not when there is no longer anything to add,
but when there is no longer anything left
to take away.”
–Antoine de Saint-Exupery, 1900-1944
Hello – this is Ben Herring, Infonomics editor-in-chief, comin’ back atcha once again. I wanted to announce some big changes coming to you in the near term; you’ve seen Rich Payne’s terrific recent post to this blog, and Rich is one of several new bloggers we’ll bring you in this space to comment on enterprise content management in the areas of government, healthcare, compliance, finance, and more.
Infonomics is also working on a striking new website that will look and function far different from the product see today, the point being to greatly increase our value to you—to help you go right to the information you need, no matter where you fit in the increasingly broad spectrum of ECM. User-generated-content uber alles will be the overriding hierarchy, and if you’ve got something to add to the conversation as we move forward, please contact me at bherring@aiim.org.
I hope you had a wonderful, classic celebration of Independence day. I certainly did – I started the day at the nation’s finest coffee pub, St. Elmo’s (www.stelmoscoffeepub.com) in Alexandria, Va. (hi Nora!).
That was followed by a terrific family reunion/cookout where I threw restraint to the wind and pigged on a burger AND a dog and ice cream. Nothing earth shaking there. But ask me what I did earlier that day for the four hours I spent with repeated cups o’ joe whilst sitting in my favorite humongous, soft & what Martha, I assume, would refer to as a "shabby/chic"crushed velvet chair in the corner? Going through my professional reading—on which I was far behind.
But...rather than seeming like work, it was utterly exhilarating! I could relax, concentrate, and focused, away from the pressures and hassles of work. New ideas soaked into my brain. I came away “pumped” with energy and motivation. And what happened on Friday (July third), was equally exhilarating. Like many folks, I tend to stash things in files to prepare for major projects, and then when I get to the project, go through it, fish out what’s truly valuable, and trash the rest.
But if you’re like most writer/editors, you ALSO have tertiary stashes of paper that go far beyond that: feature ideas scribbled on napkins, valuable story notes that never get filed, valuable “stuff” from professional meetings and organizations; printed-out emails that may be quite old but bear saving to jog your memory, unorganized business cards, inspirations, microepiphanies … you get the picture.
And, in concert with professional reading, this stuff just piles up and up, and I can never seem to clean it up at work because there are always much greater priorities, and because it seems like “cheating” to do so at work. So I left the office for the three-day weekend on Thursday, and standing in the lobby, realized I simply had to go back up to my office, put all of that professional reading and clutter in a giant boat bag, and make it go away before Monday. So I spent four hours on the paper clutter on Friday, and another four on Saturday (July 4th) on the professional reading.
Again, I could put REAL thought into what should be done with this paper without acting rashly. Most of the paper clutter went into the circular file. And what remains is quite valuable and will be acted up/properly filed Monday. Such a relief! Such liberation.
In reality, I think that doing what I did over the weekend—professional reading and decluttering—is legitimate work that one could justifiy doing “on the clock;” this is, after all, “enterprise content management,” but I also know that that will never work for me—and that I’ve found a solution that DOES works for me--and one that I actually enjoy.
Now let’s talk about e-clutter---or more to the point, e-decluttering. There are literally billions upon billions of emails hogging space on hard drives and servers across the nation, and the vast majority are pure junk. And, as experts tell us, good email management can reduce that backlog by 90 percent—and now you’re getting into real savings: you’re reducing storage demands, saving energy, and you’re greatly speeding up the process of search—whether for yourself or the other guy’s lawyer when it comes to expensive discovery, and you’re cleaning out your brain to boot—because the one, true, indisputable miracle of e-decluttering is that it will make practically any job you need to do easier through clarity and reductionism.
In a just-released "Industry Watch" study (www.aiim.org/PDFDocuments/36327.pdf), AIIM has found that a third of organizations have no policy to deal with legal discovery and that 40% might need to search back-up tapes to find emails that could be relevant to litigation. The AIIM survey also found that 84% would have no way to justify why emails of a certain age or type had been deleted. Only 19% have the facility to move important emails into a document or records management system, or a dedicated email management system, and 45% of respondents are still filing their important emails in personal Outlook folders.
For all of these reasons, e-decluttering should not be left to chance. It should be more than recommended; it should be mandatedby all enterprises, with regular training and coaching for all staff to clearly distinguish what should be eliminated and what should not and that ever-critical taxonomy. That can be paired with an annual or even a quarterly hard-copy decluttering day or half-day wherein employees can report to work in blue jeans and really get down to business.
To sum it all up, decluttering, both hard and soft, is and should be a structured, core element of any enterprise content management system, and, based upon my own three decades working of working at a wide range of enterprises, I don’t think most enterprises are doing enough of it or have any idea just how valuable it can be.
AIIM has the solution to this email mess. You'll find all the training and resources you'll need from AIIM's Email Management Certificate program, which offers the following:
Concepts and technologies for:
Find complete details at:
www.aiim.org/Education/Email-Management-Training-Courses.aspx
Kind regards,
Ben
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