It's that time of year to give thanks, watch football, stuff ourselves and think about the pilgrims. Many organizations are like the pilgrims as they stuff themselves on information, but with little governance that information is like those who died on the mayflower and that first winter on American shores. Information without governance is like coming to America for the first time, something that will take a miracle to survive.
Although it can be intimidating to think about the task ahead there are many things that we have to be thankful for as information management professionals. In AIIM style I have listed eight things I am thankful for and feel free to leave a comment on what you are thankful for.
1)Analytics and the aggregation of data and unstructured information that brings the value of information to the forefront. This goes hand in hand with metadata and taxonomy so that we all speak the same knowledge and have a common criteria when searching for information.
2)social collaboration as we are smarter and more efficient as a whole than we are individually. This is not just knowledge management within an organization but also communities on social media that shares best practices and real world experiences.
3)maturing cloud environments that allows for increased data security as opposed to traditional on premise solutions as well as making software available in organizations that wouldn't be possible without the cloud.
4)the increased speed that business processes are allowed to move at with mobile solutions and digital signatures.
5)the automation of disposition, fulfilling e-discovery requests, applying holds and performing other records management functionality with ECM technology.
6)enterprise search capability that facilitates the search and retrieval of information across many different applications in an organization to save time and money.
7)forms management that ensures that everyone in an organization is using the most recent version of a form and data can flow from CRM to the form on an automated basis.
8)the role AIIM has played in creating a community of information professionals with a common goal bringing order to our world of information chaos by showing where risk can be decreased and value increased by providing research, training and networks for today's forward thinking information professional