Remain Calm You’re Still a CIP

Picture Gildna Radner’s SNL character Emily Litella starting a monologue about wanting to bring an end to AIIM’s “see, I pee” promotion. Picture her rambling on until someone points out that “it’s CIP, as in Certified Information Professional.” Picture her offering up her classic: “never mind” and the skit would end.

As much as it would be comforting, I can’t hide behind a misunderstanding. When I wrote my previous post “Ding Dong the CIP,” I knew what I was doing. I was trying to come to the aid of an association that I have great respect for, and to show support for a decision that I was party to making.

I am writing this today, to acknowledge that the CIP is not dead. We don’t have the witch’s broom in our possession and we’re not going back to Kansas. The scarecrow can keep his brain, the tin man his heart, and the cowardly lion need not cower in the shadows of the forest, because, well, we’ve caused enough confusion, and besides, Christmas is only a week away.

Seriously, I’d love to explore all things CIP in this post but, being mindful of the rapidly approaching holidays, I’ll do my best to be brief, and I’ll try to stick to the facts.

Fact – The CIP is back. Again, you can read John Mancini’s explanation of why the Association made this decision. I will summarize this from the point of view of someone who was in the room when the mistake was made:

We misjudged the importance of the CIP within the industry. We heard, loud and clear, from passionate members of our community that the CIP has value and we decided to work to fix the CIP instead of getting rid of it.

I have no problem announcing this mea culpa because, I’d rather take the position of having been wrong than be accused of being obstinate after having been wrong.

Fact – AIIM is working to meet the demands of a community of professionals that is rapidly growing beyond the ranks or ECM and ERM folk. The things I wrote about in my earlier post are also true. More and more people are dealing with more and more issues around managing information, and many of them don’t identify with Information Management as a profession. AIIM will now work to adapt the CIP to fit a broader and growing body of knowledge. Fact – no organization is more capable of meeting that challenge.

Fact – AIIM is a viable and vitally important source for information about information. To the pundits that suggested that AIIM has had nothing to offer without the CIP, I would say “you couldn’t be more wrong.” The CIP is important, apparently more important than we realized. However, the CIP is far from the only good thing AIIM has to offer to the community of information professionals.

Hopefully, the CIP can grow as the body of knowledge that it is designed to certify one in, grows. Hopefully, AIIM, the AIIM community and the industry that AIIM serves can help focus attention on the CIP going forward. Hopefully, this will cause more people to see the value in holding that certification, and hopefully those people will realize that AIIM remains the preeminent source of research, standards, education and communication around that growing body of knowledge.

It’s a lot to hope for, but my history with AIIM tells me that it can all happen. I received, and accordingly I still hold a CIP. I have an ECM^m and an ERM^m. I still value the later designations more than the certification. The important thing is that when I needed to learn about handling information that doesn’t respond to a SQL query, I turned to AIIM and AIIM delivered. As that information grew in importance in my workplace, I continued to turn to AIIM for insight and guidance and AIIM continued to deliver. As that information worked its way onto multiple platforms, into the Cloud and onto my phone, I didn’t even have to turn to AIIM. People in the AIIM community had already prepared me for those changes. I heard them at Chapter meetings, at the AIIM Conference and, by proxy, through AIIM’s research, whitepapers and webinars.

Whatever your feelings about the CIP, don’t confuse the certification with the Association. Don’t look upon the CIP as an end point that, once achieved lets you walk away from the community. AIIM has much to offer me, you and the entire community of information professionals and the industries that serve those professionals.

Once good thing came from this mistake, the AIIM community showed that they can still get excited. More than ever, I am looking forward to the AIIM Conference in New Orleans and I hope to see you there.

What – No SharePoint?

Earlier this week a group of volunteers gathered in Woburn, MA to chart the educational course of the AIIM New England Chapter. We’ve been working for several years to “put the program on rails” but we decided to derail a couple of old standards. One of those appears to be the notion that we should have one event every year dedicated to SharePoint.

This used to be a slam-dunk event for the Chapter; in its heyday, tossing the word “SharePoint” after anything was an immediate win.

“Join the parishioners of the Triple Rock Baptist Church for a day of preaching and music, followed by a bake sale, potluck dinner and some SharePoint – Jake; get wise, you get to church”

We always tried to give our SharePoint events an AIIM-ish twist. We explored ‘Usability’ in SharePoint. We explored ‘Governance’ in SharePoint. We teamed up with the folks over at ARMA Boston to explore ‘Records Management’ in SharePoint and we tried to figure out what people are really doing with SharePoint. We had some success, but two things seem clear. OK, one thing seems clear and one seems a little fuzzy. Clearly, interest in SharePoint as a subject is waning among our members. Fuzzily, (oh my goodness, that is a word), the direction in which SharePoint is moving, or trying to move, is getting hard to predict. I’m not suggesting a doom and gloom scenario, but if we try to build an event around a product, we need to have a clear picture of the road ahead.

So, rather that market a “message for SharePoint” that has benefit to the broader masses of Information Professionals, we are going to offer a series of messages for that broader group that we hope will attract people from the SharePoint community, too.

Now that I’ve let AIIM NE’s agenda co-opt my blog space for a few hundred words, I think I’ll give you a break and bring this to a quick end. I would ask for a little help though. As many of you know, I am the Program Director for AIIM New England. We are trying to chart a different course this year, partly because, like many professional associations, we are struggling to find the right mix of topics that you (information professionals) will find interesting.

If you have a few minutes, would you please fill out this survey? I promise you that it will only take a few minutes of your time and the results are very important to us. We, by the way, are a small group of like-minded information professionals (well, maybe not entirely like-minded) who volunteer our time to spread the word and provide meaningful educational events at a ridiculously low price to the broad community of (say it with me now) information professionals.

Note: if you have problems with that survey link, for example, if WuFoo asks you to open an account, paste the URL below into your browser. We don’t care if you become a WuFoo customer (although we like them) but we really do want your input – https://aiimne.wufoo.com/forms/aiim-ne-2014-program-survey/

All Part of Information Services

In 2013, Peggy Winton introduced me for my presentation at the AIIM Conference by saying “Dan once said that he didn’t like the department name Information Services but recently he has come to embrace it.” I’ve shared that comment a number of times, mainly because it’s true.

I’m not sure when “IT” took over the terminology, but for the longest time, I wanted to be part of the IT-hype. Keep in mind; I’ve been doing this long enough to remember my department being called Data Processing. Information Services seemed so bland, so boring, as if it were on the edge of the technology. I came very close to asking my boss to change our department’s name before I realized that – it isn’t about the technology.

This past week, I chaired a meeting of our newly formed Communications Working Group. We were talking about curating content in advance of a somewhat formal launch of our long neglected Facebook page and a subsequent re-launch of our long-standing but tired website. Yeah, I didn’t provide the links for a reason.

We don’t drive income from either of those digital venues. They are both information only kind of sites. Still, they are important. The people who visit those sites appreciate the content that they find there, well at least the website. Revamping them will take time. It will take work. We’re going to spend a little money. We are going to make them better so that they better serve the people who visit them. As I was explaining our plans to my boss, he quipped: “It’s all part of Information Services.” He’s right of course and I’m glad I never asked to change that name.

Technology has changed since I began my career over 35 years ago, but technology has never really been the main attraction. All the time I sat there, concerned that I was missing out on the glory, I was missing the main event playing out right under my nose. Technology has changed – information has expanded.

When I began this journey, information was gleaned from assemblages of data. People were hardly telling us anything, it was the numbers that did the talking. Today, we are using technology to tame the volume and velocity of information streaming in from myriad sources. Over the years, information gained color, dimension, sound and action. Information used to arrive in our physical inbox (I still have one) and if we weren’t proximate to that inbox, we didn’t have the information. I can remember people calling me (because I am often one of the first people in the office) to ask me to find some file or binder and retrieve a salient bit of information for them. Information Services indeed.

On Monday, we will begin our curating process. We will use a library on SharePoint to store bits of information, links to information and ideas about the types of information we might share. The people in that Communications Working Group will check various boxes indicating their support or concern for sharing those artifacts to different constituents. The audiences range from small groups of key players whom we will target via email, to broad segments of the unidentified public at the end of a Twitter timeline. It’s all information.

The fact that we will be using SharePoint to support the categorization effort is a non-story, a back-story – it’s the technology story and it’s unimportant. A library, a few metadata columns, a series of alerts and maybe a few minutes of my admin’s time to make the library email-enabled and we’re done.

I can look back in this blog and find entries where that was the story that I was proud to tell. Technology is like that, it has the shiny-new-toy appeal that information never has had. But the shine wears off or a newer toy arrives or the toy breaks or you find that you can’t play with it everywhere you go. The notion that information surrounds us is truer today than at any time during my life. I manage information services within our small organization and I am proud of that.

Will You Be Able to Tell Your Stories?

I want to make this a short post. It’s a holiday weekend here in the US and I’m trying very hard not to do anything that reminds me of work. No SharePoint, no ECM, no AIIM. No metadata, governance and no search. OK, there’s going to be a tiny little bit of AIIM, but just as background material.

One of the friends of the AIIM New England Chapter is the National Archives and Record Center of Boston (NARA). We have had two recent events at their beautiful facility in Waltham, MA. Lately, they have been running a series commemorating the 100^th anniversary of the Cape Cod Canal. NARA shares various interesting bits of their archive (our archives) fairly regularly on their Facebook page. They have a ton of content and they have proven to be very good storytellers. Along with the story of the US, they have also shared a little history of the National Archives.

I’ve been fascinated by NARA’s presentation of US history but I’ve also been wondering if the future employees of our company will be able to tell our company’s story – our history. If your company is in and out of business in the span of 10 – 50 years, maybe nobody will ever care to hear your story. But, if you’ve been around a long time or if you’re planning to be around a while, someone will probably have to tell that story at some point. Do you know it? Will your successors know it? Will they be able to tell it accurately? Will they be able to make it interesting?

You know what you need to tell that story? You need the facts. You need the images. You need the people’s names and the key events. You need the video, the audio, and the presentations. In other words, you need the information.

For my readers in the US, I hope you’re enjoying a long weekend.

Single Stream Information Governance

Lately there are two information governance conversations going on. One is in the world around me and one is in my head. The one in the world is increasingly hyperbolic with threats of grave danger if we don’t get our collective act together soon. The conversation in my head is much more practical. Those voices are simply saying:

“Do NOT bring this up at work – do NOT use the phrase information governance in a conversation with your boss!”

The voice in my head is winning. I refuse to say that term in our office. Information governance has joined “records management” “platform” “metadata” and the myriad other terms destined to be met by the rolling eyes of my coworkers. Don’t ask me to champion this cause because doing so just strengthens their opinion that I don’t get it.

I do get it. Those people have a job to do, a business to run and the documents and information artifacts that are consumed and created by those jobs are simply that – artifacts. Artifacts to be curated by someone who cares. Do those artifacts have value? Of course they do, and they are paying my department to bring that value to the table.

During his opening message at the AIIM Executive Leadership Summit on Information Governance, John Mancini mentioned that one of the AIIM Board members had said “Information Governance is like my check engine light.” The comment invoked a mix of facial expressions that made me glad that John hadn’t identified me as being that Board member. I wrote about that comment on my other blog in a post called for the love of black boxes. I’m going to abandon that analogy here. I’m going to make one that the InfoGov folks will like even less. Information governance is like recycling.

Think about it:

When our little town in Connecticut started talking about recycling, it was a “save the planet” mission. There was lots of education, lots of discussion and lots of work for the precious few who tried. Recycling meant warehousing garbage collecting bags and boxes of neatly separated stuff before trucking it to bins behind our Public Works building. Very few people participated in the program. Most of the stuff just got hauled out to the curb with the rest of the trash. Tell me you haven’t seen an analogous situation in the information governance space.

Next, we moved to single-bin mode. We had our own bin, where we put newspapers in a bag, cardboard tied in bundles and cans and bottles loose in the bin. We had to carry the bin to the curb, and lots of stuff was left in the bin because the town only recycled certain plastics.

Then, a few years ago, we went totally single-stream – everything in one big wheeled bin. Oh yeah, I’m recylcin’ now baby.

It has to be this way. We all get it. We all know how important recycling is but if you don’t make it easy, most of us won’t do it or we won’t do it consistently or we won’t do it well enough. Information governance needs to get to the point where we have a big blue bin. This isn’t my area of expertise, but here are a couple of things that we’ve done that actually work:

Templates – We have a few solutions where we have tied templates to content types so that people can create documents in the library where the completed documents belong. The governance stuff is built in and nobody actually has to do much work.

ShareFile – Our decision to start using Citrix ShareFile was actually when this blog started to change its identity. Yes, ShareFile relies on folders and naming conventions to identify things, but I don’t see it as a step backwards. We are using it to share content with people outside of our organization. So, instead of people clandestinely avoiding SharePoint, they are happily embracing ShareFile. Give ‘em what they want! We have one set of documents, they are in our cloud and there are apps for everything. You could use any other cloud-based solution (Box, DropBox, Google Docs, OneDrive or iCloud). The point is, the solution has to meet the user where they work. Find a way to govern that solution and aid the business process instead of impeding it.

Services – These are black boxes of a sort, nobody sees the content, they only see the results, the information that they need. The most recent example of this is a survey we are about to conduct. The people who are interested will see the results, organized the way they want, but that’s it. We’ll take care of the bits of metadata needed to organize the results. We’ll take care of the permissions, the retention, the privacy and security around the ‘personally identifiable data’ and we’ll take care of all that other stuff nobody else cares about.

They won’t know that their information is compliant with regulations and in keeping with the policies our company has established. They won’t know, and I won’t tell them.

Apparently I am a Dumbass

Earlier this week, I gave two presentations in Orlando, FL. One, at the AIIM Conference was well received; it was about SharePoint and ECM and will take a few blog posts to sort out.

The second presentation was to the Service Provider Executive Forum (SPEF) and unfortunately, it’s very easy to describe. The vendors attending SPEF are the ones who sell scanning services, document storage, printers, copiers and scanners. SPEF was one of those conference-within-a-conference deals, and my presentation was part of a ‘User Feedback’ panel.

I worked hard on this presentation. It was a good presentation. It just wasn’t the message this group wanted to hear. I’m sorry for that, but I don’t have a great history with this industry. My message wasn’t a feel-good story. I talked about why we don’t use many of these services, and how our most recent encounter has gone somewhat off the rails. I had hoped that the organizer was right when she told me:

“They will appreciate your candor“

Here’s a tip: if you ever hear those words, run. Drop everything, don’t tweet about it, don’t snap a picture, don’t think twice – just run.

Our story in a nutshell – we are small. This industry’s story in a my-opinion-nutshell – they are commodity brokers seeking a sale at any cost.

The best analogy I can come up with is that buying these services or products is like buying a digital camera; they all take pictures, they all have good battery life and they all let me move pictures to my PC, tablet, Cloud storage, etc. Once I decide the few, somewhat unique features (zoom, video, and form-factor) that I want, it comes down to picking the one that’s most comfortable.

The problem – that we have experienced – is that some salespeople want to be the mystic swami in your life. They don’t want informed customers. They don’t want to hear your story; they want to tell you theirs.

My presentation carefully presented our position, our real-life experience and then I took “questions” I put that in quotes because most of what I heard were not questions per se.

Why didn’t you buy a scanner? Scanning to SharePoint from dedicated scanners seems to provide more robust options than scanning from multi-function copies (MFCs)…who knew? More importantly, who cares? The fact of the matter is that we don’t have a space for a dedicated scanner, nor do we have the volume to justify one. In addition, we only want to have to learn how to use one device.

Why didn’t you do an RFI first?  Seriously, an RFI for two MFCs?

You’re ignoring the money you could save by outsourcing all the scanning to us. I reminded this person that I had explained the very, very high cost of teaching someone how to classify and index our documents.

Finally, a white knight emerged. Addressing the audience, he said:

“What I’m hearing is that you guys are saying that Dan is a dumbass“

Ah…well…thanks?

His point was that I failed to engage with them according to their preferred sales method. Apparently, from their perspective, that was my mistake.

One woman came up to me afterwards and said “I don’t think you’re a dumbass, but this managed metadata thing sounds like a unique requirement.” I reminded her that it’s a mainstream feature of a major product. I didn’t invent it; I just want to use it. More importantly, it was a written requirement that we were willing to explain.

One guy followed me to my next presentation, all the way telling me that if I had done an RFI he would have been able to explain why we needed a scanner. I explained, again, why we chose MFCs over a dedicated scanner.

He turned up again later as I was boarding the bus to the conference social event. He started telling me about the features of the scanner. The one we don’t want – as if he thought that if he gave the same pitch often enough I might just buy one. My friend (who sells a high-end ECM product) said:

“This guy sells hammers. You have a screw, but he still has to try and sell you a hammer.” He added, “It’s a sales technique we call show-up and throw-up.”

I’ll leave you with the message in my final two slides. When we look for vendors to help us, we look for a vendor who will:

• Be a business partner with us
• Let us do the portions of the project that we feel we need to closely control
• Accept that we know our business and know enough about yours to evaluate you/your product or services as compared to others that are available
• Think long term; think beyond this sale and this commission.

Oh, and don’t lie to me. I can handle the truth.

No Fools in Florida

Early next April, April 1-3 to be specific, I’ll be attending the AIIM Conference in Florida. I’ll be speaking at that conference, and even though it falls in between two great SharePoint conferences, I think the AIIM Conference has the more important message. SharePoint is the tool; AIIM is all about using the tool (any tool) correctly – for the right purpose – on the right material – for the right reasons. The title of my presentation is “From Hoarders to Pickers and Pawn Stars” and here is a glimpse (reblogged from my AIIM blog) of what I will be talking about.

OK. I admit it. My session title is a cheesy attempt to cash in on the popularity of a few History Channel shows. In my defense, I do feel the title speaks to both the problem with enterprise content management (ECM) today and the solution. Simply put, we aren’t managing content; we are hoarding stuff.

Stuff we think might have value, stuff we think we have to keep, and stuff we simply lost track of so long ago that we no longer know what it is. I have stuff like this in my inbox; you may have some of this stuff too. If you don’t, you don’t have to look very hard to find it. Maybe it’s in a shared drive; maybe it’s on your C: drive; maybe it’s still in a file cabinet; and maybe it’s already made its way into SharePoint.

There is a difference between the hoarder mentality and the picker mentality – and this can affect your organization. Hoarders keep stuff. Pickers ignore junk and seek out that which has value. If you watch the shows, you realize that hoarders don’t want to be pickers, they just want to keep stuff – ALL the stuff. For the most part in business, we aren’t dealing with the kind of hoarder whose stuff is about to bury them. We’re dealing with the people that the pickers find; the people with large warehouses, multiple outbuildings, or a fleet of abandoned school buses and RVs dotting their property. Hoarding doesn’t hurt them; it only hurts the generations that will inherit that stuff. That’s us, that’s business hoarding. We pile document after document, spreadsheet after spreadsheet and PowerPoint presentations from everywhere into all the virtual outbuildings our network has to offer – and they never fill up!

To combat the hoarders, some of us have to become pickers and some of us have to become family. As pickers, we have to ask questions like: “Where did you get this?” “How much do you think this is worth?” But, as family, we have to ask the really hard questions: “Why on Earth would anyone want this?” “What do you expect me (or my coworkers) to do with this?” Not to mention: “Don’t we have 10 or 20 of these? Do we really need this one too?”

As for becoming Pawn Stars, that’s the tricky part. One difference between Pickers and Pawn Stars is that Pawn Stars know how to repurpose stuff by turning it into more valuable stuff. They know that with the right amount of work, something interesting can become something truly remarkable. That’s the real goal. We have to find that content that has value and we have to make the right investment to amplify that value and bring it to the surface.

Let me give you a short example: We have an engineering department that performs loss control inspections of the facilities we insure. We keep those inspection reports, all of them, forever. We have them on paper, on microfilm, on microfiche, in Word Perfect files, Word files and PDFs. Up until a couple of years ago, nobody could access those reports without a guide and a Sherpa. Today, we have several years’ worth of those reports in SharePoint, easily accessible by facility, by insurerd, by engineer. Recently, we added a workflow so engineers, who are researching older reports, can quickly add them to SharePoint and expand the library of “managed” reports. We still have to work on throwing away the other media, but I’m happy that we are extracting value from the pile.

I’ll see you in Orlando.

We Need Some Pickles

The word of the day is ‘Find” as in the word is not ‘search’ – people don’t (really) want to search, they want to find. That was the message offered up by Steve Weissman in our recent training sessions, and that was the message offered up by Bob Larrivee when I attended his AIIM ECM Master class several years ago. In fact, Bob was the first person I ever heard use the word “findability” in a sentence. Bob and Steve are correct, people want to find stuff. I might like to replace “Search” in SharePoint with “Find” just for that reason. I’m sure there are people who would tell me how to do that, “it’s just CSS” or “it’s just a bit of script” or “it’s just tweaking the master page” but I won’t really do it.

I won’t do it because we are conditioned to search. I’m not sure if that is Google’s fault, or Yahoo’s fault, perhaps it’s AOL’s fault, but ‘search’ rules and ‘find’ lags pretty far behind, even when we search. Despite that fact, finding is the goal. The problem with search is, well there are too many problems with search to talk about in one blog post, so let’s talk about find instead. How do we find what we are looking for in SharePoint?

We know where stuff is – The easiest way to find anything is to look where that thing is supposed to be. Well, unless you’re looking for something of mine. If I know that a particular type of report is in a document library in the Engineering site on SharePoint, it’s going to be pretty easy to find. That’s why it’s so important to design SharePoint in such a way that it supports your organization’s content. Of course, designing SharePoint isn’t just creating the site structure, we have to consider:

• Who should be able to find this stuff? – Permissions
• What do they need to see? – Views
• When do they need to see it? – Alerts
• How do we make views and alerts, not to mention search work better? – Metadata

Those attributes all help to make it easy to find what we are looking for.

We know what stuff is – We have lots of content in our company, but we have a relatively small number of types of content. Some of those types are generic: presentations, correspondence, contact lists, etc. and some of those things are unique to our business (or at least to insurance) like inspection reports. SharePoint supports both types of content, but it takes more effort to support the unique content. However, the results often make the effort worthwhile. In reality, a loss-control inspection report is just a Word document but if I am looking for one, my results are much better if restrict my view (or my search) to a specific Content Type than if I include all Word, or worse all Office documents.

We know what people do with stuff – This is where we have the opportunity to make content management shine. When you go to the grocery store, you will likely find rolls, jars of pickles, bags of chips and slices of cheese near where you can buy stuff that can be grilled. That’s because the people who lay out the store know that if you’re buying hamburger patties, you need, or can be tempted into thinking you need those other items. We’re not selling content on SharePoint, but we can make someone’s experience better if we bring together the content that they might want to see with the content they have selected. For example, we are working on a site where people can look at the recommendations that have resulted from those loss-control inspections. If I am looking at a recommendation, I am very likely to ask:

How many recommendations have we made at this place?

Was this recommendation accepted, rejected, explained away or ignored?

How many times have we made recommendations similar to this one at other plants?

Of course, with the right metadata and enough clicking, people could probably configure a list to answer some of those questions while they are looking at it. With a little more time, they could build a View to preserve those settings, but very often, that isn’t enough. In my example, we let them click on certain attributes in one list and then we present them with a page of web parts showing a composite picture from several lists – lists that are linked by metadata – so they can find the rolls and the pickles easily.

Search is a native element of SharePoint. With metadata and text indexing, we can make search return more and perhaps better results. By thinking about where we put our content, what our content is and how people will want to use it, we can use other features within SharePoint to help people find what they are looking for.

How Do You SharePoint?

Maybe I’m missing a verb in the title, or maybe “to SharePoint” has meaning, suggests action of a sort or at least makes a few of us shake our heads. I left out the verb, because I’m not sure what the right one is. How do you “use” SharePoint, “get rid of” SharePoint, “stop bad SharePoint sites from spreading like kudzu?” “get the most out of” SharePoint, “teach people how to use” SharePoint, and so on. Do you have answers for any of those questions? Do you live in New England? Can you spare some time on Wednesday, November 13^th? There’s a lot of questions, but if you can answer a few of them, join some of your New England neighbors in Cambridge, MA on the 13^th – share a snack, share some coffee and share your answers, or at least your reactions.

On November 13^th, the New England Chapter of AIIM (AIIMNE) will hold our second educational event of the program year and, no surprise, it’s focused on SharePoint. In case you aren’t aware, AIIMNE is doing events differently this year – well sort of differently. AIIMNE events have always been fairly lively, with a healthy amount of audience participation. This year, we decided to tap that energy and add some value for our members in the process. Each event is organized to encourage that audience participation and we are then publishing a white paper from the event. To get an idea of how this works, check out the white paper from our first event, where we focused on handling secure and confidential information amid an always connected always sharing workforce. Go ahead, download that report, it’s free and we aren’t even asking for your email address.

For this next event, we arranged for Marc D. Anderson, Co-founder and president of Sympraxis Consulting, Derek Cash-Peterson from Blue Metal Architects and Russ Edleman, president of Corridor Company to join us to get things started. Between them, these guys have seen just about every kind of SharePoint or SharePointery there is (hey, if we’re making up words). Steve Weissman, President of the Holly Group will be on hand to facilitate the discussion, should that be necessary; our audiences have a tendency to fire at will. Not to worry, our speakers are adept at crowd control.

What’s the goal? Well, besides gathering fodder for our next Event Experience report (as we call them), I hope to learn something. I hope to hear about ways of using SharePoint that I haven’t considered. I hope to return to work on Wednesday afternoon with a head full of ideas that will keep me busy until the next SharePoint event. I’ve heard some of these guys speak before, so if I’m going to get a head full of new ideas, I need you to be in the room. I want to hear your SharePoint Story (ooh, there’s a catchy name).

If you’re planning to join us, we will be at the Microsoft building at 1 Cambridge Center. It’s the one in the picture up in the corner. It’s not the building at 1 Memorial Drive. It’s a great facility and the Chapter truly appreciates being able to use it. We will also be using Microsoft’s Internet connection so if you can’t be in Cambridge, consider joining us on-line as we stream the event live. We stream a mix of presentations and video and we do our best to submit the comments and questions from our remote audience into the discussion in the room. You can read or share this event with others at the Chapter website, and if you are ready to sign-up, you can do that over at Eventbrite. But wait, there’s more. If you register by November 1st, enter the discount code “sharepointstories” and save $5. Thanks for reading!

For the Children

Last Tuesday, in a post on my AIIM blog, I described my effort to begin crafting an Information Policy that will apply to one of our most recent SharePoint solutions. Eventually, I hope to have a collection of these policies bundled into a comprehensive information policy for our company. That may not happen in the 5 to 7 years that remain before I retire, but I’ve heard that it’s good to have goals. This first attempt was presented to the department earlier this week and the draft was well received, even after I explained that most of the work that remains will fall to them. We moved onto the other agenda items, but we kept coming back to the information policy, and I began to realize just how important this document is going to be. The point where this became most clear was well into the meeting when one person asked

“…how is this [SharePoint site] really any different than the K: drive?”

It’s not the first time we’ve been asked this question in the years that we have been trying to move our content from shared folders to SharePoint, but this was perhaps the easiest it has ever been to answer that question.

“It’s different because we can answer three questions for every document on this site that we can’t usually answer for content on the K: drive:

1) Why did we create this document?

2) Who was involved in its creation and disposition?

3) Why did we keep it?”

The inability to answer those three questions is why most of the content on the K: drive will end up staying there. Once the shared drives become read-only; it will take a lot of effort to explore the content and answer those questions. That task will get even harder when the people who were here as those documents were created retire. The loss of tacit knowledge has already begun to affect our ability to classify older documents, without reading them and without a little guess work, and it’s only going to get worse.

One of the tasks that this group has to accomplish is to move a lot of historic content into the site we created for them. This effort will be guided by the information policy, and the experience will help them refine the policy. A good example of how this will work came as we demonstrated Boost Solutions’ Classifier product for them. I’ve written about this product before, but in a nutshell, it lets you quickly tag and process a lot of content that has similar qualities. We stumbled upon two documents that looked like good candidates, a draft contract from a vendor and a list of changes that our staff had proposed. Before we could process these, the head of the department asserted that “we should not keep these, because, in this case we only care about the final contract” which we also had. This led to a short discussion of the kinds of documents where we want to keep drafts and review commentary and the kinds of documents where we don’t. This distinction mapped well to the library structure we had created and there was a placeholder section in the draft information policy for that kind of management decision to be documented.

Other elements of the policy are equally important for helping future employees answer those three questions. For example, there is a section titled Definitions. In the draft of that section, I included the words, library names and metadata elements that need to be clearly defined. Two library names that I included were Internal Communication and External Communication – why do we need to define these? Well, maybe we could live with one definition, but are we talking about external to the company or external to this function? Another definition was a word we have all seen too many times in business, “stakeholders” – when does someone we do business with become a stakeholder? That’s important because it’s a metadata term used in a lot of places, and if stakeholders are involved, the apparent importance of the document increases.

In our board meetings at the New England Chapter of AIIM, we often describe a documentation task as being necessary “for the children.” In other words, we are taking the time to document something that we figured out, but that future board members shouldn’t have to. That’s the difference between managed content and a bunch of files in a shared folder. That’s why you create information policies and that’s why you pay attention to the definitions, guidelines and clear instructions that people include in that very important document. Of course, the policies can change, so when they do, the document should be revised.