Building an Enterprise Vision of Content Management

The year 2001 was a watershed in the evolution of records management as a profession. The compliance pressures that ensued have dominated how many organizations think about business content—how they capture, retain and ultimately dispose of that content. More recently, the goal is to become more prepared as a business that can thrive in an era of litigation and new electronic evidentiary rules. Rooted in an era of mistrust and uncertainty, the wave of legislative and regulatory pressures has expanded the role of the records manager. Technology solutions designed to address particular capture, storage and disposition requirements abound, yet content-centric problems continue to plague the modern knowledge-economy enterprise.

This article explores the emerging concept of information governance, a theme for organizations with a mature perspective on information and content management, and a strategic corporate objective that seeks to align IT and ECM investments with core organizational objectives.

Information Governance

According to a May, 2006, Gartner, Inc. research note, information governance is "the collection of decision rights, processes, standards, policies and technologies required to manage, maintain and exploit information as an enterprise resource."1 In the knowledge economy, businesses that rely on innovation, technology development, patents, regulated products and creative arts must protect their core assets just as more traditional companies would protect their plants and property. Engineering or scientific expertise, crystallization of reusable best practices and innovative market strategies: these are direct contributors to top-line revenue. Intangible know-how, specialized knowledge, intellectual capital and cohesive corporate culture are critical resources that do not naturally grow from a records or knowledge management policy driven by only legal compliance pressures.

Organizations that are exploring a corporate information governance strategy are seeking to guide how the business makes decisions about content stewardship. They understand the need to align organizational technology and business objectives and aim to articulate this vision to employees and key partners and external stakeholders. Content-centric best practices to help meet compliance and risk mitigation mandates imposed by law, regulators or internal quality standards are complemented by a keen focus on developing ways to capitalize on the kinds of productivity and efficiency gains that grow out of an asset-management approach to corporate content.

Companies that rely on the development, use and protection of intellectual assets are the innovators in the 21st century information economy. Research by the OECD views these "intangible assets" as increasingly strategic to corporate growth and strength and are "intimately linked with key corporate governance issues such as monitoring of senior management and strategy by the board, reporting and accountability to shareholders, oversight of internal control and risk policy."2

The culture of compliance that has permeated the corporate records and knowledge management world has gained acceptance within many organizations. Business can derive value from managed content beyond the immediate drivers of risk mitigation and litigation preparedness. Focused and accountable management of corporate intellectual assets can contribute to top-line revenue as well as to bottom-line cost and risk reductions. Decision-making can be streamlined and made more predictable with reporting and auditing of managed content; geographically dispersed work teams can function more efficiently across time zones with secure collaborative authoring and discussion spaces. Companies that use technology to preserve, analyze and exploit their intellectual capital can create competitive advantage and respond to changing market or regulatory conditions better than those peers who have not invested in productivity and content management tools.

Anticipating The New Risks: Three Disruptive Forces

Risks to organizational health are now emerging from arenas beyond that of regulatory or legal requirements. A corporate information governance strategy enables a more agile enterprise by recognizing change as a constant. An information governance strategy abstracts best practices, corporate and business requirements to ensure operational continuity, facilitates the natural evolution of users’ technology tools and provides a method by which to dissolve unneeded departmental or geographical boundaries between data and documents. A consistent and well-articulated strategy to govern the creation, use and retention of company content can serve as a guide for employees from the mailroom to the boardroom.

Companies have been compelled to institute records management and litigation preparedness programs in response to changing laws and regulations. But a new wave of threats to the business will come from shifts in the workforce demographic, from an influx of disruptive consumer technologies, and by forces of nature itself. What follows is an outline of three emerging risks to the enterprise—each a distinct and tangible threat to an organization that fails to protect its content-centric enterprise resources.

The headlines have sounded the first new threat to the enterprise. Studies published by government, academia and HR firms are coming to the same conclusion: employers across the G8 are on the brink of losing their workforces. US federal and state governments have been paying attention to these shifts: the 2003 Clinger-Cohen survey demonstrates the profile of the aging federal IT worker and both California and Texas noted that the rate of government employee retirement eligibility had reached unprecedented levels among "knowledge workers" who held specialized training, expertise and leadership needed by the agency.4 Beyond public sector, companies in the transportation, healthcare, energy and manufacturing sectors are at most risk of losing expertise as senior staff become eligible for retirement. Vulnerable are the high-value positions that cannot be easily automated by applying technology. Engineers, scientists and technical managers who have spent the majority of their careers in the same field are preparing to leave their organizations, taking decades of best practices and insider knowledge that contributes to corporate memory and organizational performance. Loss of corporate memory due to retirement and staff reduction was identified as a contributing factor to a major North American train derailment in the official report published in 2007.5 No longer is this demographic shift a hypothetical risk to business, the public and the environment. It has become real.