy content.
• Old dogs and new tricks: Face it; you’re not an early adopter. If you were, you’d already be on SharePoint 2010. So what makes you think that your organization will be any more likely to be in the first wave of SharePoint 2013 adopters than you were for 2010? Chances are, you’d decide to wait for 2013, and then end up sitting on the fence until 2015 and be in the same spot you are in now. Trust me.

The Final Word

So there you have it: my thoughts on what some of the key enterprise ECM trends are going to be for 2012. As always, I’d love to hear from you all out there: Tell me I’m crazy, share your own trends, or share your own experiences with any or all of these — jump in, and let’s get the conversation started.

“Right-sizing Your Information Footprint” is my made-up term for turning your information parking lots into a Goldilocks-and-the-three-bears amount of information: not too much, not too little; just the right amount. There is too much digital content, with more being created continually. We need to clean up the past in a defensible way. While the “daisies” are beautiful at the beginning of their life, they lose their appeal as they decay. The same is generally true for information. Businesses also need a better path forward so that content comes into being because the business needs it, and all records are better managed.

Too much stuff, you fail to be business-efficient and you get your clock cleaned when litigation strikes.

Too little information, you can’t run your business, and you fail to comply with recordkeeping requirements, among other things.

So here are twelve remarkably compelling reasons to right-size, right now:

1. Information is growing at such a rapid rate that costs related to storing, finding, using, migrating, extracting, and preserving information are becoming prohibitively high.
2. Knowing what information exists and where it is parked to be able to efficiently run your business is becoming too complex.
3. Technology has failed to find a good way to manage content in a way that minimizes impact to employee productivity (but Kahn is working on auto-classification to help).
4. Employees get too much content to be able to properly manage it.
5. Content has sat for years in old “information parking lots” and it is a decaying asset. (Working on a new book, called Chucking Daisies, to help companies deal with precisely this issue.)
6. Companies spend too much time looking through way too much irrelevant stuff to respond to litigation, audits, and investigations.
7. Companies have out-of-date records used against them in litigation, records which could have been disposed previously.
8. Systems are breaking down or no longer work as efficiently as they should, as a result of the information volume burden.
9. Data parking lots are being ill-managed, and that failure is causing other failures, not the least of which is failing to harness needed information to be “faster, better, and cheaper”.
10. Going Green. No list is complete until it has a bit of “green”. Technology is consuming all kinds of energy. By cutting your energy, emissions, and every other relevant footprint, you are greener, you look better to the outside world, and maybe the marketers have something “green” to say about the effort.
11. Information finds itself on unsanctioned data parking lots when sanctioned ones fill up, making life more challenging.
12. Along with volume, growth has been the creator of many new information parking lots (smart phones, the cloud, Twitter, blogs, etc.), which makes management of content that much more challenging.

Rightsizing will never be as easy as it is right now, as information parking lots continue to grow and grow. Clean your house of digital data junk. Develop a thoughtful plan for future information retention. Right-size now, because it’s good business.

Guest blogger Randy Kahn is a consultant, lawyer, author, teacher, and speaker, and the founder and principal of Kahn Consulting, Inc.

Breton claimed that much of the email employees were receiving was just time-wasting noise, anyway; he estimated that of the 200 messages each employee receives per day, maybe 10 percent were actually useful to the business, and as much as 18 percent were spam (you might inquire as to the quality of the company’s spam filter). But Breton’s goal is to completely eradicate the use of email for internal communications within 18 months.

Note, of course, that it’s only internal email that Breton is going after; email will continue to be the communication vehicle of choice for external emails with clients and partners. But in the past 6 months, the organization has managed to reduce its volume of internal email by 20 percent.

What do employees think of the change? According to an Atos spokeswoman, response “has been positive, with strong take-up of alternative tools.”

But it’s reflective of the observed decline in email usage across certain demographics, particularly the precipitous decline in email usage by persons below the age of 35 – users who rely on tools like Facebook, IM, and texting instead. It’s the message that all those vendors of social business software have been pounding away at for a couple of years now: that these are the tools that members of the future workforce prefer to use for their communications, and so it behooves organizations to put those tools in place now, if not yesterday.

Granted, email still makes sense for certain business communications. And as difficult as it’s been for many corporations to address email from an Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) standpoint, the challenge in any move to reliance on social technologies will be to make sure that all those IMs that are properly classified as business records get managed appropriately in the system of record. (Alas, there is no word on just how Atos is accomplishing this.)

But those organizations that remain on the sidelines with respect to social media just might want to ask whether there’s a use case to be made for social technologies for internal business communications, at the very least. And asking that question may open up consideration of the use cases to be made for external applications, as well – e.g. opportunities for using social tools to allow information-sharing and collaboration with customers, suppliers, and partners.

In that spirit, I want to spend some time in this post and the next taking a look at my picks for noteworthy ECM 2012 trends:

1. The rise of Information lifecycle management (ILM)
2. The evolving relationship between compliance and social media
3. Enterprise content management (ECM) goes viral
4. Realistic retention
5. Mainstream Enterprise 2.0
6. Mid-tier ECM steps up to the plate
7. SharePoint decision time

#1. The Rise of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)

ILM  is a hot topic on all fronts these days – from vendors and standards bodies, to customers and practitioners in the trenches. And while it has similarities to enterprise content management (ECM) and records management (RM), it differs in some fundamental ways.

More so than either ECM or RM, ILM refers to the management of information throughout its lifecycle from a broader perspective than just retention or legal obligation. The goal is to meet the needs of the total organization (compliance, IT, and lines of business) for information management, with optimized people, processes, and technology.

The term has been in use in pockets for a few years now, but until recently, operationalizing ILM has been mostly aspirational, primarily because ECM technology wasn’t sufficiently mature to support it. Recently, however, ECM vendors have begun to build suites of tools to address ILM more holistically. Jury’s still out whether they’re ready for prime time, but at least they’re out there.

And beyond technology, disciplines like RM, litigation management, and compliance are beginning to adopt an ILM perspective on their activities. You hear a lot of talk in these disciplines about business value and practicality (more on this in #4), both of which are products in part of the increased cache of ILM as a legitimate organizational activity.

#2. The Evolving Relationship between Compliance and Social Media

Another area poised for significant transformation in 2012 is corporate social media compliance. Compliance and social media have had a rocky past at most organizations, where initially laws, regulations, and industry standards were regarded as reasons not to get involved in social media, especially since this whole social media thing could just be another fad, after all.

Once it became clear that social media wasn’t just another fad, and once businesses began to better understand how social media could positively impact core, value-chain activities, this initial attitude had to change, which it did: Compliance was no longer a reason not to do social media; it simply made doing social media more challenging.

Most organizations are still at this point. They know they have to get involved in social media; they imagine that their competition is working furiously on social media (they’re right), but they’re facing some difficult compliance challenges – not the least of which is the absence of legislation/regulation addressing social media for most industries.

What’s on the horizon for most organizations in the coming year is a view of social media compliance as a strategic asset – a competitive differentiator. All the difficulties that compliance raises for effective social media are barriers to entry that make solving them all the more valuable for those organizations that manage to get there first. Those that are late to the game will still have to work hard to solve these challenges, but they’ll be playing catch-up rather than enjoying first- or early-mover advantages.

Some forward-thinking firms are already there, but I think the light bulb will go off for a large number of organizations in 2012, and they’ll begin looking for ways to capitalize (and monetize) this new view of compliance and social media.

#3. Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Goes Viral

This trend, ECM becoming relevant for a wider range of industries than financial services, banking, insurance and pharma, has been around for awhile, but boy, has it ramped up lately! I’d say that fully 30 percent of my clients in 2011 were organizations outside the traditional document-intensive stomping grounds for ECM, in industries such as oil and gas, mining, manufacturing, petrochemicals, and consumer product groups.

These are industries where documents have historically not been viewed as central to their value chains. Unlike financial services, banking, and insurance, they make stuff or sell stuff (or both), so most of their energy is channeled toward managing that stuff. That, of course, involves managing information about that stuff; but again, traditionally, within these other industries, that information has been contained in non-ECM systems, like supply chain management systems.

It’s not that these organizations have radically changed their business model or something, but rather that ECM has become important to them for a few key reasons:

Social media has brought content front and center for all organizations — tribal knowledge is poised to be memorialized in systems and organizations are going to have to figure out how to deal with it.

Electronically stored information (ESI) volumes have reached the point of unmanageability given current ECM practices/technology — this straw broke the camel’s back a long time ago in financial services, insurance and banking, but for these second wave ECM industries, they’re hitting it now.

Core ECM technology has matured; those on the trailing edge can now (more) successfully adopt it. Although not perfect and by no means a slam-dunk, ECM technology has matured greatly in the last few years; in fact, most of the problematic deployments I see these days are less a struggle because of the technology and more because of how folks implement it – i.e. with little to no (mostly no) planning, strategy, or governance, but that’s another blog post.

The Final Word

Okay, so much for trends #1 through #3. Next time I’ll tackle the last four. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what folks think of my take on 2012 trends so far. Dive in and offer some of your own picks for trends; we’d love to hear what folks out there think about Content Management 2012.

The four steps to getting compliant are:

1. Create a cross-functional body to “own” the problem of social media compliance.
2. Find out what’s happening with social media at all levels of your organization.
3. Focus on creating a reasonable, defensible social media compliance strategy.
4. Manage social media compliance the way you manage traditional compliance.

Now let’s look at each of these steps in detail.

1. Create a cross-functional body to “own” the problem of social media compliance.

Those of you who read me regularly could have guessed that this would be part of my top four best practices. I’m a huge believer in the efficacy of cross-functional teams for just about any business challenge.

And I know that “Center of Excellence,” “community of practice,” and so on, may be dirty words at some organizations, with good reason. Too many times these groups end up being more about bureaucracy than results, and they take on a life of their own: They seem to spend more time justifying their own existence rather than delivering business-relevant results.

That’s not the kind of cross-functional body I have in mind.

Picture instead a group of folks drawn from IT, governance, risk management, and compliance, and the relevant line-of-business functions – all of whom have a vested, personal interest in how their organization might use social media and enterprise collaboration modalities to become a truly social business.

These would be people like enterprise architects, network engineers, application developers, service desk associates or business analysts; HR, regulatory compliance, ethics, finance, records management or risk management representatives, as well as those involved in all facets of legal operations, from contracting to litigation; and representatives from all areas of operations—from sales, marketing, and customer service, to product development, supply chain, and beyond.

They would be focused on making decisions about how the organization will pursue social media and enterprise collaboration to meet the varying requirements of the constituencies they represent.

And beyond just giving you the best chance of making sound business decisions about social media and enterprise collaboration, such a group allows you to obtain both the enterprise buy-in and organizational visibility to succeed at building a compliant, competitive, effective social business.

2. Find out what’s happening with social media at all levels of your organization.

The first rule of compliance is: If you don’t know about it, you can’t govern it.

Not surprisingly, then, a lot of Enterprise 1.0 compliance efforts are centered around ensuring adequate visibility into business operations to both monitor and better ensure compliance. And despite these efforts (and the years we’ve spent honing our compliance capabilities to maximize their effectiveness), achieving adequate E1.0 compliance visibility can still be a challenge at many organizations.

As you can imagine, the visibility challenge is multiplied with social media and enterprise collaboration, not only because the majority of corporate compliance practitioners are new to it, but also because the nature of these domains is federated, grassroots, agile, and decentralized.

So the first step for your newly-minted cross-functional group of social business stakeholders is to document as much of the social media and enterprise collaboration activity currently in flight as possible.

Because of its cross-functional membership, your stakeholder group will likely have good initial visibility into what’s going on at the organization, and when you reach the limits of the group’s knowledge, each member then spearheads a fact-finding mission to their own areas to find out more.

The result will not be 100 percent visibility, but will definitely be head and shoulders above what a narrower group (e.g. one drawn primarily from Marketing and Corporate Communications) could have achieved, even with two or three times the effort.

3. Focus on creating a reasonable, defensible social media compliance strategy.

Your first reaction on developing that long list of in-flight social media and enterprise collaboration efforts at your organization may be panic: How in the world are we going to govern all of them to ensure compliance? Heck, you may be wondering how you would even govern one of them, let alone the entire list.

Pause. Take a deep breath. And just own the fact that it’s not possible to be 100 percent compliant, 100 percent of the time — not with social media and enterprise collaboration, and not with any of your E1.0 business processes, either.

Even tried-and-true business activities like using the phone, which probably seems pretty benign, are in reality not at all benign. There are a whole host of ways employees could use the telephone that would make your organization noncompliant and put you at great risk. Yet, if asked, most folks responsible for compliance at organizations would not cite telephony as a burning issue.

In a nutshell, this is because they’ve come to accept the cost/benefit equation of telephony’s risk profile. They understand what could go wrong, what the impact would be, what the chance of it happening is, and what their response needs to be, and that’s that. Not much more to be done.

The same is not true for the risk profile of social media and enterprise collaboration. The domain is so new that most folks wouldn’t say that they know the range of things that could go wrong; failures of corporate social media efforts happen in the most public of spheres — the Internet — and receive tremendous publicity, both from traditional media outlets as well as those available on the Internet itself, so we tend to associate “worst-case” scenarios with E2.0 compliance failures. Given the ease of use and the ubiquity of social media and enterprise collaboration tools, we assume that the chance of noncompliance is high. And as for what our response should be, the dearth both of regulatory rulings and marketplace precedent makes this largely uncharted territory.

The answer, however, is not to block efforts to turn your organization into a social business. Instead, the answer is to take steps to understand the cost/benefit equation of the risk profile of social business and then to design a compliance program that is reasonable and defensible – just like you already have for the range of E1.0 business activities that are core to your business operations.

4. Manage social media compliance the way you manage traditional compliance.

What I don’t mean by this is to lift and shift the tried-and-true methods for E1.0 compliance to your E2.0 compliance activities; this is a recipe for failure. The specific, “click here, click there” aspects of compliance are not interchangeable between E1.0 and E2.0 activities.

What is interchangeable, however, is the fundamental orientation of E1.0 compliance activities on the business process being governed, rather than on the technology, systems, or media used.

But in the attempt to make our social media and enterprise collaboration efforts compliant, many of us fixate precisely on the technology, systems, and media used to deliver E2.0 capabilities, and we lose sight of the core business process all this futuristic technology is supposed to be enabling. And when we lose sight of the core business process, we lose sight of what should be the real object of our compliance efforts: how we run our business.

So it’s absolutely essential to make sure your sole focus in pursuing social media and enterprise collaboration compliance is to ensure the compliance of core business activities (that happen to leverage social media and enterprise collaboration capabilities). It should not be to ensure the compliance of your organization’s use of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Jive, SharePoint, etc., because you will not succeed. How could you, if you don’t have specific business processes in your line of sight?

The Final Word

Taken together, this post and my previous two give you a good blueprint for addressing E2.0 compliance – i.e. the compliant use of social media and enterprise collaboration in your business. You’ll need to take it and adapt it for the specifics of your organization: its history; its culture; its maturity with respect to social media and enterprise collaboration; the nature of the relationship among compliance, IT, and the business, and so on. But it should give you a place to start, which, in the brave new world of E2.0, is often half the battle.