Today’s organizations receive a disappointing “C minus” for creating, capturing, and sharing information like emails and documents, according to a recent industry survey from the Association for Intelligent Information Management (AIIM). Much of the new “information chaos” is caused by the fragmentation of content storage because of an increasingly distributed work environment, brought on by last year’s COVID lockdowns. To address information chaos, AIIM recommends “piggybacking information management initiatives on existing investments.”
And there isn’t a bigger or more strategic investment to piggyback today than Microsoft 365. Over the last year, organizations have made massive investments in Microsoft 365, in part, to impart virtual meeting capabilities to remote workers through Microsoft Teams. During the recent lockdown, use of Teams skyrocketed from 13 million users in 2019 to 145 million users in April 2021. The drive to Teams was accompanied by a widespread migration to other Microsoft 365 apps as well, including SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and even Exchange Online.
While the introduction of new useful apps and services has been a boon to business, it has also introduced serious new challenges for information governance and compliance. At its core, Microsoft 365 is a set of apps and services, with many overlapping capabilities. Case in point; Microsoft 365 emails and documents may be stored in Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, and even Teams. And with many workers toiling away from home office ‘silos,’ it’s anybody guess where emails and documents actually end up. The result? ‘Information chaos.’ Gartner sums up the challenge in their recent “2021 Audit Plan Hot Spots Report”:
“As organizations rapidly scale their remote work capabilities and deploy new technology, IT capacity is increasingly strained… Organizations are still struggling to successfully implement and enforce data governance frameworks. As they accumulate new types of data and rely on fragmented storage systems, they are more exposed to regulatory, ethical, and data security risks.”
Enforcing data governance
Enforcing data governance is a problem, in part, because many emails are documents of record that need to be retained for compliance or regulation requirements. And with Microsoft 365, finding important emails and documents across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook is a huge challenge… both for remote workers and for information and compliance managers.
So, while Microsoft 365 might be part of the problem, when used together with the new harmon.ie 365, it is also part of the solution… Because harmon.ie 365 makes it easy to capture, classify, and discover emails (and documents) across multiple Microsoft 365 apps; SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Outlook.
