“Overwhelming”
“Complicated”
“Scary”
Quotes from a movie poster? A book jacket? A Congressional hearing? No, merely a summary of my latest People’s Take* on the state of information management today.
From one: “All I want to do is scan stuff into my system, but they keep shoving content management at me. Except now it’s not that, but ‘content services.’ What the heck is THAT?”
From another: “I’m just trying to shorten my billing cycle, but every conference I go to is full of sessions about the cloud and analytics. Do I need to care about these?”
From a third: “Information governance, big data, business intelligence … it all sounds so impressive. But I’m not sure how they relate to me. And what happens if I pick the wrong one?”
First of all, there isn’t a “wrong one” per se since each of these disciplines involve essentially the same best-practices when it comes to the “care and feeding” of your business-critical information. There are differences in the details, but you’ll be find if you do your homework properly.
Second, you need to care about them all, but the lens through which you view them has to be the business problem you’re trying to solve. You’ll find much of the confusion and obfuscation disappears when you ask your questions in the context of your specific need. So don’t worry about what the technology is called; concentrate instead on what it can do.
Third, don’t wait to figure it all out before taking steps to improve your situation. There’s a cost to continuing to do things the way you do now, and there’s always something new coming over the horizon. Delaying until you know everything about everything will only push your action off for months more.
- You can begin categorizing your paper documents today to prepare to scan and store them.
- You can map your billing process today to identify choke-points and quantify throughput goals.
- You can start articulating your information-related pain-points today to identify which specific discipline(s) / technology(ies) you should investigate.
Dale Carnegie said, “If you want to conquer fear, don’t sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” I say, be like Dale, and dive right in!
*My “People’s Take” is a regular bit of informal research conducted to gauge customers’ thinking regarding the “latest and greatest” concepts and technologies. Turns out they’re usually more in tune with their thoughts than anyone else!