• Management processes – governing operations of the organization often called ‘corporate governance’
• Operational processes – set of core business activities to generate value and revenues, like manufacturing, purchasing, sales, or marketing
• Supporting processes – set of auxiliary activities supporting the core, operational processes, for example HR, accounting, information technology, and support

The processes exhibit certain common characteristics:

• Definition – they have clearly defined scope,  inputs and outputs
• Sequencing – the activities could be sequenced and prioritized for execution
• Benefactor – there must be specified recipient of the process outcome
• Value – adding value during the process of transforming or carrying the data
• Inclusion – they exist in the context of the organization
• Cross-functionality – the process often spans multiple functions within organization

There are two concepts related to process management: Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR). Although both deal with the process control and flow of information, and sharing many common characteristics, there is however a significant difference between the two. Business Process Management is an ongoing initiative with set of operational activities to capture, define, monitor, and to gradual improve the organizational benefits. BPM is often implemented using bottom-up approach, and it introduces more gentle change to the organization. Business Process Reengineering on the other hand, is more project oriented, with clearly defined end-state and timeline, redesigning the processes and transforming the organization. It is often implemented as top-down approach and requires much stronger organizational change management activities on many fronts within the organization. BPR initiatives could create lot of apprehension among the workers, due to introduced change in work habits, and often their key success measurement relates to reduction of the workforce.

Formalization, standardization and automation of business processes can introduce several benefits to the organizations:

• Better utilization of organization’s workforce
• Improved process speed
• Reduction in number of errors
• Costs reduction
• Risks reduction
• Improved customer service
• Duplicate work reduction
• Improved visibility of the processes and their efficiencies

Formal business processes implementation might need to resolve several issues:

-   Staff resistance to change – new processes will impact the ways how the work is done right now, and could introduce fears related to exposing potential inefficiencies, resulting in workforce reduction, or transferring to other departments

• Implementation time is often lengthy due to need of discovery and documentation of hidden, informal processes, and their adjustments
•  ‘Butterfly effect’ – any small inaccuracies in identification of the sub-processes, could translate into larger problems down the value chain
• Difficulty in finding skilled resources to deliver
• Insufficient funding – most of organizations face budgetary constraints today, while the business process changes often require substantial time and money commitments
• Lack of management support – formalization and automation of business processes might not be on the top of management’s priority list.

The process automation could be categorized by complexity of the implementation, and organizations could select one or more depending on their needs:

1. Routing

Routing is the simplest implementation of the business processes, addressing ad-hoc needs of the end users. Usually they linearly move information from person to person, without integrating with information generating or consuming applications. They are often employed for user notification about waiting task and monitoring of the completion status. The users need to open and process the tasks manually. That type of solution gives limited ability, if any, to implement rules associated with the process.

2. Workflow

Workflow is more sophisticated implementation of the business process automation. Among others, it allows running processes not only serially but also in parallel, saving time and improving productivity. The processes can also have defined complex set of rules, exceptions and conditions. Often there is a graphical user interface that allows for easy customization of the workflow. Useful feature of workflows is the ‘role’ concept allowing assigning tasks to roles rather than to specific people. In cases where user is unavailable, a rule could assign the task to another person, belonging to the same role. Completion of the task could trigger next step in the process chain.

3. Business Process Management

The Business Process Management is extending this concept further, to the whole enterprise, allowing crossing platforms, applications and repositories. It addresses complexities of the cross-departmental processes, and allows for their standardization. Implementation of automation requires identification of core practices and detailed analysis of business rules and triggers. Flowcharting and process modeling are two of the techniques used for this purpose. Flowcharts are graphical representation of sequence of steps and decision branches. They are excellent tools to provide blueprint for implementation, as well as could serve as communication and change management instruments. Process models on the other hand, are more elaborate tools adding intelligence, dependencies and levels to the process tasks. The simulation functionality allows identifying and resolving potential bottlenecks, inefficiencies and loops. Integration and operational monitoring of the processes could help with continuous improvement. Since the implementation of BPM is much more complex than with other two categories, it requires careful planning, change management and funding.

To address these problems, organizations needed to develop set of aligned governance constructs within an overall Information Governance Framework. Among those constructs are Information Security Governance, Information Architecture, Data Quality, Records and Retention, Master and Reference Data just to mention few. I think that the latter plays very significant role and should be done early to get information under control.

So how Master Data Management could be defined? It is a set of processes, tools and organizational structures, where business and IT work together to address issues likes uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, and consistency and accountability of the organization’s data. This leads the data to become authoritative, secure, reliable and sustainable.  But not all data should get the same level of attention.  Master data is a ‘key’ data gathered and used by multiple departments during operations of the business like for example – customer data, information about products, employees, materials and so on. Master Data must contain most accurate and authoritative data available, and serve as single source of truth across the organization. Lot of organizations however find it difficult to secure the necessary funding and support from senior management, due to difficulty with measurement of return on investment.

Earlier this year, Gartner published some predictions related to Master Data Management governance and impact on organizations by end of 2016:

-          Only 33% of organizations that initiated MDM will be able to demonstrate its value. The difficulty here is that such initiative must present complete approach and be an ongoing process rather than once-off isolated project. This means that there needs to be consensus among senior executives and obtaining this is often quite challenging.

-          Spending on information governance must increase fivefold to be successful – and as per point above, needs to include other disciplines within the Information Management Governance Framework like quality management, lifecycle and retention, privacy and security. This will lead to building larger teams focusing on the governance and higher costs.

-          20% of CIOs in regulated industries will lose their jobs failing to implement information governance. IM governance is a construct that allows organization for compliance with regulations, and the primary responsibility for this lies with CIO and Legal Counsel.  Breaches in information security, leaks of confidential information, and breaches in privacy will lead to reputational and financial damage to those organizations.

The good news is that lot of organizations already recognize these risks, as according to Gartner, last year they have seen 21% increase in spending on MDM.

• Lack of FAST search solution
• Lack of integration with Microsoft Information Rights Management
• Lack of ability to index external databases from SharePoint search
• Lack of Performance Point Services
• Lack of support for external lists

So, for organizations that need more sophisticated configurations, this might not be the best option – at least for now.

But there is however another possibility – companies that really want to move into cloud, could try hybrid solutions. Assuming that such organizations have good information architecture and defined business processes, they could partition data and processes in such way that critical information is handled by in-house installations, and the rest is stored and processed using cloud solution. The integration of the data might require building a mash-up portals for the end users, so it would require some good thinking before implementation, and solid governance in place. It is important however to understand limitations of such solution – for example – federated search based on cloud and on-premises data will not work. Key success factor for such implementation would be a solid understanding of the business requirements, and alignment with overall long term goals of the organization. There are however quite a few benefits that cloud solutions bring and Microsoft is working on closing some of the gaps.

So what is text analytics about? It is simply set of techniques and models to turn text into data that could be further analyzed, as in traditional business intelligence, allowing organizations to respond to business problems. By generating semantics, text analytics provides link between search and traditional business intelligence, turning data retrieval into information delivery mechanism. The process discovers and presents the uncovered facts, business rules and relationships. There are several analytical methods employed in this process, using statistical, linguistic and structural techniques. Here are few examples:

• Named entity recognition – to identify from the textual sources names of people, organizations, locations, symbols and so on
• Similarity detection and disambiguation – based on contextual clues to distinguish that for example the word “bass” refers to fish and not to the instrument
• Pattern based recognition – based on employing regular expressions, for example to identify and standardize phone numbers, emails, postal codes and so on
• Concept recognition – clustering data entities around defined ideas
• Relationship recognition – finding associations between data entities
• Co-reference recognition – multiple terms referring to the same object, which could be quite complex – in the example below the pronoun refers to two different people:
• Paul gave money to Stephen. He had nothing left.
• Paul gave money to Stephen. He was rich.
• Sentiment techniques – subjective analysis to discover attitude based on source data – opinion, mood, emotion, sentiment
• Quantitative analysis – extracting semantic or grammatical relationships between words to find meaning

As we can see the difficulty with extracting information from unstructured data could be quite immense, although it is not impossible task. It requires however quite a lot of commitment from the organization to implement it. If done properly, it can help with addressing lot of problems that enterprises face today. These problems are related to perceived information overload, poor information governance, and low quality of metadata that leads to poor findability and knowledge. This in turn impacts organizational productivity. As for information external to organizations – the ‘big data’ question – how to monetize on the social media, will drive new technological and business solutions. It seems that this is one of the areas that will experience substantial growth. Using only ‘transactional’ business intelligence based on structured information, is insufficient for organizations to get the full picture. The solution is rather the ‘integrated business intelligence’ combining structured and unstructured data in providing answers to business questions.

1. distrust IS/IT departments,
2. perceive IS/IT as detached from the business and not addressing their real problems, or
3. benefits from IT/IS initiatives are potentially intangible and/or never measured after projects are  completed

I do not have specific numbers for information management initiatives, but experience seems to confirm similar correlation. When information management projects are not driven by the business but rather by IT, they are often observed with distrust, little confidence and support. Indeed, some of the IT/IS information management initiatives focus on technology, with poor understanding of the business processes, goals and operations. If this is true, to improve the odds, they should be conceptualized and driven by the business groups rather than by IT.  Using Pareto principle, maybe 80% of focus should be on business transformation and knowledge management, and 20% on technology. Delivery should still reside within IS but the business should be firmly in the driver’s seat. The recent explosion in collaboration methods, are blurring the boundaries between the external and internal, business and social, stationary and mobile collaboration, bringing new opportunities and challenges. There is no doubt – the cloud computing is going to revolutionize the way how IS and IT departments work today. IT is becoming increasingly a commodity, and some jobs are quickly disappearing, although recent IDC study brought news that cloud services are going to generate 14 million new jobs by 2015. Too bad that they are going to be in some other, cheaper part of the world. This trend will also force redefinition of the role of the CIO – maybe putting ‘Information’ back into the title – changing the focus from the infrastructure and technology to identification, valuation, definition of metrics and the management of the information as any other enterprise asset. I believe that both – shifting of the responsibility for information management initiatives to the business, as well as recognizing that information is the asset will increase success rates of IM initiatives within organizations, leading to improved profits, reduced risks internally and better service to customers externally.

First of all – SharePoint out-of-the-box implementation will provide only a partial and rather informal – records solution. Many people consider Department of Defense DoD 5015.2 records management requirements as an overkill. This might be true for most of non-governmental organizations, although ARMA identified that of 168 requirements in DoD 5015.2, at minimum 105 are considered as those that make system a robust records management application. SharePoint 2010 satisfies 72 of these requirements. That leaves gap of 33 requirements that needs to be addressed. There are two ways of doing this – getting SharePoint implementation customized or getting a third party add-ons to handle the records management. Both of the solutions have their own pros and cons related to costs, licensing, training and operational support requirements.

Among the issues that need to be addressed are:

-          Centralized file plan, linked to a retention schedule. I wrote about this earlier – this requires usage of records center rather than in-place records management.

-          Securing, management and maintenance of the file plan by the records managers. This includes securing top levels of the file plan hierarchy but with ability to allow delegated departmental records clerks to create and maintain third level of subject and case file folders.

-          Proper disposition process – SharePoint OOTB handles automatic deletions, but disposition process needs to be customized, including records qualification, reviews, approvals, cutoff times, and records state status updates

-          Distinction between the subject records and the case file records. The significant difference between the two is related to the above process, where the entire content of the Document Set in case file record must be disposed at the same time, preventing the users from destroying the record partially.

-          Centralized management of Information Management Policies in SharePoint, due to required security levels. Information Management Gallery is not enough, and this also impacts ability to implement in-place records management, where control of these policies and maintenance of the security becomes quickly impractical.

-          Ability to monitor ingestion of records, their classification status, and retention events. This includes bulk uploads and changes to records metadata. Even on document level it is currently a huge pain in SharePoint.

-          To manage the records across their lifecycle, proper metadata must be collected and updated along their way. The specific records related metadata needs to be defined and implemented during the rollout.

-          MS Outlook integration with ability to declare emails with their attachments as records, and ability to add records specific metadata.

In either case – customization of SharePoint or integration of third party add-ons requires lot of thought planning, and tough decisions making.

As expected there is no simple answer to this question – it depends. But once the decision is made, the organization needs to live with its consequences. The way back is costly and time consuming, it makes reversing the course usually unfeasible. So what are the pros and cons of either solution? The list below captures some of the key differences and their potential impact. Please note that some of the functionality was split to reflect the fact that business users and records managers are often driven by conflicting requirements – ease of filing, access, finding information and ability to collaborate for business users and ability to restrict access, protection and enforcing retention rules for records managers.

So how to determine which one is more suitable for given organization? There are several factors that will ultimately influence the decision, like:

-          Company culture – strict or more relaxed

-          How heavily regulated is the industry

-          What are the legal, regulatory and statutory requirements

-          Existing processes for handling records – is there already dedicated staff to manage records?

-          Business continuity planning requirements

-          Existing business processes – are document sets best suitable in the organization (this is weak point however, as I am sure that Microsoft is going to come with solution for Document Sets handling soon)

-          Information growth rate and proliferation of sites and sites collections

Decision on the method of records management implementation should not be taken lightly as it will have long term impacts on costs, change management, user adoption, governance, sites and records management, compliance and others. There is no easy way back.

The positive side of this event is that it should be fairly easy for Fortis to develop and approve business case for an improved records management system. One of the biggest problems facing implementation of information management projects is that they are always low priority, due to the intangibility of most of the benefits and risks. There is always something more important generating revenues. Documents and records management are mostly perceived as cost centers – until accidents like this happen. Fortunately in this case there was no further damage and nobody was injured. But definitely this is an opportunity to quantify the costs and risks in the business case and get the problem fixed. In this case – these will be the costs of the emergency services, evacuation, investigation, and problem rectifying and so on. Safety, Health and Environment risks will come on the top of priorities and let’s not forget about reputational risks – protecting the public trust, and the organization in litigation, would one follow. One door closes, another opens….

On the other hand the social technologies bring new challenges from point of view of information management – like for example – how to treat them as records, how to deal with their retention, how to retain the knowledge. The bigger challenge however is personal productivity, if everyone is chatting with everyone; then they have no time to do any work. This type of collaboration cannot be replacement for ability to store, search, find and use the information. So information management is becoming now even more important, before the big wave hits destroying the efficiency instead of enabling it, the workers must know where to find the information, and have easy access to it, rather than trying to find it by chatting. This is the point where the email has advantage, with tools like Outlook – the search is quite simple and it is easy to associate the content with its business context. The governance has a key role to play here, on one of our recent programs we implemented a policy to block 50% of time to focus on the work that was planned, including collaborating ‘within’ the teams, and devoting the rest of the time to coordination with other teams, planning, meetings, answering emails, administrative work and so on.

Overall, no doubt – while our world is changing dramatically when it comes to communication and collaboration, our information management strategy and governance needs to adjust accordingly.

1. Cannot delete custom content types.

Once you created a content type, that’s it, you are done – you won’t be able to delete it. Sure, there is a link in Site Settings to delete this content type; the only problem is that SharePoint will not allow you to do it. Instead, you are going to get messages that the content type is in use, even if you ensured that this content type was unlinked. There are some blog posts showing how to work around this problem, but all of them require running direct action queries on MS SQL content database. Obviously it is possible to be done, but not really feasible for production environment in most of organizations. To avoid this issue, implementation teams need to make sure that the taxonomy is tight on the paper, and then test with a pilot before production implementation.

2. Drop-off library works only with Document type items.

Drop-off library is a great concept, allowing for building set of rules that facilitate an automatic movement of documents to corresponding libraries, based on their content type. Unfortunately this works only on Document types, or your own custom types inherited from Document class. So if your customers would like to use it for images or audio files, they will have to move the files manually to their target locations. This could become confusing – for one type they can use drop off, for the others they cannot. So, when planning implementation, consider this during alignment of the end user processes, and if you still decide to benefit from this functionality, make sure that the change management team gives enough attention to it.

3. Lack of native support for indexing of PDF files.

PDF today became standard when a user wants to make document portable, light-weight and read-only. Unfortunately SharePoint 2010 indexing service currently does not support this type of files. There is couple of add-ons that could be installed, but they range in performance, quality and cost. I believe that this is such an important feature that it should be part of the out-of-the-box installation.

 Small things but make life more difficult – hopefully SharePoint 2012 will address them.