David Yoon

You’ve probably heard the words ‘digital transformation’ thrown around quite frequently these days. And although we may be sick of hearing this buzzword, it is still a useful way to describe the ultimate goal our organizations should be striving to achieve. In this week’s episode, Semantic Arts CEO Dave McComb shares that to make this change, organizations need to focus on their data, not single applications or programs.

John Mancini is well versed in information management and data intelligence. He returns in part two of our discussion to talk about the increased complexity of data and the lack of standardization across applications and solutions.

Jason and John discuss the problems (and opportunities) that have arisen from the exponential data growth organizations have experienced over the past two decades. We are living in an age of information chaos and companies are naturally very sceptical about their ability to deal with this problem. The responsibility has fallen on information managers to be the common denominator between the different ‘dialects’ being spoken across different areas of the organization and across systems.

It’s been an article of faith for the past 25 years that 80% of information in the organization is unstructured and unmanaged and yet no one can seem to dig up the source of that ubiquitous stat. John Mancini is a well known industry strategist, writer, keynote speaker, former president of AIIM and host of his own video series The OxyMorons so he’s no stranger to information management. He’s since polled thousands of knowledge workers about the volume of information they’re facing and how much is actually unstructured.

From there it’s a throwback to the birth of ECM. Back in the 90’s ECMs were purpose built to manage and automate mission critical, document intensive, large scale processes at organizations. But that was tied to a limited amount of information. The scale has exploded and organizations need to let go of unrealistic expectations around how much records management the average knowledge work is inclined to perform.

Independent analyst Bob Larrivee joins us to discuss the growth in the nuclear sector with new companies working to create mini and micro-reactors that is creating a state wide network of facilities, which leads to a whole new set of information governance challenges of their own. Records managers will soon have to wrestle with universal clients – literary at the extra-terrestrial level with the companies working with NASA to potentially place reactors on the moon.

Out in space and here on earth companies still need to face the gap between the ideal and the reality when it comes to managing data, otherwise you end up with nothing more than a costly digital dumpster.

The corporate information ecosystem has drastically changed as a result of Covid. The new work from home reality has amplified internal inconsistencies in how information had been managed. This has led to information chaos and companies will either sink or swim.

It’s all about people, process, information and technology in that order. Technology without strategic thinking is just reactionary. Processes that don’t take people into consideration will stall. Companies need to take an holistic approach to solutions and to their data. Without context data is meaningless and projects are doomed to failure.

Douglas Schultz is the Senior Technology Manager at Access Sciences and in this week’s episode we talk about how Information Governance needs to evolve beyond just mitigating risk and instead look at how to drive real value from content. It’s a matter of looking at it holistically.

In the face of this companies are still struggling to get a handle on the sheer volume of incoming data. It requires thinking beyond the application and putting the data first. But it’s proving hard to change engrained behaviours. Visionaries know that automation drives efficiencies, mitigates risk, drives understanding and provides incredible organizational value. Find those people in your organization.

We welcome Records Management Consultant and past President and Chairman of ARMA International David McDermott to the show.

David talks about how most knowledge workers aren’t records managers so when it comes to information they tend to what’s easiest. That’s not always what’s best for the organization though. Knowledge gets buried in silos, isn’t easily found, hampers productivity and can often prove to be the smoking gun during discovery. Suddenly information becomes a liability not an asset.

We return with Dave Slimmon, Technical Product Manager at Shinydocs helping companies that are “data rich and information poor”. Of course that doesn’t mean everyone needs to become a Records Management expert. Systems in place need to be sophisticated enough to manage the information challenge without getting in the way of end-users.

Also exploring the notion of a Security Defragmentor to help companies manage permissions on their files – something they’ve been historically bad at.

Jason is joined by Dave Slimmon, Technical Product Manager at Shinydocs who brings decades of experience in the Enterprise Information Management space to talk about how we bring our solutions to the data to drive complete understanding and equip the leadership team with the cold hard facts that drive better decisions.

It’s about being able to arm information managers with the visualizations to expose opportunities for improvement, identify the high priority items and maybe even revolutionize how things are done.