As many of you are aware, AIIM has released a video series on the Top 10 Excuses Not to do Document Management. The videos are light-hearted and pretty funny. After watching and chuckling along with them, I started thinking -- most of those excuses are fairly pathetic. Everyone seems to have a sense of the value of information along with a feeling that it's out of control. Those in this industry KNOW that tools are available that work, and work well (and can deliver a real return on investment). SharePoint. Xythos. Xerox. IBM. Digitech. SpringCM. EMC. Large or small, there's a product out there that's going to work for you.
Given the importance of knowledge in today's economy (and, really, that's not a new concept either, there's just more information readily available to be turned into knowledge), not devoting thought into a strategy for managing that content is, well, stupid.
What sparked this was a series of interviews I listened to while running the other day. One of the news programs on NPR was focused on the U.S. auto industry and why it couldn't produce fuel-efficient cars that Americans wanted. Now, there was one guy that said, to paraphrase Obama, "Yes we can." However, there was a line-up of excuses about how Americans didn't want those cars, it would take a while to retool plants, the auto-workers union, blah, blah, wah, wah. I just found myself suddenly thinking: This is the country that put a man on the moon? What the ---- happened to us?
Instead of looking for solutions, everyone was looking for or making up excuses. Rather than looking ahead, it was a look at how hard it would be to get to where the industry needs to be and blinking and back-peddling about the amount of work.
It seems that too many companies are doing the same when it comes to the basic blocking and tackling of managing their documents. We in the industry need to do a MUCH better job of educating the wider market that, "Hey, there are tools for you to use."
Now that I've got that off of my chest, I wanted to share a few more of the excuses we received from our readers. Chuckle away (they are funny), but I also can't help but shake my head and wonder and a little bit of disgust at how facile these excuses really are.
- That sounds like a lot of work, and I am retiring next year.
- Our staff need paper originals.
- But we just go everyone using SharePoint 2001.
- What if something happens to the server? All our documents will be lost!
- We've never done it that way.
- Our documents have no business value after 30 days. That's the time required to put them in the system, so DM is not for us.
Thanks for reading,
Bryant
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