A recent industry survey from the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM) finds that organizations receive a disappointing “C minus” for creating, capturing, and sharing information like emails and documents.
Yikes.
With people increasingly working from home, a lot more information is being dispersed through email and document attachments. That’s not surprising, considering only 1 in 3 organizations felt prepared for remote work prior to the COVID crisis, according to the survey.
This information deluge is not expected to slow down any time soon. The survey also found that organizations expect their information volume to grow by 4.5X (on average) over the next two years. And 57% of that information will be unstructured, including emails, text and other document formats.
Some organizations have been able to make the adjustments but many more are lagging behind. The Harvard Business Review notes that the productivity gap between the ‘best and the rest’ has widened during the pandemic. The article states, “we estimate that the best companies – those that were already effective in managing the time, talent, and energy of their teams – have grown 5% to 8% more productive over the last 12 months.” The rest of us have some work to do to catch up. Where do we get started?
According to the survey, the two most important information challenges remain “digitizing, automating, and integrating processes” (25% say it’s the top challenge), followed closely by “managing information throughout its lifecycle” (24%). These responses are remarkably consistent across different roles.
The report provides six recommendations to information managers, as follows:
- Understand that we are in the disruption business: IIM – because it involves people and how they work – is THE most disruptive technology you can implement in an organization.
- Think strategically about the pace of change. Take a breather for five seconds to do a little bit of cleanup before you try to keep moving forward, full steam.
- Fail fast. Really fast. If a leader or strategy or solution is failing, admit it. Replace who or what is not working and move on, quickly.
- Engage users “where they live.” Ask your users how they are using your information systems, how they’re storing their data, and the pain points they are experiencing.
- Hone and personalize your C-Suite elevator pitch. Look at records management as being part evangelist/salesman.
- Do not underestimate the power of a seat at the table. Information governance should have a seat at the vendor intake process within the organization. You should assess each product and understanding exactly what types of information that product is going to be touching, managing, using, and storing.
harmon.ie to the Rescue
The good news is that the new harmon.ie 365 offering is perfectly poised to help you with today’s information management challenges. Here’s how:
- First of all, harmon.ie 365 delivers on AIIM recommendation #4, “Engage users where they live” in Outlook, and now, also in Teams.
- It brings together all the Microsoft 365 apps where users store content – SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive, into a single, easy to use Outlook sidebar. Capturing and classifying emails and documents is a simple drag and drop operation.
- Need to share content? Select a document in the harmon.ie sidebar and right-click the mouse to launch Microsoft’s modern Share facility.
- Can’t find an email or document? No problem. harmon.ie 365 has just introduced a host of new discovery tools, like flexible search across all Microsoft 365 apps, unique filters, views, and favorites.
With harmon.ie 365, you’ll go from a ‘C-‘ to an ‘A+’ for creating, capturing, and sharing information like emails and documents, in no time.
Try a 14-day evaluation of harmon.ie 365 here.
