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Occupy IT Manifesto

Oct 21, 2014

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A look at some of the forces reshaping enterprise IT -- and how the business looks at IT.
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Table of ContentsEpiphany 3

About This Manifesto 5

My Background 14

Bias #1 — It’s a sin to waste money. 15

Bias #2 — All evidence to the contrary, I think I’m a technology expert. 16

Bias #3 — Despite lots of IT spend, true process automation is just in its infancy. 17

Thinking Differently About IT 19

The #OccupyIT Manifesto 28

Demand #1 — Commit to the cloud. 30

Demand #2 — Mobilize everything. 34

Demand #3 — Make the business social. 40

Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves. 46

Demand #5 — Prepare for extreme information management. 52

So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW? 59

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CHAPTER 1

Epiphany

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Every once in a while the light bulb goes off.

For me, the light bulb went off in 2010. It was during a meeting of the AIIM Task Force on the Future of Enterprise IT, headed by Geoffrey Moore, noted futurist and best-selling author of Crossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity, among many titles.

Geoff posed this simple question in the context of the amazing period we are currently living in:

Why is it that in terms of technology I feel so powerful as a consumer and so lame as an employee?

As the CEO of AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management) a global association of information professionals, but perhaps more importantly as the CEO of a small business of 45 employees with enormous member expectations about our own use of technology, the question quickly morphed into:

Why the hell have I been spending so much on technology and yet have so much frustration to show for it?

Chapter 1: Epiphany

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CHAPTER 2

About This Manifesto

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Chapter 2: About This Manifesto

That light bulb moment was the inspiration for this book.

I wrote this book for information professionals. So your very first question before going any further might be what the heck is an information professional?

Let me put it this way:

... If you are business executive struggling with how to get value out of all information you are gathering...

... if you are an IT manager looking to remain relevant at a time when technical knowledge alone seems to be becoming a commodity ...

... if you are a compliance officer or a records manager worried that the old ways of managing information risk are drowning in the torrent of information hitting your organization...

...if you spend time worrying about how you put the right information in the hands of the right people in order to make more timely decisions ...

THEN YOU ARE AN INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL AND THIS MANIFESTO IS FOR YOU.

Geoff crystallized his question about feeling so powerful as a consumer and yet so lame as an employee in the following from his white paper, A Sea Change in Enterprise IT:

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Over the past decade, there has been a fundamental change in the axis of IT innovation. In prior decades, new systems were introduced at the very high end of the economic spectrum, typically within large public agencies and Fortune 500 companies. Over time these systems trickled down to smaller businesses, and then to home office applications, and finally to consumers, students and even children. In this past decade, however, that flow has been reversed. Now it is consumers, students and children who are leading the way, with early adopting adults and nimble small to medium size businesses following, and it is the larger institutions who are, frankly, the laggards.

Our initial response might be to dismiss this trend as not really relevant to the issues of business. After all, if there really were useful productivity gains here, surely we would already be investing in them. Isn’t it far more likely that this proliferation of consumer services, social sites, and interactive games is simply digital entertainment which, if anything, should be banned from corporate computing?

In a word, No. In two words, emphatically No. What is transpiring is momentous, nothing less than the planet wiring itself a new nervous system. If your organization is not linked into this nervous system, you will be hard pressed to participate in the planet’s future. To be more specific, amidst the texting and Twittering and Facebooking of a generation of digital natives, the fundamentals of

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next-generation communication and collaboration are being worked out. For them, it is clear, there is no going back. So at minimum, if you expect these folks to be your customers, your employees, and your citizens (and, frankly, where else could you look?), then you need to apply THEIR expectations to the next generation of enterprise IT systems. But of far more immediate importance is how much productivity gains businesses and governments are leaving on the table by not following the next generation’s lead.

The first yardstick we usually use in thinking about this kind of technology change is Moore’s Law. Now before I thoroughly confuse everyone, the Moore referred to in Moore’s Law is not Geoffrey Moore but Gordon Moore, former president of Intel. Yes, it does seem like the Moore family has a pretty good handle on this future prediction thing.

Just kidding. As far as I know, Geoff and Gordon are not related, although it admittedly would be way cool if they were. Moore’s Law, originally stated by Gordon Moore in an article in the 1960s, contends that our ability to lay down transistors on a semiconductor essentially doubles in capacity every 12 months. That was later increased to once every 18 months, but even at 18 months you can get a sense of the exponential impact of technology change on our ability to improve hardware.

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In Race Against the Machine, Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson (neither of who is named Moore) make the point that the impact of Moore’s Law is just beginning to hit its radical phase. Andy and Erik use the analogy of the fable of the invention of chess as a way to talk about what happens once the power of exponential improvement really takes hold of processes and people and technology.

The fable goes like this: Supposedly the inventor of the game of chess showed his creation to the emperor. The emperor was so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to name his own reward. The inventor was a clever man, and so he asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second, four on the third and so on with each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous one. The emperor agrees, thinking that this reward is far too small for such a fabulous game.

He is reassured in his thinking during the early phases of the rice doubling because initially it really doesn’t seem that impressive. Even after 32 squares, the emperor has given the inventor only about 4 billion grains of rice. Now that’s an awful lot of rice, but it is only about one large field’s worth.

However, it is in the second half of the chessboard that volume of rice becomes overwhelming. In the second half of the chessboard the emperor ultimately realizes that the

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number of grains of rice is equal to 2 to the 64th power, minus 1, or about enough rice to make a mountain the size of Mount Everest.

The point that Andy and Erik make with this fable in terms of technology is that we are now starting to move into the second half of Gordon Moore’s chessboard, where technology change really accelerates. And if the changes and improvements in hardware technology (as represented by semiconductor capacity) are not impressive enough, our ability to create software and algorithms improves even more quickly than our ability to improve the hardware.

This leads to a situation in which technology becomes more and more ingrained in the fabric of every business and within the reach of individuals, not just businesses. Technology doesn’t just enhance businesses. It creates the potential for vast new businesses and revolutionizes the very foundations of existing businesses.

And most importantly for the purposes of this book, it changes: 1) what we need to do with technology if we hope to keep our organizations competitive; and 2) how we go about deploying technology.

All of the work we did in creating Systems of Record for our organizations no longer provides competitive advantage; effective Systems of Record are a necessary but not sufficient investment for competitiveness. To quote again from A Sea

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Change in Enterprise IT:

Those of us old enough to have senior management positions understand enterprise IT through the lens of data processing. That is how it grew up around us and we grew up with it. We spent the last half of the 20th century building up this capability from rows of punch cards that could process census data to global information systems that capture every dimension of our commercial landscape, from financial transactions to human resources to order processing to inventory management to customer relationship management to supply chain management to product lifecycle management, and on and on.

These are the great Systems of Record, and like the interstate highway systems of a prior generation, they have paved the way for an enormous economic expansion. But most important of all, the thing to register about Systems of Record is that they are mostly and largely complete, particularly within larger organizations. Are they perfect? No. But these Systems of Record are no longer a source of competitive differentiation for organizations. They are a necessary condition of doing business. Once you have an interstate highway system, the era of the great build out comes to an end, and the era of maintenance comes to the fore, and that is precisely what has happened with enterprise IT as we have known it. As a result, this past decade has been one of increasing

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optimization, led by IT budget cuts as funds are transferred to other uses within the enterprise, and led technologically within IT by virtualization, cloud computing, and ever more outsourcing. And that is where we stand today.

The next stage of IT investment requires that we think differently. We need to change what we are trying to do with our IT investments and how we go about procuring technology.

Welcome to the world of Systems of Engagement.

Systems of Engagement will overlay and complement our deep investments in Systems of Record. Systems of Engagement begin with a focus on communications. We grew up with letters, phones, telexes, and faxes, and grew into email, shared text databases like Lotus Notes, portals, websites, and mobile phones. Now we are going to incorporate a third generation of communications, based on 1) connecting people in real time; 2) smart and geographically-aware mobile devices; and 3) ubiquitous and cheap bandwidth.

These communication capabilities will also be complemented with new collaboration capabilities. These are IT-enabled services that allow groups of people to interoperate both synchronously and asynchronously, and they include wikis, collaboration tools, chat, crowd sourcing, Web conferencing, video streams, video

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conferencing, and similar services. And as cultural and language barriers become more and more important to overcome and transcend, high definition real time video telepresence sessions and the like will complement and in some cases replace the inevitable round of international trips required to make global commerce really work.

If you are dependent upon suppliers or distributors or partners to deliver your fundamental value proposition to your customer then who are we kidding? You have to grab onto the new communication and collaboration systems or you will simply end up as road kill. If you are in a sector such as technology or health care, or financial services, or consumer packaged goods, or retail, or education, or government, or energy, or aerospace and defense, or travel and hospitality, or media and entertainment, or marketing and advertising, then there is little alternative to rethink your engagement strategy.

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CHAPTER 3

My BackgroundBias #1 — It’s a sin to waste money. 14

Bias #2 — All evidence to the contrary, I think I’m a technology expert. 15

Bias #3 — Despite lots of IT spend, true process automation is just in its infancy. 16

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Chapter 3: My Background

Perhaps before we go any further, I should share my own experiences — and corresponding biases — at this point.

Bias #1 — It’s a sin to waste money.I have worked at nonprofit associations for the past 30 years. For those of you who haven’t worked in a nonprofit, you will likely find it bizarre — bordering on the incomprehensible — that someone could build a career out of working for them. You may be amused when I tell you that there is an “association of associations” (the American Society of Association Executives).

Most importantly, you will likely think that nonprofits are places where the pace of work is pretty mellow and relaxed and the bottom line is not terribly evident. Kind of a place to go once you are approaching retirement age and are looking for a bit more relaxed pace.

However, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. The thing to know about nonprofits — and hence my bias — is that there is no place I know of that is MORE focused on the bottom line than a nonprofit. Associations are “out there,” exposed to far more second-guessing from members and constituents than is the norm in the for-profit world. A 5 percent variance in budgeted expenses is a BIG deal. So when I look at the amount I have spent on proprietary “association management” systems over the years, it makes me nuts. Really.

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Most likely certifiable.

Bias #2 — All evidence to the contrary, I think I’m a technology expert.My last two gigs have been at technology associations — the American Electronics Association (now TechAmerica) and AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management). The biases this carries are: 1) I love technology; and 2) I know just enough to be dangerous.

Ten years ago, the coolest pieces of technology in my life were the PC laptop and the Blackberry handed to me by central IT casting. (True confessions: I am old enough to have once considered myself cool enough to lug a COMPAQ III on an airplane in order to fire up the 1980s adventure game Leisure Suit Larry.)

In this bygone era, we used to think it totally reasonable to issue our employees devices and tell them they were not to be used for anything except business. Under penalty of death or at least firing.

That worked when IT and the “man” held all the cool technology cards and could use this as an instrument of control. A lot has changed in the past decade. The tables have turned.

The iPad has been deployed in business organizations

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exponentially faster than the iPhone. When senior executives got an iPad 1 for Christmas in December 2010 and then brought them into work after the holidays the world changed.

The time is coming very soon when we won’t even issue computers or phones to employees; we will simply assume that they will bring their own devices to work. Gartner (Tablets and Smart Phones are Changing How Content is Created, Consumed, and Delivered) forecasts that by 2014, 90 percent of organizations will support corporate applications on personal devices. Gartner doesn’t say this, but I believe the other 10 percent are the world’s remaining buggy whip, eight-track, and portable CD player manufacturers.

But the more important point here is that the consumerization of technology has made us all experts. Or at least we think we are experts. Business executives now carry expectations — and excitement — from their experiences in the consumer technology arena into the workplace and are frustrated to find that all of their great weekend ideas (“I was working on my iPad over the weekend, downloaded this cool app, and had this great idea...”) are met with groans and eye-rolling by IT and by all of the “control”types.

Bias #3 — Despite lots of IT spend, true process automation is just in its infancy.I have spent the last 16 years as CEO of AIIM. AIIM’s focus is on information professionals, and its roots are in the

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content and process management space. The bias this brings to the question of effective information management is an obsession with the vast opportunities that exist for organizations that can actually get their “you know what”together relative to managing their information assets.

Those of us in the content space have said for years that the vast untamed Wild West of information management is in the world of unstructured information. Unstructured is all of the “stuff” (a technical term) like email, Office files, images, instant messages, social content and, yes, paper, that surrounds, engulfs and chokes off all those nice theoretical automated processes on those cute workflow diagrams.

There is a reason that my blog is called Digital Landfill. It’s because what passes for effective information management in most organizations is a thinly concealed veneer over the chaos.

This strange set of experiences leads me to these two conclusions:

1. We need to rethink what we are trying to accomplish with IT, and

2. We need to rethink how we view the people charged with this urgent mission.

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CHAPTER 4

Thinking Differently About IT

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Chapter 4: Thinking Differently About IT

In this new world of radically changing technologies and radically increased stakes tied to the effective use of technology, I am convinced that our ability to engage — really engage — our customers, our partners and our employees will be the key to success.

The technologies we deploy will play a role in determining how effective we are in driving this engagement. We can no longer assume that this engagement will happen serendipitously in our organizations or as a byproduct of “serious” technologies.

We need to think strategically about engagement and the information systems that are necessary to make engagement happen.

So let’s first think about this rather amorphous thing called “engagement.” Is it important? Does it impact the effectiveness of organizations? Gallup has done some very interesting work in researching the question of “engagement.”

Let’s start with employee engagement.

Gallup aggregated 199 research studies across 152 organizations in 44 industries and 26 countries. For each study, Gallup calculated the relationship between employee engagement and performance outcomes. In total, they studied 32,394 business units, including 955,905 employees.

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They looked at nine specific outcomes: customer loyalty engagement, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism, patient safety incidents and quality.

In Employee Engagement: What’s Your Engagement Ratio, Gallup describes the categories of employees as follows:

• Engaged employees work with passion and feel a profound connection to their company. They drive innovation and move the organization forward.

• Non-engaged employees have essentially “checked out.” They sleepwalk through workdays. They put in time but don’t approach their work with energy or passion.

• Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what engaged co-workers accomplish.

The data suggests that the reality of most organizations is a lot like “The Office,” whether you are talking about the U.S. or the U.K. version. In other words, it’s NOT GOOD. There are an awful lot of Stanley Hudsons and Creed Brattons out there in our organizations.

According to Gallup, in average organizations, 33 percent of workers are engaged in their jobs, 49 percent are not engaged, and 18 percent are actively disengaged. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees in

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organizations is 1.83:1.

On the other hand, in world-class organizations, the numbers are vastly different: 67 percent of workers are engaged in their jobs, 26 percent are not engaged, and 7 percent are actively disengaged. The ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees in average world-class organizations is 9.57:1.

Per Gallup, all of this translates in $370 billion per year in lost productivity in the U.S. alone as a result of disengaged employees.

Gallup has also looked at this question of engagement from the customer perspective in Customer Engagement: What’s Your Engagement Ratio. Their conclusion is that fully engaged customers generate a 23 percent premium in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue and relationship growth. Organizations that have optimized customer engagement outperform their competitors by 26 percent in gross margin and 85 percent in sales growth.

So what do we do about this and how do we deploy and use our information systems and tie them to the question of driving engagement?

All organizations face a significant disconnect as they think about the nature of work in the future and the systems to support this work. It’s a challenge that is as old as time itself,

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but is particularly exacerbated in times of rapid technology disruption.

The core disconnect we should be worried about — whether you are a business executive, an IT manager, or a compliance geek — is that our decision-making tends to be dominated by those whose frame of reference is structured by past rather than what lies in the future.

That is clearly the case today.

On the business side, we keep pushing, pushing and pushing for change. We are handicapped by our lack of true technical knowledge, and yet empowered by our perceived heightened level of technical knowledge based on our experiences in the consumer space. We sense that something should be different, but are not quite sure what.

All we know for sure is that we are spending way too much on all of those old clunky Systems of Record and we sure would like to get more value out of our IT spend. We can’t understand why we are spending more and more money on maintaining systems that document the past rather than enable the future. According to Gartner (Cloud Computing: Economic, Financial, and Service Impact on IT Planning Assumptions) we sense we can no longer afford the luxury service levels that are delivered by traditional IT organizations.

On the IT side, we are so captive to our existing legacy

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Systems of Record that we sometimes cannot imagine an alternative future. We cling to the control we once had (or thought we once had) and try to repel the barbarians at the gate who are demanding change, dismissing them as lunatics who “just don’t understand.”We hear the demands from business for a new way of doing things, and sense that our technical skills are increasingly commoditized, but we don’t quite know what to do about it. Truth be told, we identify with the problems of Nick Burns, Computer Guy on Saturday Night Live.

This need for engagement coupled with accelerating rates of technology change and the explosion of capabilities in the consumer space has exacerbated the traditional tensions between business and IT. In 2010, Susan Cramm (founder and president of the IT leadership firm Valuedance®) published 8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT. Here’s what she wrote:

Business hates when IT is overly bureaucratic and control oriented.

Business hates when IT consists of condescending techies who don’t listen.

Business hates when IT is reactive rather than proactive.

Business hates when IT proposes “deluxe” when “good

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enough” will do.

Business hates when IT doesn’t deliver on time.

Business hates when IT doesn’t understand the true needs of the business.

Business hates when IT doesn’t support innovation.

Business hates when IT inhibits business change.

Since 2010, the level of tension has escalated. I know in our own little association business, we are thoroughly reassessing the “what” and the “how” of our technology investments. Every time we make a technology decision, we ask ourselves whether we really want to own a piece of technology, or whether we would like someone else to own it, thank you very much, and we’ll be content to be renters.

I believe that all of this boils down to a rather simple mandate in our organizations:

It is time to look differently at our technology investments and the skill set of the people we charge with these investments.

I believe that if we are to be successful in using technology to engage our customers, our partners and our employees, we on the business side need to lead a revolution in how we view IT. The IT side needs to prepare for and embrace this

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revolution or risk being run over by it and marginalized.

In short, business needs to reclaim IT. It is time to #OccupyIT.

Now I know there are those will bristle at the #OccupyIT title of this book.

Some people LOVE the various permutations of the Occupy movement and think these folks are a fabulous manifestation of the social consciousness of the world. Others HATE them and think these folks are an unwashed spoiled iPad-carrying group of phonies. Whichever way you tend, when Time’s Person of the Year is “The Protester,” something unusual is going on.

What does matter is that the inexorable drive toward Systems of Engagement requires that we think radically differently about IT in our organizations. Given that most senior business executives are digital immigrants from the email generation, this is particularly daunting. But to do otherwise is to condemn our organizations to the practices of the past.

Susan Cramm notes her book is written for those who “make the business rock-n-roll on a daily basis.” She assumes there are plenty of books available for CEOs on business and organizational strategy. The purpose of her book is to create a toolkit to help bridge the gap between those who “do” IT and those who are ultimately accountable for justifying its effectiveness.

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The five demands of my #OccupyIT Manifesto are focused not so much on how to bridge the gap between the business and IT. Rather, they are focused on creating a framework and a set of imperatives for how we should collectively look at our IT priorities in the era of consumer technologies. The five demands should be considered the prism through which we decide what kinds of IT projects we should prioritize in our organization. The five demands are focused primarily on the what of our IT strategies.

I conclude, though, with a focus on the how. I believe that there are a wide variety of job positions that have a need for basic information management competency at their core. This new breed of professional will need deep experience in the specific skills necessary to do his or her job. But to be truly effective in the era of cloud, social and mobile technologies, this professional will have these deep skills positioned within an awareness and knowledge of sound information management practices.

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CHAPTER 5

The #OccupyIT ManifestoDemand #1 — Commit to the cloud. 29

Demand #2 — Mobilize everything. 33

Demand #3 — Make the business social. 39

Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves. 45

Demand #5 — Prepare for extreme information management. 51

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Chapter 5: The #OccupyIT Manifesto

In the spirit of manifestos, let me quote Marx. Groucho, not Karl: “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.”

So here is our list of demands.

Don’t worry; there are only five.

Demand #1 — Commit to the cloud.

Demand #2 — Mobilize everything.

Demand #3 — Make the business social.

Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves.

Demand #5 — Prepare for extreme information management.

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Demand #1 — Commit to the cloud.We must break down monolithic enterprise solutions into more “app-like”solutions that can be deployed quickly, independent of platform and in the cloud.

We’ve all just about had it with monolithic proprietary systems that cost lots of money. There are the capital costs to buy these systems along with annual costs for service. We often have to engage in expensive customizations just to get anything actually done. Many systems require frequent upgrades. This in turn requires additional consulting services to do the upgrade, and yet more consulting services to port the previous customizations to the upgrade, and on and on and on.

In To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise the authors describe this challenge:

Business always strives to do three things simultaneously: 1) sustain existing products and services; 2) grow them; and 3) introduce new ones. Gartner labels these activities run, grow and transform. According to Gartner in 2011, 66 percent of IT spending sustained existing products and services, 20 percent helped improve them, and 14 percent enabled the introduction of new products and services.

Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for on-premise software. Far from it. Many of these systems are the backbone

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of our core Systems of Record. But as we think about how to meet the challenge of rapidly deploying new Systems of Engagement, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon or [insert your own personal favorite proxy for a really smart person] to realize that something needs to give.

We have to find new, more cost-effective ways to deploy new systems, and we need to find ways to save on legacy Systems of Record. Cloud solutions can provide a way to save money on our legacy systems and also provide new ways of more quickly deploying transformational technologies. Cloud technologies are the very first stopping point we need to make in terms of thinking about revolutionizing the way we approach IT.

A couple of data points to consider:

• Sixty percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud computing over the next five years as a means of growing their businesses and achieving competitive advantage. The figure is nearly twice the number of CIOs who said they would utilize cloud in the previous 2009 study. (IBM Survey of 3,000 global CIOs)

• The total size of the public cloud market will grow from $25.5 billion in 2011 to $159.3 billion in 2020. The market for virtual private cloud solutions will grow from $7.5 billion in 2011 to $66.4 billion in 2020. The market for private cloud solutions will grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to $15.9 billion

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in 2020. (Forrester, Sizing the Cloud: Understanding and Quantifying the Future of Cloud Computing)

However, the data suggests that organizations are having a difficult time making the transition.

• Thirty-three percent of organizations have a generic IT strategy for moving to the cloud. 12 percent do not, and 55 percent are still undecided. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Twenty-eight percent of U.S. organizations currently using cloud computing. (CDW Cloud Computing Tracking Poll)

• About 33 percent of organizations are still unlikely to use cloud-based or SaaS solutions. (State of the ECM Industry)

Cloud computing is one of the top priorities for CIOs in 2012, but the reality is that actual deployments are still at a relatively early stage. Gartner (Cloud Computing: Economic, Financial and Service Impact on IT Planning Assumptions) notes that cloud computing represents only 3.5 percent of the IT marketplace, scaling to 5.9 percent by 2015. A strong argument can be made that these percentages underestimate the impact of cloud solutions because revenues do not include the use of “freemium”(or near freemium) products in the enterprise (or by individuals within an enterprise, unknown to IT).

Some of this disconnect is due to the fact that there is a lot of confusion regarding what the term “cloud”means. This

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confusion ties back to the many flavors of cloud computing (public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds), as well as the multiple uses of the cloud: to host software applications (SaaS), to host infrastructure (IaaS), and to host platforms (PaaS).

The impact of the cloud, though, will be massive beyond the immediate revenues classified as cloud because cloud changes the way we look at IT services, how we pay for these services within in our organization (capital spending vs. operating), and how we view upgrade paths (and who is responsible for these upgrades). Organizations that do not incorporate the cloud into their thinking do so at their own peril.

Business needs to DEMAND that IT embrace the cloud. Not just experiment with it or consider it or ponder it or look at it when they have a chance. Point one of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands the cloud be a part of every IT decision, not an afterthought. Business must take advantage of the cloud to become faster, more agile and more innovative – and IT must figure out how to make it work, not figure out how to keep the status quo.

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Demand #2 — Mobilize everything.We must redefine content delivery and process automation to take advantage of mobile devices and mobile workforces.

It seems like only yesterday that the iPhone first appeared. It’s hard to believe how long the iPhone — and all the smartphone sons of iPhones for those initially held in Verizon and Sprint purgatory — have been with us. Believe it or not, it’s been less than five years. A blink of an eye.

The iPhone was introduced in June 2007 to fairly widespread snickering among “serious” technology types. Said blogger Mark Flores (http://www.intomobile.com), “The initial reaction from competitors, or soon-to-be competitors since Apple wasn’t really in the game yet, was either shock or laughter. RIM didn’t think it was possible to have such a device without it being a power hog. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer laughed at it for not having a physical keyboard.”

I will confess to being swept up early in the iPhone frenzy and ultimately convinced my IT types to chill, that I would handle my own tech support, and that everything would be OK. (And true confessions, for the most part it was. And yes, I do understand that technology in a small 45-person organization is different than technology in a Fortune 500 company.)

Well, a lot has changed. We now find ourselves in…

• A world in which there are more tablets and smartphones

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sold than PCs.

• A world in which people are more likely to own a cell phone than a toothbrush.

• A world in which our customers expect to use a mobile device to: 1) interact with us; interact with the information we provide; and 3) interact with the processes that drive our businesses.

• A world in which our employees, who are increasingly working outside of traditional, chained-to-the-desk office environments, expect to use multiple devices and locations to interact with corporate information and systems that we once thought of as locked down and “company confidential.”

• A world in which less than half the devices accessing the Internet run on Windows.

Ubiquitous mobile computing is one of the core underlying drivers for Systems of Engagement and continues to shape the future of these systems. In the span of a decade, cell phones have spread to essentially every person and location on the planet. Mobile technologies are the “steroid” accelerating all of the other elements in our technology strategy.

On the opportunity side, we now interact with customers on devices that are aware of their location. If we know exactly where a customer is, in real time, what does this mean in terms of the kinds of new products and services we can

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deliver? If our customers carry around connected devices with 5-megapixel portable cameras and scanning devices in their pockets, what does this mean in the context of our interactions with them?

My wife and I recently drove down to surprise my daughter for her 20th birthday during the middle of exams. When we got there, we easily found her car, but not her. I had the brainstorm to use the “Find my iPhone” functionality to find her. I will admit that my daughter did not think this was as cool as I did.

The natural reaction of IT in the face of this dramatic change is to fall back into the control paradigm. Witness the following:

• More than three-quarters of organizations have no mobile processes: 24 percent haven’t even thought about it, 20 percent cite security reasons or feel mobile adds no value, 32 percent have evaluated it but not made a move. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• A third of organizations have not optimized their websites for mobile. Of those that have, only 8 percent specifically test access to all pages and forms, only 10 percent have apps — and only 5 percent check for tablet resolution. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Median % of processes that could be mobile that actually

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are = 2.5 percent. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Only 47 percent of organizations allow personal devices to access company data, most doing so in a policy void. (Making the Most of Mobile: Content on the Move)

• Mobile access to ECM systems is somewhat restricted with 37 percent of organizations having no mobile access available on their ECM systems and a further 30 percent needing a conventional Web interface. Only 15 percent have a dedicated app, at least for iPhone. (Making the Most of Mobile: Content on the Move)

• Some 42 percent expect staff to carry two phones, a company one and a personal one. Nearly one-half (47 percent) allow personal devices to access company data, but only a third of those enforce data-wipe policies. The rest rely on employee trust. Twenty percent have no usage policy on mobile and 9 percent allow staff to hook up in an ad hoc way. (Making the Most of Mobile: Content on the Move)

But many agree the potential benefits of embracing mobile are significant, as the following survey data shows:

• Median expected productivity improvement among administrative staff for automated processes — 29 percent. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Sixty-seven percent of organizations believe that mobile

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technologies are “important or extremely important to improving their business processes.” (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Median expected productivity improvement for field-based or travelling staff if they could input directly to, and/or interact with back-office processes using mobile (hand-held) devices — 25 percent. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• The average organization that has deployed mobile solutions is 2.7 times faster in responding to customers and staff than those that have not. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

I heard someone once say that the continuum of devices we currently use (phones-tablets-laptops) can be thought of in food terms as the progression in functionality from snacking to dining to cooking. It is clear that the “action” right now is on the snacking and dining front, and we need to make sure that our systems adapt to be snacking and dining friendly.

While we can’t ignore the control factor, we need to respond aggressively to the opportunities afforded by mobile. Point two of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that mobile be a part of every IT decision, not an afterthought. It demands that we invest in the required technical skills, which are different from traditional IT skills, to take advantage of mobile. It demands that we set our focus on where our customers will be three years from now in terms of mobile, and figure out

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Demand #3 — Make the business social.We must integrate social technologies into processes rather than create stand-alone social networks with the objective of making the business itself social.

It seems like just a few years ago (oh, it was just years ago) that social technologies were viewed as some temporary aberration of college students. Kind of like keg stands or an ice luge (ask your kids). Well, wake up! Social technologies have moved into the enterprise with a vengeance and are beginning to transform organizational processes.

Consumer sites like Twitter and Facebook initially exposed organizations to the potential benefit of using social technologies as listening posts to the market. Many early adopters of social and collaborative technologies were keen to try out different tools and services to see how they might work in a business environment. These pioneering toolsets have now converged to a much more defined set of products and application areas, and an increasing focus on integrating social technologies into the core of business processes.

Organizations are now beginning to understand that true Systems of Engagement mean more than just a public “social” veneer. True Systems of Engagement mean embedding social technologies into the very nature of how organizations operate. In just a few years we will cease to

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view “social” as a separate layer from process. Our long-term objective should not be to “bolt on” social systems, but to make the business itself social.

It is clear that the young professionals in our organizations — those of the mobile and social generation — view work much differently than we in the email generation do. And if we are going to race with the machine rather than against it, if we are going to position our organizations for the future rather than the past, we best start paying attention to what they are saying and doing.

Many current technology decision makers tend to view the world through the prism of work that is done in an office. Technology decision makers of my generation — the email generation — tend to view collaboration as something that revolves around in-person meetings and email. We tend to worry about what our employees are doing when they are not in the office. We tend to equate social with Facebook and worry about what domains we should restrict (except of course for those crazy marketing types, we’ll let them go wherever they want). We think about the question of what might happen far more often through the prism of Sarbanes-Oxley and Enron and litigation and control than through the prism of opportunity and new business and flexibility.

In November 2011, Cisco released a very interesting report on what is going on in the minds of college students and young

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professionals. The Cisco Connected World Technology Report surveyed 1,441 college students from 18 to 24 and 1,412 young professionals age 30 and under from 14 countries.

Now, one can say, particularly if one is of my generation, “Who cares what these people want. Just suck it up and work the way we tell you to.” But honestly I don’t feel that’s the way to approach it. If we buy the proposition that engagement is key to creating value — and ultimately profitability and productivity — then we really need to think about the social and mobile technology systems that create and foster engagement — and how they connect back to the existing information resources of the organization.

So let me give you a couple of data points about how young professionals in the workplace view mobility and flexibility and social technologies, according to the Cisco report:

• Forty-five percent of young professionals would accept a lower-paying job with more flexibility rather than a higher-paying job with less.

• One in four young professionals say the absence of a remote access option for their jobs would influence their job decision.

• Thirty percent of young professionals feel that the ability to work remotely with a flexible schedule is a “right.”

• More than three-quarters (77 percent) of young professionals have multiple computing and

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communication devices. Fully one-third use at least three devices for work purposes.

• More than one-half (52 percent) of young professionals believe that they are not responsible for securing their work devices and data — service providers and IT are. Fifteen percent of young professionals have had their mobile phone, laptop or other devices stolen in the past 12 months and 30 percent have experienced identity theft at least once.

• Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of young professionals access Facebook at least once per day. Seventy percent of these have “friended” either their colleagues, their manager, or both.

• Sixty-eight percent of young professionals believe that company-issued devices should be available for both work and play.

So, clearly, we need to think about how we engage this generation of employees differently from how we engaged the email generation. While the deployment of social technologies in a business context is still in its infancy, the data suggests huge potential benefits:

• More than one-half (51 percent) of organizations consider social business to be “imperative” or “significant” to their overall business goals and success. (Social Business Systems, Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications).

• Thirty-eight percent of those organizations using some form

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of Enterprise Q&A or expertise sourcing get half or more of their answers from unexpected sources within the business. (Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications)

• Within organizations using an open innovation social platform for ideas and suggestions, 48 percent have successfully surfaced major changes to internal processes and 34 percent have come up with major changes to external product offerings. (Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications)

• By using specific social collaboration between sales and marketing staff, the number of respondents reporting “poor sharing of knowledge and information” drops from 41 percent of organizations to 8 percent, and “poor working together” drops from 21 percent to 4 percent. (Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications)

There is still huge resistance to these technologies, in this case not only from traditional IT, but from business executives who believe that these technologies will result in the escape of corporate secrets and the death knell of employee productivity. Sound familiar? We all said exactly the same thing about deployment of email and then Internet connectivity to the general employee population. We were wrong then and we are wrong now.

Point three of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that we

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embrace social technologies as the future digital dial tone of our organizations. That we understand that how the Facebook generation will expect to connect with their peers and customers is dramatically different from how the email generation did so. That email as a group collaborative tool (as opposed to a direct tool for one-to-one communication) is poorly suited to the task.

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Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves.Drive bottlenecks out of processes (especially paper ones), link systems together and automate process flows.

We’ve all done it. Admit it. Tearful confessions are the first step to forgiveness. And an appearance on Dr. Phil.

No, not sex, drugs or rock-n-roll. I’m talking about pulling rank on the IT people, coming in with a great idea you thought of over the weekend, and convincing everybody to roll it out as quickly as possible. To push out that new System of Engagement and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Except for one thing. True customer engagement is more than just creating a social veneer. Because once you bring the customer into the business, once they truly engage, all of the weaknesses of your backend systems and processes will be exposed. The reality of most organizations is that there is a lot of cleaning up to be done in core backend processes and to get systems and departments on the same page.

We’ve all experienced the irritation of keying in our phone number or account number multiple times in a call response system, only to have the very first question asked by a customer service representative (assuming we get one) be, “Can you tell me your phone number?” I won’t even go into the recent customer experiences that generated the following tweets (company names masked to protect the

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guilty; my wife calls these my old man rants):

@Jmancini77 — 1:40 pm via HootSuite — If someone doesn’t contact me today and let me end run your #Satanic call center, I’m blogging tomorrow @xxxxx

@Jmancini77 — 3:40 pm via HootSuite — This is Day 87 that I am held hostage by @xxxxx’s ridiculous #mortgage refinance process. Please call.

No matter how elegant the front end, Systems of Engagement cannot operate in an environment in which the processes that support and complement them are engulfed by paper and inefficiency. The reality is that most organizations exist in a hybrid environment in which process information may come from paper documents, paper forms, Web forms, faxes, telephony, emails, SMS, mobile and social.

Automated capture of information as early as possible in the business process and as close to the point of origination produces cleaner data, resulting in higher quality information, less exception handling and better process management. The more important the process is to a business, the greater the impact such improvements will have. Once paper-based information moves into the digital realm it can be used to enrich social and mobile applications. In paper form, that information might as well not exist since no one can get to it without great effort.

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Forms processing is a particularly important element in process automation. Forms — both electronic and paper — are used to collect data, carry signatures, drive the business process and provide an auditable record of the outcome. Each of these can be readily carried out in all-electronic formats. But until recently, the paper form has been somewhat stubborn in its hold on even the most modern offices.

A few data points illustrate the reality that exists in most organizations:

• The average cost to process a paper invoice is still more than $9. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)

• Overall, 52 percent of organizations surveyed have yet to adopt any automated AP systems. One-third of organizations receiving more than 25,000 invoices per month are still using paper-based processes. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)

• A third of small and mid-sized companies and 22 percent of the largest have yet to adopt any paper-free processes. Only 20 percent of organizations of any size pro-actively evaluate all processes for driving out paper. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• The percentage of processes that could be paper free that actually are — 14 percent. (Process Revolution:

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Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• On average, 45 percent of documents that are scanned are “born digital”– just as they came from the printer. And many of the rest would be all-digital if not for the added signatures. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)

• Seventy-seven percent of invoices that arrive as PDF attachments get printed. Thirty-one percent of faxed invoices get printed and scanned back in. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)

• For 40 percent of organizations, half or more of their electronic workflows are interrupted by physical sign-offs, generally requiring multiple paper copies to be printed. (Digital Signatures for documents, workflow and SharePoint)

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about true progress relative to digitizing processes is how compelling the existing results are relative to the lack of progress outlined above.

• Electronic-only filing would halve the storage space needed for paper in five years. The average proportion of office space taken up by paper is now 15.3 percent, and it would drop to 7.4 percent with an all-electronic filing policy, a saving of nearly 8 percent in overall office costs. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)

• Sixty-one percent of accounts payable system users report a payback period of 12 months or less. Seventy-seven percent consider they have achieved a payback of 18

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months or less. A significant 20 percent report a payback in as little as six months. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)

• Invoice costs reported range from less than $2 to more than $30, with an average of $11.60. Half of survey respondents are processing 5,000 or more invoices per month. At this rate a 33 percent saving at $10 per invoice is $200,000 per year. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)

• On average, respondents using scanning and capture consider that it improves the speed of response to customers, suppliers, citizens or staff by six times or more. Seventy percent estimate an improvement of at least three times, and nearly a third (29 percent) sees an improvement of 10 times or more. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)

• Forty-two percent of users have achieved a payback period of 12 months or less from their scanning and capture investments. Fifty-seven percent are posting a payback of 18 months or less. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)

Paper is the enemy. Our processes are engulfed in analog sludge. The technologies involved in addressing this are not terribly complex, nor are they particularly new fangled. They are mainstream and proven. It’s time that these core process-improvement projects move to the front burner and actually get implemented organization-wide.

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Point four of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that we ruthlessly drive paper out of every process we can find. It demands that we view the connections between systems with as much rigor as we view the individual systems themselves. It demands that once we drive paper out, we keep it out. It demands that we automate just enough, but not too much.

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Demand #5 — Prepare for extreme information management.We must find insights and value in all that information we are storing, and mitigate the risk associated with all the information we are saving.

I believe the term “extreme information management” was first coined by Gartner. I like it a lot because it implies both the scale of the challenge facing organizations, as well as the need to look at this challenge in a new way.

According to IDC, the amount of information in the digital universe will grow by a factor of 44 between now and the end of the decade. Even more challenging, the number of containers or files will grow by a factor of 75. The subset of information that needs to be secured is growing almost twice as fast. And the amount of UNPROTECTED yet sensitive data is growing even faster. And while all of this is going on, the number of IT professionals in the world will grow only by a factor of 1.4. (IDC, Digital Universe)

Needless to say, that’s a lot of bits and bytes and not a lot of new folks to manage all of it.

The shift to Systems of Engagement dramatically increases the complexity and volume of data and information that must be managed within an organization. IT, we on the business side understand that not everything can or should be saved

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forever because of the litigation risk associated with saving “everything.” We also believe that there is growing value in mining the huge masses of information we are accumulating.

We also understand that these two statements are not necessarily consistent with each other. We need IT to help us make sense of our irrationality.

Gartner identifies big data by these four attributes: volume, velocity, variety and complexity.

On the “risk” side of the equation, the volume of information coming at us is making it clear that manual information retention and disposition processes simply extended from the world of Systems of Record will no longer suffice. Aside from the sheer enormity of the task, a lack of clarity about what content is valuable is the main obstacle, along with the fear of getting it wrong and a sense that there is no immediate ROI from getting rid of outdated information.

The reality in most organizations is that traditional approaches to information governance are a joke, and it’s not for lack of effort. It was never realistic to assume that knowledge workers would assist in manually classifying documents according to a complex records retention schedule, and it is equally unrealistic to assume that we will manage the fire hose of data and unstructured ephemeral social content with the same degree of records rigor that we applied to retaining a life insurance policy for the life of the policy holder.

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Clearly, adapting to the world that is upon us is proving problematic:

• Two-thirds of organizations have an information management strategy, but only 22 percent use it. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Seventy-nine percent of organizations have an information retention policy, but only 32 percent enforce it. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Seventy percent have mobile device rules and social media rules, but only 30 percent enforce them. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)

• Fifty-eight percent of organizations say that a single enterprise records management model underlying all content systems is their goal, yet only 9 percent have achieved this. (Records Management Strategies: Plotting the Changes)

But big data is more than managing information-related risk. Organizations are increasingly realizing that there is also “gold in them thar hills.” McKinsey (Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity) believes that big data can create significant value for the world economy, enhancing the productivity and competitiveness of companies and the public sector and creating substantial

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economic surplus for consumers:

...if US health care could use big data creatively and effectively to drive efficiency and quality, we estimate that the potential value from data in the sector could be more than $300 billion in value every year, two-thirds of which would be in the form of reducing national health care expenditures by about 8 percent. In the private sector, we estimate, for example, that a retailer using big data to the full has the potential to increase its operating margin by more than 60 percent. In the developed economies of Europe, we estimate that government administration could save more than €100 billion ($149 billion) in operational efficiency improvements alone by using big data. This estimate does not include big data levers that could reduce fraud, errors and tax gaps (i.e., the gap between potential and actual tax revenue).

Yuchon Lee, an IBM vice president, describes the “value” side of the equation this way:

For the past decade, companies have been accumulating data in what we call a system of record. Those who survive going forward will also have systems of engagement, which start with evaluating how you can have a relevant conversation with each individual customer across all channels. And ensuring you have the analytical capability and the data to support that analysis.

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That is where the linkage is between the system of record data and the system of engagement. On the technology side, we believe the future of handling this volume lies in leveraging the capability of the cloud. A lot of the analysis is done behind a firewall, but the analysis, platform and architecture is really a hybrid. That is how you solve the problem and get the most value out of the data.

There are a wide variety of vexing and previously unsolvable business problems that big data brings within our grasp. Among these are the following (per http://www.cloudera.com):

• Modeling risk and failure prediction

• Analyzing customer churn

• Web recommendations (ala Amazon)

• Web and ad targeting

• Point of sale transaction analysis

• Threat analysis

• Compliance and search effectiveness

Many analytical solutions were not possible previously in the world of unstructured information because: 1) they were too costly to implement; 2) they were not capable of handling the large volumes of data involved in a timely manner; or 3) the required data simply did not exist in an electronic form. New tools now bring the capabilities of business intelligence and the benefits of optimization, asset management,

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pattern detection and compliance monitoring to the world of unstructured information. New approaches to data management, designed for the cloud, such as HADOOP and NoSQL, have dramatically reduced the cost of analyzing large volumes of information, making it affordable for first time.

Systems of Engagement are generating massive volumes of new structured and unstructured information. According to Fortune, by 2020 Internet-connected devices will grow from 400 million today to 50 billion. These devices will be talking to each other and to the Internet. By 2020, it is also predicted that our smartphones will have the capability of storing and accessing as much information as IBM’s Watson and supercomputers can. Cisco estimates that the flow of data transmitted across the Internet will increase from 275 exabytes per year now to 275 exabytes per day by 2020. [Note: That’s a lot of routers!]

The core difference between this “low-value-density” information and all of the “high-value information” in Systems of Record is that this new information tends to have value in the aggregate or as it is interpreted rather than intrinsically. In other words, it is easy to see the value in storing a document or a piece of data that documents a specific transaction or process. It is more difficult — and it has been too expensive in the past — to do so with vast quantities of digital flotsam and jetsam that has value only as it is aggregated and analyzed.

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Advances in semantics, search, content and text analytics, and print stream analytics are now making analysis of large amounts of information practical for first time, especially all of that unstructured information hidden away in digital landfills. In addition, for the first time, natural language processing and visualization technologies are moving the analysis of all of this data and information from technical back rooms and into the executive suite. As organizations develop standard approaches to metadata, and expose this metadata in the cloud, processes will standardize and transform.

Like the cloud, actual big data implementations are still in their early stages. Many organizations will fail in their efforts to extract value from big data, and we face a growing shortage of people with the data analysis and statistical skills necessary to tap into all of this potential value. But for those who succeed, the payoff will be dramatic.

Point five of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that we acknowledge the old world of paper-driven records management thinking is dead; and we need IT’s help in mitigating the risks associated with the death of what was once a nice predictable world. We also desperately need to get more value out of all the “stuff” we are gathering — and use this intelligence to improve customer responsiveness and anticipate and predict where the business will go next.

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Enter code OCCUPYIT for 20% off the Certified Information Professional (CIP) Exam through December 31, 2012. Enroll at: http://www.prometric.com/aiim

CHAPTER 6

So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW?

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Chapter 6: So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW?

Thus far, my manifesto points to the issues that we must address within our organizations if we are to remain competitive and if we hope to transform our organizations. These are changes that are urgent and challenging.

But there is something that every organization can do tomorrow in order to prepare for the demands of the future: Commit to viewing information management as a profession.

IT staff must commit to placing their technical competence in a broader information management and business context. At the same time, digital immigrants on the business side must commit to taking their technology game to the next level.

Traditionally, IT focused on either the deployment of enterprise software applications (seemingly the more complicated the better!) and the “plumbing” of our information infrastructures. The business now needs professionals with a broader skill set than what is traditionally found within traditional records managements or IT departments. Specifically, the business needs people who understand the management, utilization, and application of information and social assets to the organization. The business needs a new breed of information professional.

Last year, Gartner published “CIO Alert: The Need for Information Professionals.” The core finding in the report (subscription required) was:

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The vast majority of organizations see the need to manage information as an enterprise resource rather than in separate “silos,” departments or systems, but they don’t know how to begin to address the challenge, as it is so large... Professional roles focused on information management will be different to that of established IT roles… An “information professional” will not be one type of role or skill set, but will in fact have a number of specializations.

This perspective was reinforced in a January 2012 report by noted IT skills expert David Foote of Foote Partners in IT Skills Demand and Pay Trends Report:

Gone is the tendency to hire specialists and large teams of limited range permanent staff for long-term initiatives. New models require smaller teams made up of multitaskers and multidimensionally skilled workers with subject matter expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of appropriate interpersonal and “political” skills.

The challenge in the early stages of this revolution is this new breed of professional can have a number of roles within the organization. Few people currently have “information professional” as a title, but many have the stewardship, management and application of information assets as a core part of their job.

“Information professionals” can be found on the legal,

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Chapter 6: So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW?

records, and library staff of organizations. They can be found among those whose primary focus is governance, e.g., information architects and managers. Process owners, business analysts and knowledge managers all have effective information management as a core part of their skill set, as do the new wave of information curators, digital marketers and community managers who currently focus primarily on social systems.

And that’s the point. At the early stages in the evolution of a profession — particularly one that is an umbrella that cuts across and encompasses a wide variety of technical disciplines — it is difficult to define where it begins and where it ends.

Consider just one profession that is very well defined today — project management. Twenty-five years ago, one would imagine that the idea that there was a common body of knowledge associated with people who manage software projects and manufacturing projects and construction projects would have been met with extraordinary skepticism. How can that be? The projects are so different! There can’t be any commonality across projects that are so different. However, more than 400,000 project management professionals later, it is clear that there was and is a core profession and body of knowledge associated with managing very different kinds of projects.

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I believe this is how the profession of information management feels today.

These are what we call “T-shaped” individuals in our organizations. The need for deep knowledge relative to a particular domain or technology does not go away. But this deep knowledge has far more value if it can be applied in a broader context. Hence the need for “T-shaped” individuals.

The five points of our manifesto have focused on the “what” question: On what areas do we need IT to focus if you are to be relevant to the business challenges we face? As such, the #OccupyIT Manifesto focuses primarily on the changes the business needs — demands — from those charged with our technology infrastructures.

However, there is also a broader change needed within organizations. And that is to realize that a new information management skill set is at the core of every one of the demands in the manifesto. That the business needs business people, technical people, analytic people and process people with a core grounding in information management. That “connecting the dots” will increasingly create far

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Chapter 6: So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW?

more value than knowledge of an individual dot. That how organizations put deep technical and domain knowledge into a broader context has great value for the business.

Because the era in which abstract technical skills created competitive advantage is ending. Technical skills alone are becoming a commodity. Technical skills will continue to have value in helping our organizations run and grow. But what will have much greater value to the business in the years ahead are information professionals who can help transform the business.

In the face of rapid change, organizations can take one of three approaches:

1. The “10 percent more of the same” approach. Assume that the change that is coming is just an extrapolation of the immediate past.

2. The “Oh, $%X#%^C!” approach. Just be reconciled that whatever comes will be a surprise.

3. Or assume that what is coming will be dramatically different from what came before and try to prepare for and anticipate the change.

The consumerization of Enterprise IT means change is coming. Your assignment, as a member of our new tribe of information revolutionaries, is to try and anticipate that change by doing the following:

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1. Test your information competency by taking the Certified Information Professional practice exam.

2. Identify your weaknesses, review the free AIIM videos that are relevant, and then take the CIP Exam.

3. If you are a boss-type, have the people who report to you take the Certified Information Professional practice exam and then work to bring their skills up to the appropriate level.

4. Pass this manifesto around to others in your organization. To colleagues. To friends. To family members, especially teenagers, if you wish to torture them.

Welcome to the Revolution. #OccupyIT.