Tuesday 9 April 2013

Transforming Digital Landfills to Competitive Knowledge Assets

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In today’s digital economy the currency of exchange is information. With the volume of electronically stored information estimated at 2.7 zettabytes and growing 48% annually the value of information as a strategic resource must be reliable, relevant, current and readily accessible. 

This unprecedented growth in the volume and variety of digital content represents both opportunities and challenges for business and public sector organizations alike. For businesses competing in the digital economy agility in leveraging information is an imperative in order to minimize transaction costs and grow revenue. For public sector agencies the need for more efficient constituency services delivery is paramount at a time of increasing budgetary constraints. The growth of digital content also brings about increasing complexities associated with its collection, use and disposition. They encompass protection of privacy and intellectual property rights as well as disclosure and transparency obligations.  

Lack of effective content management and preservation best practices may result in exposure to legal risks, lower staff productivity, in higher transaction costs and in ineffective customer and constituency service levels. While these challenges relating to digital content are self-evident organizations continue to struggle in harnessing its strategic value. Content continues to proliferate in disparate email in-boxes, shared drives, in un-managed repositories and in legacy systems. In fact a recent AIIM study revealed that only 30% of the organizations surveyed felt that their content is reasonably well managed. Moreover the same study found that 40% of organizations surveyed have three or more EDRMS systems in place, while at the same time 40% of respondents continue to manage and store business critical information in personal Outlook folders.  

These inefficiencies often result in fragmented information repositories and data duplication. Given the declining cost of storage the propensity is to continue creating content without the benefit of having a consistent information governance framework in place. When a decision is made to consolidate heterogeneous content repositories into a more organized and centralized system of record the assumption is made that migrating the content is a relatively simple exercise. However, the challenge associated content migration is often underestimated. The result may be substituting one inefficient and unreliable content repository with another albeit within a managed EDRMS.  

Efficient content migration must be a high priority. The challenge is that multiple versions of documents may exist in multiple places. There may be records that are not properly declared and classified. Bulk migration of content to an EDRMS without proper clean up and classification may result in the same problem as persists with un-managed content.  

An interesting approach to effective content migration is provided by www.conceptsearching.com Their Smart Content Framework™ methodology provides the building blocks to leverage content assets to reduce organizational risk by providing a framework for identifying, cleansing, de-duping and organizing information assets through:  

§   Auto-classification of content aligned to corporate taxonomies, classification structures, functional entities (e.g. PAAs), roles and responsibilities;
§   Real-time generation of intelligent metadata at source improving information transparency;
§   Automatic intelligent content routing as defined by an organization’s information governance policies; and
§   Populating content to any target EDRMS such as Microsoft SharePoint or Open Text Content Server.  

The expected outcome of intelligent content migration is to transform content into business value, reduce duplication, overlap, improve information relevance so that when content is migrated into the desired target EDRMS repository is of high quality, reliable, authentic and meets operational and compliance requirements.  

CORADIX will be holding a complimentary seminar on intelligent content migration. The objective of the seminar is to share insights relating to:  

§   How to avoid moving your content debris from one place to another;
§   What classification is and how to do it;
§   Which tools make auto-classification easy;
§   How to deal with sheer volume of content; and
§   How to effectively migrate content to either a Microsoft SharePoint or Open Text Content Server EDRMS environments. 

Register now for this event:
http://coradix.com/en/events/Content+Migration
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