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Image & Data manager • idm.net.au

After months of discussion your budget is set for your ECM implementation. Happy days. That is, until you turn up for work the next day to find out the whole “content” arena has changed.

Getting a handle on content was much simpler once. Just plan for the required metadata for documentation, decide how far back you will have the paper records scanned in and then book some school kids to come on work placement to do the scanning.

Nowadays the range and variety of social media platforms that Gen Y’ers use to communicate and collaborate is making a mockery of this ordered approach. You can’t deny the kids in the office their FaceBook time, especially as these days most don’t need time out for a smoking break with the habit dying out

Thanks to technology flying at us at great speed in the social realm, not understanding it enough to deal with it is becoming the life of the over 35ers struggling to remain in the information management world.

It was easy when we had typewriters, Gestetners and filing cabinets. You just need a chair with wheels on it to be within arm’s reach of all of your documentation and records.

You probably comm-unicated externally over documentation so few times that you can remember every time you licked a stamp.

It got harder when we all had to wait for our secretaries to learn to use a PC and how to program in DOS to communicate externally. It didn’t matter though as life was slower and we simply rushed home to play Pacman or tanks on your Atari to wind down after a day in the office. Times have changed haven’t they?

Nowadays its a good idea to buddy up with anyone under 25 in your company and try to follow every tweet, Facebook post and any technology-based conversation.

So if its on social media is it a record? Historically speaking, a record could only be a document, (or a conversation when it was part of for example a “hand shake deal”). In those no one sued anyone but would visit each other’s homes and have a conversation about it to clear the air.

Those “records” grew from being stored in filing cabinets, to computers, to USB and are now likely anywhere an electronic record can be saved to.

Then, along came Document Management systems (Windows) and those wonderful shared drives that nicely took care of all of those easy documents and gave the CIO somewhere to read everyone’s business.

In about 2001, the arrival of the World Wide Web created another source of “records”. A truck load of litigation has proven that your corporate web page can as quickly hang you as as sell your product or service. You advertise something on your web site, someone faults you, and you don’t have a capture, you’re busted. (So if you are

not regularly capturing and storing your web pages, I’d start now at least). Then those with money that wanted to get ahead of the pack or may have had hassles finding records in those shared drives invested in an ECM solution. This may even have included emails, sound files and video etc.

Today we are doing more and more business by social “interaction”. In fact the company Facebook and Twitter pages are now the headache of the record manager.

Now that many of your staff are mobile, those “interactions” can be held between anyone, anywhere, anytime and on any number of new

cool technologies. Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, YouTube & LinkedIn are

now often part of your marketing and sales strategy and such, have become

records to manage (or to be hung by if you don’t)!

You may think that you go out and buy an ECM solution that

fits you today (or at least when you did the Discovery),

then you set it, pay your zillions of dollars and forget it. Your

receptionist is a gun on computers and she is in charge of its mods. That is

so far from the reality but most learn this the hard way.

The nature of content is changing so rapidly, but there is no chance to sit on the sidelines and wath the

revolution pass by. You need to have technology and policy in place around all your business or organisational records, whether they are paper, emails or tweets or whatever comes next. Vigilence must be eternal as you monitor what systems are pumping records into and out of your organisation and keep pace with systems that automate the record-keeping process as much as possible. Each record needs to be stored, approved, and easily found regardless of whether you still have the technology with which it was created on your servers. Your workforce is now more and more mobile so both internal and external sieving is now required but must be automated to allow you to keep up.

ECM solutions on the market now are dealing with the nature of content available today and what we can see just on the horizon. The very nature of content and the way we do business is now so fluid that you must be ready to manage record or content types that are not even a twinkle in their creators’ eyes. Does that mean “foresight” is the ultimate challenge for content management in the Twitter era?

Jill Nehrybecki is managing director of Innov8, a specialist consultant in enterprise document management, CAD drawing management and

business process.

Just when you thought your ECM strategy was settled, a new social media comes along and changes everything, including the way your company does business. Jill Nehrybecki takes stock of the digital dilemma

After the bird has flown