Digital Landfill

8 Things You Need to Know About Preservation of e-Documents for Litigation and Regulatory Investigations

John Okonkwo is dual qualified US Attorney and UK Solicitor specialising in information governance, with a focus on e-discovery and e-fraud. He is a professional member of AIIM and the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE). 

8 Things You Need to Know About Preservation of e-Documents for Litigation and Regulatory Investigations 

As regulators and courts increasingly exercise their oversight powers, it can be expected that they will hold organisations accountable to explain the evaluations which underpin their ESI (Electronically Stored Information) preservation protocols. 

The business impact of this heightened level of regulatory and judicial scrutiny is that enterprises which ignore the ESI preservation risks inherent in local and remote working, as well as the management of employee Web 2.0 communications do so at their peril. Since over 93% of enterprise records are electronic, and the volume and mix of data types is exploding, millions of electronic documents are now routinely collected from all locations where an organisation has custody, control or access to electronic documents – be it in London, Lima, or Timbuktu. 

The dynamic nature of ESI means that critical documents can easily be overwritten, modified, destroyed, or corrupted during normal use. It does not matter whether this happens accidentally or maliciously. The result is the same – loss of potentially relevant evidence giving rise to probable criminal penalties, fines or court sanctions for spoliation. 

The following tips may provide useful guidance.

1.  Dig your well before you are thirsty.

The Chinese proverb “dig your well before you are thirsty” is particularly apt. Be proactive and establish a transparent, documented and defensible methodology for the preservation of ESI once a regulatory investigation or litigation is foreseeable. This process should be driven by senior stakeholders from legal, IT, records, and compliance.   

2.  Define your information management framework.

Implement an effective information management framework that ensures that records generated by the business are kept and destroyed in a legally compliant manner. This structure will generally provide a consistent methodology and the volume thresholds in which data is deleted, overwritten, or stored to off-line or back-up systems. 

3.  Preserve metadata. 

The metadata associated with an electronic document can be just as important as the data in that document because it establishes the context in which the electronic content was created. The courts and regulators expect that the metadata associated with ESI will be kept intact. 

4.  Implement an IOA strategy. 

Implement an information organisation and access (IOA) strategy as the essential cornerstone of the above procedures. AIIM runs an excellent program which can enhance an organisation’s ability to systematically create, implement, and administer a holistic information management and compliance strategy.

5.  Constantly monitor custodian based-retention practices. 

Employees tend to store data in the most convenient manner regardless of policy. Portable media or storage devices can now hold vast amounts of data which can exist at any given time only on that device. Along with Web 2.0 social networking platforms, they can be crucial in establishing relationships, timelines, and exceptions to hearsay objections. Remember that different functions handle data in different ways. For example, mahogany row executives often deploy private email systems that are known only to a handful of people. You must guard against the concealment of such potential sources of ESI.

6.  Deploy archiving technology.

Deploy archiving technology that meets evolving data retention and preservation obligations, and don’t rely on backup tapes as an archive. 

7.  Centralize and consolidate preserved ESI.

Centralize and consolidate preserved ESI into one or just a small a number of repositories if your organisation is routinely involved in litigation or regulatory investigation, or once you anticipate any of these events. This will reduce the cost and disruption normally caused by the e-disclosure process.

8.  Develop a transparent and consistent process for ingesting preserved ESI.

Develop a transparent and consistent process for ingesting preserved ESI back into an enterprise archive once the investigation or litigation is fully concluded.  

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Might be worth checking out if you are interested in e-discovery...

AIIM Electronic Records Management Practitioner course 

AIIM course on electronic records and retention ($75) 

AIIM e-discovery learning bundle ($395) 

Gartner Identifies Six Approaches to Save Money in Content Management

Interesting list from Toby Bell at Gartner -- apparently going to be the basis for a his presentation at their upcoming portals conference in London -- check link below for details on original press release or direct link HERE:

1- Pare Down to the Essential Content: Eliminate old or duplicate content before "standard" ECM, business process management (BPM) and content-enabled vertical application (CEVA) implementations. Appoint "content strategists" to calculate the cost, value and risk associated with storage and provisioning of content.

2- Include a policy implementation When You develop a Content Architecture: A policy about documents takes the form of rules and metadata that allow some automatic categorization and expiration of content. In particular, the policy can be used to separate "content of record" from intermediate content. It can also be used to clean up repositories and file servers.

3- Include a Content Service Provider and Open Source in Your Strategy: Content service providers are vendors that extend beyond software offerings alone and offer consulting, implementation, outsourcing or other services. IT managers must take a closer look at vendors that compete with content services beyond traditional software, such as Xerox, EDS, HP, Iron Mountain, Astoria, and Clickability among others. Open Source offerings have matured and the market has stabilized. Leaders regularly compete for government and higher education contracts among vertical markets.

4- Leverage Your Web Channel: Organizations must stop wasting money on manual data and content transformation between customer-facing channels and instead put in place a structured and unstructured master data system.

5- Explore the Green Benefits of an Electronic Workplace: There are various green initiatives that organisations can explore, such as moving to electronic forms and storing records electronically, eliminating redundancies (50 per cent of archived paper documents are duplicates) that are ultimately saving time, money, trees, and physical storage heating/cooling environmental impact..

6- Get Out of the E-mail Business: Gartner believes that the hybrid on-premises and hosted e-mail services model will become increasingly popular for organizations – whereby some users (those without extensive mail and calendar needs) will use Outlook web access "in the cloud" at a low price — while the company maintains a population of Outlook/Exchange users at headquarters (examples include car company executives vs. line workers, and retail store executives vs. store floor workers). Conversions from on-premise to hosted Exchange have also been significant in 2008-2009 with huge savings as a result.

via www.shootonline.com

Document and file retrieval metadata -- interesting post on Andrew One Degree’s Blog

Good post (check link at end for full article) on some basic advice relative to file retrieval and metadata. An short excerpt...

When designing your retrieval fields, metadata or indexes (whatever you wish to call them), keep in mind just what a user will want / need to do to actually locate this file / document. Here is a quick list to help you:

1. How much information will the user have on a file?
2. How much time do you want to allow them to enter search information
3. How can your metadata fields actually assist in this
4. What sort of results will be brought back and how clear will these be to the user (clear as in how can they quickly see the file they want)

Many systems recently spend a lot of time on very accurately identifying files, however, by doing this they also make it very complex at the data capture stage (scanning and indexing) and also require the user to spend longer setting up their search.

via andrewonedegree.wordpress.com

I guess I've always been an outlier - study of Twitter demographics and practices

A recent article on eMarketer reported on a survey by Sysmos looking at what the Twitter population looks like and what they are actually doing.

The results are perhaps a bit more skewed than I would have thought in terms of the youth of the audience as well as usual lopsided ration of content creators/producers.

As a 54 year old who averages 7 tweets per day, I find myself positioned as more of an outlier than I might have initially guessed. Although I confess that this would likely not come as a surprise to my wife.

How are you using Twitter? How often? What are you accomplishing? Here's an excerpt from the report (click on the link below to check out the original eMarketer post)...

Twitter has experienced explosive growth in 2009. According to “An In-Depth Look Inside the Twitter World,” from Sysomos, 72.5% of all Twitter users joined the service in the first five months of this year. Who are they?

More than one-half of all Twitter users (53%) are women, and the majority are young. Among users who disclose their age, 66% are under 25, and another 15% are ages 25 to 29.

Most Twitter users are quiet: 85.37% tweet less than once per day. Only about 1.1% of users update their timeline an average of more than 10 times daily. This means a small group of users dominate the Twitter timeline—75% of all Twitter activity comes from just 5% of users.

via www.emarketer.com

2 Good Lists to Help Us Understand How Old We Really Are Re Technology (as if we really needed it)

Now is the time of year as kids are going off to college that we are reminded that we are not as technologically cool as we think we are.  I have to admit that I chuckle every time I see that Verizon commercial where the guys is Tweeting, "...now...I..am...sitting...on...my...patio..." to the great consternation of his kids.  Not that I am like that or anything.

Per Business Week via Yahoo Finance, here is “a list of outdated tech terms, phrases that you shouldn't be using at work anymore because they will make you seem old.”

Here’s the original article.

If we were doing a list for OUR INDUSTRY, what would it look like?  Send your submission to me via email (doesn't have to be 12) and I'll run a few of them.

1.    Intranet

2.    Extranet

3.    Web Surfing

4.    Push Technology

5.    Application Service Provider (ASP)

6.    Personal Digital Assistant (PDA)

7.    Internet Telephony

8.    Weblog

9.    Thin Client

10.    RBOC

11.    Long-Distance Call

12.    World Wide Web

While I’m on the topic of cool lists, the Benoit Freshman list is always a lot of fun for highlighting exactly old ancient you are relatively to your kids.  

“Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college. It is the creation of Beloit’s Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride and Emeritus Public Affairs Director Ron Nief.  It is used around the world as the school year begins, as a reminder of the rapidly changing frame of reference for this new generation. It is widely reprinted and the Mindset List website at http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/receives more than 300,000 hits annually."

As a baseball fan of teams with revolving managers, #29 is especially amazing to me.

Here’s this year’s list for the Class of 2013.

Most students entering college for the first time this fall were born in 1991.

1.    For these students, Martha Graham, Pan American Airways, Michael Landon, Dr. Seuss, Miles Davis, The Dallas Times Herald, Gene Roddenberry, and Freddie Mercury have always been dead.

2.    Dan Rostenkowski, Jack Kevorkian, and Mike Tyson have always been felons.

3.    The Green Giant has always been Shrek, not the big guy picking vegetables.

4.    They have never used a card catalog to find a book.

5.    Margaret Thatcher has always been a former prime minister.

6.    Salsa has always outsold ketchup.

7.    Earvin "Magic" Johnson has always been HIV-positive.

8.    Tattoos have always been very chic and highly visible.

9.    They have been preparing for the arrival of HDTV all their lives.

10.    Rap music has always been main stream.

11.    Chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream has always been a flavor choice.

12.    Someone has always been building something taller than the Willis (née Sears) Tower in Chicago.

13.    The KGB has never officially existed.

14.    Text has always been hyper.

15.    They never saw the “Scud Stud” (but there have always been electromagnetic stud finders.)

16.    Babies have always had a Social Security Number.

17.    They have never had to “shake down” an oral thermometer.

18.    Bungee jumping has always been socially acceptable.

19.    They have never understood the meaning of R.S.V.P.

20.    American students have always lived anxiously with high-stakes educational testing.

21.    Except for the present incumbent, the President has never inhaled.

22.    State abbreviations in addresses have never had periods.

23.    The European Union has always existed.

24.    McDonald's has always been serving Happy Meals in China.

25.    Condoms have always been advertised on television.

26.    Cable television systems have always offered telephone service and vice versa.

27.    Christopher Columbus has always been getting a bad rap.

28.    The American health care system has always been in critical condition.

29.    Bobby Cox has always managed the Atlanta Braves.

30.    Desperate smokers have always been able to turn to Nicoderm skin patches.

31.    There has always been a Cartoon Network.

32.    The nation’s key economic indicator has always been the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

33.    Their folks could always reach for a Zoloft.

34.    They have always been able to read books on an electronic screen.

35.    Women have always outnumbered men in college.

36.    We have always watched wars, coups, and police arrests unfold on television in real time.

37.    Amateur radio operators have never needed to know Morse code.

38.    Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Armenia, Latvia, Georgia, Lithuania, and Estonia have always been independent nations.

39.    It's always been official: President Zachary Taylor did not die of arsenic poisoning.

40.    Madonna’s perspective on Sex has always been well documented.

41.    Phil Jackson has always been coaching championship basketball.

42.    Ozzy Osbourne has always been coming back.

43.    Kevin Costner has always been Dancing with Wolves, especially on cable.

44.    There have always been flat screen televisions.

45.    They have always eaten Berry Berry Kix.

46.    Disney’s Fantasia has always been available on video, and It’s a Wonderful Life has always been on Moscow television.

47.    Smokers have never been promoted as an economic force that deserves respect.

48.    Elite American colleges have never been able to fix the price of tuition.

49.    Nobody has been able to make a deposit in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

50.    Everyone has always known what the evening news was before the Evening News came on.

51.    Britney Spears has always been heard on classic rock stations.

52.    They have never been Saved by the Bell

53.    Someone has always been asking: “Was Iraq worth a war?”

54.    Most communities have always had a mega-church.

55.    Natalie Cole has always been singing with her father.

56.    The status of gays in the military has always been a topic of political debate.

57.    Elizabeth Taylor has always reeked of White Diamonds.

58.    There has always been a Planet Hollywood.

59.    For one reason or another, California’s future has always been in doubt.

60.    Agent Starling has always feared the Silence of the Lambs.

61.    “Womyn” and “waitperson” have always been in the dictionary.

62.    Members of Congress have always had to keep their checkbooks balanced since the closing of the House Bank.

63.    There has always been a computer in the Oval Office.

64.    CDs have never been sold in cardboard packaging.

65.    Avon has always been “calling” in a catalog.

66.    NATO has always been looking for a role.

67.    Two Koreas have always been members of the UN.

68.    Official racial classifications in South Africa have always been outlawed.

69.    The NBC Today Show has always been seen on weekends.

70.    Vice presidents of the United States have always had real power.

71.    Conflict in Northern Ireland has always been slowly winding down.

72.    Migration of once independent media like radio, TV, videos and compact discs to the computer has never amazed them.

73.    Nobody has ever responded to “Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

74.    Congress could never give itself a mid-term raise.

75.    There has always been blue Jell-O.

Enjoy, and thanks to Business Week and Benoit for some creative thinking.

These lists remind me of the importance of keeping your skills fresh (you knew there had to be a connection to AIIM, right?)  When was the last time you took a look at refreshing your information management skills?

It also reminds me that when these kids come into the workplace, a lot of our "control" concepts re content and information management are going to be a pretty hard sell.

8 Things to Try When Marketing ECM Projects

Our guest opinion-maker today is Dan Antion, Vice President of Information Services for American Nuclear Insurers. Dan is responsible for information technology at ANI and works with a small team addressing ECM.  (The opinions in this piece are Dan's, not ANI's.) Dan has presented at the AIIM Expo during each of the past four years, three times talking about SharePoint and once talking about working with a small budget. He has completed AIIM's ECM Master course. His blog can be found at http://www.SharePointStories.com.  He can be reached via e-mail at Dan.Antion@gmail.com and can also be found on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Dan is a two-time "8 things" columnist:

• 8 things vendors need to know about selling document management to small businesses 
• 8 things small businesses need to know about document management 

8 Things to Try When Marketing ECM Projects

Recently on Information Zen, a question was asked regarding how to introduce ECM to an older workforce. Age isn’t the issue; introducing ECM in any environment for the first time will face challenges. In many ways, gaining acceptance for ECM is a marketing effort; below are eight techniques that might help you market your project.

1.  Showcase Success.

When you do make progress, even if it’s a very small example, talk about it, show it off and be sure to give credit to the other people involved. If you present things in terms of “this is what I (we) did over here” the process will always be seen as yours. By showcasing the work of others you communicate the fact that “this is a company project”.

2.  Focus on Education.

Training is critical and you might be surprised at the topics people would like to see included in a training session. What seems second nature to you is new ground for others. Offer training specifically about ECM and, when you conduct other training, include a section on how that topic supports or is supported by the ECM effort. Keep your training limited to a few topics at a time; start with the basics and repeat the basics often. Consistent with #1, involve others in your training whenever possible.

3.  Take People to AIIM/Industry Meetings.

I try to attend every AIIM New England meeting and last year I started bringing a guest with me to those meetings. When your guest hears other people talking they realize ECM isn’t your personal mission. When they look around the room and see people of all ages, they realize that ECM isn’t a generational thing. And, when they look at the name tags and see the companies represented, they realize ECM isn’t just for certain industries.

4.  Showcase Problems.

This is a little trickier than showcasing success but it’s a powerful tool. Content management, collaboration and the changes to the business process that often accompany an ECM project solves problems. When you can present “how it used to be” vs. “how it is today”, you send a strong message. If you can get someone from the problem area to help send that message, it becomes even more powerful.

5.  Spread the Word but Let People Opt-in.

Stay plugged into industry media and social media outlets like groups on LinkedIn, Information Zen and Twitter but don’t share everything with everyone. Be an aggregator for your company. Compile white papers, reprints, links, etc. and make access to that material easy. Send out weekly updates or, if you can use a blog or discussion group option, let people subscribe to your updates.

6.  Learn Their Business.

I have the benefit of having been in the same company for over 20 years so I can use examples that I know are relevant to the individual or business unit I’m talking to. People respond much better when you frame a solution in terms that relate to their day-to-day life. I remind myself every day that while “I do this for a living, they do something else”. They expect you to understand your job; show them that you also understand theirs.

7.  The Problem isn’t Generational or Departmental or… 

When you ask people to adopt an ECM solution, you are asking them to change their behavior. I wrote a series about this on my blog because I think it is the single most overlooked aspect of any significant business change. You have to convince people that either they will benefit from ECM or that the company will benefit in a way that offsets the changes they have to accept. Resist the temptation to write their ambivalence off to age, department, business function, etc., it only gets in the way of success.

8.  Take Advantage of Management Support.

If you have the support of management, make the most of that. Make sure that managers attend training sessions so they can be seen “nodding in support” of the topics that are covered. If you make progress on an issue, Send a complimentary email to the manager(s) of the people on your team (#1 again). People want to impress their boss, they want their boss to know they are doing the right things but they need to hear that those are, in fact, the things their boss cares about.

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Some recent "8 things" posts:

8 things SharePoint 2010 needs to be a true ECM system  

8 things that changed the history of document management 

8 things you can do with an enterprise wiki 

8 perspectives in ECM projects that can make me see double  

8 things you need to know about developing an ECM information architecture 

A question I am asked constantly -- Can original paper records that have been digitally copied be destroyed?

Here's a white paper on the AIIM Green ECM microsite worth taking a look at. You'll need to register if you haven't already. The link is below...

Establishing and managing a comprehensive electronic records management program, with its all-important retention and disposition policies, typically leads most organizations to consider converting many of their active paper records to electronic records – by scanning the paper into electronic files and creating “digital image copies.” This white paper by Cohasset Associates addresses key legal questions associated with the conversion process.

via www.aiim.org

37 Really Cool Statistics About Social Media

The following are 37 really interesting stats about social media.  

[Note: just as an aside, if you are looking for a great free e-book about SharePoint, check out THIS LINK. No registration required; a free resource to use. For a full list of all 124 "8 things" posts, go HERE. Also, make sure you "LIKE" this blog -- upper right hand corner -- and I'll give $1 for each to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.]

To give credit where credit is due, I had NOTHING to do with their creation.  It might be that everyone else has already seen the presentation -- it was released while I was on vacation -- but worth re-highlighting even if everyone else has already seen.

I saw the original blog post on a site called Committed Sardine, which has some great content -- well worth tracking.  Here is their original post.  

Their citation was back to a YouTube video by Socialnomics09 that can be found at THIS LINK.  I'll embed their video at the end of this post.

Here's the text list of the stats from the Committed Sardine site:

1. By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
2. Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
3. 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
4. Years to Reach 50 millions Users: Radio (38 Years), TV (13 Years), Internet (4 Years), iPod (3 Years)…Facebook added 100 million users in less than 9 months…iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
5. If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
6. Yet, some sources say China’s QZone is larger with over 300 million using their services (Facebook’s ban in China plays into this)
7. comScore indicates that Russia has the most engage social media audience with visitors spending 6.6 hours and viewing 1,307 pages per visitor per month – Vkontakte.ru is the #1 social network
8. 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average, online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
9. 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
10. % of companies using LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees….80%
11. The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
12. Ashton Kutcher and Ellen Degeneres have more Twitter followers than the entire populations of Ireland, Norway and Panama
13. 80% of Twitter usage is on mobile devices…people update anywhere, anytime…imagine what that means for bad customer experiences?
14. Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshmen
15. What happens in Vegas stays on YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook…
16. The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
17. Wikipedia has over 13 million articles…some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica…78% of these articles are non-English
18. There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
19. 54% = Number of bloggers who post content or tweet daily
20. Because of the speed in which social media enables communication, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth
21. If you were paid a $1 for every time an article was posted on Wikipedia you would earn $156.23 per hour
22. Facebook USERS translated the site from English to Spanish via a Wiki in less than 4 weeks and cost Facebook $0
23. 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
24. 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
25. People care more about how their social graph ranks products and services than how Google ranks them
26. 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
27. Only 14% trust advertisements
28. Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
29. 90% of people that can TiVo ads do
30. Hulu has grown from 63 million total streams in April 2008 to 373 million in April 2009
31. 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video…on their phone
32. According to Jeff Bezos 35% of book sales on Amazon are for the Kindle when available
33. 24 of the 25 largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news, the news finds us.
34. In the near future we will no longer search for products and services they will find us via social media
35. More than 1.5 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on Facebook…daily.
36. Successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy Listening first, selling second
37. Successful companies in social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertiser.

Forgive the self-serving link, but as organizations think about mapping Web 2.0 and social media into a corporate environment, it's well worth thinking about our E20 courses.

8 Things you need to know about developing an ECM Information Architecture

Today’s guest columnist is Michael Elkins, an independent consultant with over 17 years of experience helping global clients with the design and deployment of enterprise wide content management systems. His clients benefit from his ECM experience including strategic guidance, information architecture and ECM/data governance programs.  His company, Kestral Group LLC is based in Denver, Colorado.

8 Things you need to know about developing an ECM Information Architecture

Information is our most important corporate asset, but the value of that information can only be realized if users can quickly find and use it.  All too often, companies are handcuffed by numerous departmental or standalone content management systems, each with unique or incomplete information architectures. Getting to enterprise information architecture requires careful consideration during the design process including:

1.  Requirements and not just technology should dictate the architecture.

Solutions developed in a vacuum are far more likely to fail.  Users must be involved in the definition process as much as possible.  At the end of the effort, the desired result is that users can intuitively find what they need quickly and easily.  The best solution is not always out of the box from the ECM vendor.

2.  Start with what you know.

Nearly a third of all companies have implemented Master Data Management (MDM) technology in order to gain control of their structured data sources.  Unfortunately, few companies are utilizing that data to assist with the development of their ECM information architectures.  In most cases, the ECM system will be integrated with other systems such as ERP, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and other core business systems.  Take advantage of existing folder structures to understand how users currently categorize content and look for any industry standards that may exist.  In most cases, one will find existing industry standards for elements such as metadata, thesauri and taxonomies.  Taking the time to map out data sources will provide a considerable cost savings both during development and ongoing support of the information architecture.  

3.  Don’t create something unwieldy.

It’s important to have a comprehensive information architecture that provides benefit to the company, but there can be a fine line between adding value and creating overhead.  Users will gladly tag content if they know it will benefit them, but when tagging becomes a chore, the value is gone.  The same can be said from a retrieval perspective.  Even though an advanced search may help users narrow down their search results more quickly and effectively, many users still prefer the simplicity of a basic keyword search.  Sometimes, less is indeed more. 

4.  Inheritance is a good thing.

So, how much is too much?  The more that can be done for the user, the happier they will be and the better the data quality.  There are a number of ways to default metadata values including information based upon user profiles or folder locations.  All efforts should be made to limit the impact of tagging on the user.  

5.  Consider implementing a Thesaurus to improve search results.

Every industry, company and even discipline has its own language including acronyms and core terminology.  Authors often revert to common acronyms without spelling them out.  This simple act can affect a user’s ability to find the documents they are looking for based on the terms they search by.  With mergers or acquisitions, the acquiring company’s terminology will tend to become dominant, and the acquired company’s legacy terminology will slowly fade away, often causing the documents from the acquired company to become “invisible” via the search process.  Using a thesaurus can greatly improve the user’s ability to find the information they need.

6.  Leave all options on the table.

Typing a term into a search box is not always the best path for a user to get what they need.  I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that folders are not recommended or that they are outdated.  In reality, there are situations where folders provide a very valid way for users to access information.  Folders may offer an opportunity to default information which improves information quality and end user satisfaction.  Multi-faceted taxonomies are not “out of the box” for most ECM vendors, but they do provide tremendous value for specific business applications.  A strong information architecture should provide flexibility in how information is accessed.

7.  Data governance is critical.

Developing the information architecture is not the end of the process, but rather just the beginning.  The information architecture will surely change over time.  Understanding what will change and controlling the impact of those changes is critical to the architecture’s long term viability.  Data governance should be a core component of any ECM governance plan.  From an information architect perspective, it is important to identify who is responsible for the various components of the architecture including core data sources, metadata standards, and taxonomies.

8.  Think big and think portable.

All too often, ECM deployments are departmental in nature.  As a result, only the implementing department’s needs are taking into consideration at the time of the design.  Other departments may rely on the information and should be a part of the information architecture design process.  For example, the Finance department may be implementing a solution, but Internal Audit department may benefit simply by being a part of the discussion to ensure that their needs are met as well.  Beyond the multiple departments, companies need to think multiple systems.  Many companies have more than one ECM system and, without consolidation, those systems should be aligned.  Developing information architecture standards will drive improved access to information across all platforms by providing a more consistent user experience.

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Some other posts in the series...

8 things you need to know to build an ECM strategy 

8 things you need to know about SharePoint governance 

8 things you need to know about using ECM for regulatory compliance  

8 things you need to know about information risk 

Wild Wednesday for #Email Training - If you're in Europe - Name your own price!

Wild Wednesday

On Wednesday 26th August, you can "Name your own Price" for the Online Email Management Practitioner (EMM) Course and learn how to improve the control of corporate emails -- FOR EUROPEAN CUSTOMERS ONLY.

The normal online course fee is £430 or € 630 but you can pay us what you think it's worth; pay what you can afford.

You will still receive 24-7 access to AIIM's Email Management (EMM) Practitioner course for 6 months.

The EMM Practitioner course provides you with a thorough understanding of a lot of different issues and you can download the table of content right here <http://www.aiim.org.uk/education/EMM_overview.asp>

Earn the EMM Practitioner designation after passing the online exams.

Why are we doing this?
Because we are committed to being your information management resource, while assisting you in making informed and efficient business decisions. No strings attached.

A few simple rules to remember!
Our IT infrastructure won't cope with this madness, so we need to get personal. To take advantage of this offer:

• Contact the training team on +44 (0)1905 727606 or alternatively email angela@aiim.org.uk to make the transaction.
• We will accept your price even if we are not able to get back to you by end of the day as long as it is logged between 8am and 5pm GMT+1 on the 26th August 2009 ONLY.
• Only credit and debit cards are accepted. (We are unable to accept Amex)
• Access will be given over the few days after the 26th