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InfoGov Top Topics to Watch in 2016

Well, it’s December, and that means it’s time to share my Top Topics to Watch for the coming New Year.

Like many other consultant/analyst types, I could bedazzle you with a litany of technology advances that we see coming over the horizon, but the truth is that I just don’t see any real game-changers on the ‘scope for the next 12 months!

Mobility/BYOD, the cloud, Big Data, and the like will certainly dominate our discussions over the coming months, so don’t get me wrong: they will have a definite impact and need to be followed closely. But the issues I hear most often from clients have a lot more to do with tasks and tactics than they do tools and technologies.

With that as background, then, here are my Top Three Topics to Watch for 2016:

  • Email management. We’ve been talking about it for years, and more organizations are baking it into their infogov plans than ever before. It appears that both organizational cultures and enterprise software have matured enough to mitigate the attendant fear and loathing.
     
  • ERP inclusion in content/information management initiatives. Long treated as a discipline unto itself, ERP is beginning to be recognized for what it has always been: a critical cog in the enterprise data delivery/analysis mechanism. Its days as an operational island thus, finally, are starting to wane.
     
  • Shared-drive cleanup. It’s not sexy, but it’s central to information governance success if for no other reason than shared drives contain SO MUCH stuff and nobody knows what or where that stuff is. For many, this is a great place to start, even if the ultimate future-state scenario isn’t yet fully articulated.
     

So that’s my list. What’s on yours? Your fellow readers would love to know, and not for nothing, so would I!

4 thoughts on “InfoGov Top Topics to Watch in 2016”

  1. Steve, great choices. I would like to add the challenge of managing visual content to your list – the body of photo and video content from cell phones, Instagram, video chats, body cams, etc. is growing and I think will pose many legal and InfoGov challenges related to authenticity, reliability, ownership, preservation, and storage to mention just a few.

  2. Indeed! I don’t find it on my clients’ requirements list nearly as often, but there’s no doubt that visual content — as well as audio, and olfactory some day maybe — is just as important as anything else. As I am fond of saying, “content is content,” regardless of media type or format.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

  3. Tasks and tactics will drive many discussions in the coming year, but I see two areas where decisions will have to be made that impact those items. Apps . . . it seems that everyday there is a new App being promoted for our devices. Most of these apps are not controlled in any way, or even discussed when it comes to InfoGov management and responsibilities for the data and images put into them. Even something as simple as an event App for an industry conference now contains instant messages, email and connections to social media that could contain sensitive company or organizational information.

    Another area that is seeing changes is outsourced services that for many years were sent offshore. There is heightened interest in bringing this work back onshore with advanced capture technologies that are now competitive in cost and offer faster and more accurate presentation of metadata. The social disruptions and terrorists activities around the globe are forcing companies to open new discussions of where their information is going and what are the risks associated with offshore vendors and suppliers. We may live and work in a global environment, but that environment is now under attack and management must have this conversation in 2016.

    In some cases, I think we may also see more insourcing as companies elect to bring outsourced services back under their direct responsibility as they review InfoGov processes and procedures.

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