"I Want Certainty and Control - How Do I Get It?"

Everyone wants certainty. Everyone wants control.

We like knowing what’s going to happen. We like knowing where our data is, who’s accessing it, and how it’s being used.

Back in 1999, we had it.

Sure, the tools were clunky. File shares weren’t sexy. People struggled to find things, and security was a manual process.

But we knew where everything lived. We owned it. We managed access.

We had certainty and control and it worked.

Like what you see? Want to see more? I invite you to chat with my team at Shinydocs.

Then, the "Promises"
Came...

The industry promised us something better:

“Cheaper. Faster. Easier. More secure.”

And we bit. We moved our content, our workflows, and eventually our questions — into systems we don’t own and can’t fully understand.

Now, someone else decides:

• How fast we can retrieve our own data
• How AI analyzes it
• What visibility we’re allowed to have
• How much do we pay to get access to our own data

And somewhere along the way, we lost the two things we cared about most.

What is Certainty and Control, Really?

It means for every question you have about your data, you get a complete, trusted answer — instantly, securely, and without third-party eyes.

And control? It’s knowing:

• What data you have
• Where it lives
• Who can see it
• What’s being done with it
• And how you’ll keep it protected

Combined, it means you have Google-like knowledge of your own data, and your users have Google-like access to your data securely.

But right now, most companies don’t have this. They’ve ceded that responsibility to someone else.

"So, How Do I Get It Back?"

Start by getting clear on what not to do:

• Don’t hand over your IP — or your questions about it — to a black-box cloud AI you don’t control.
• Don’t rely on tools that only answer questions from fragmented or incomplete data sets.
• Don’t confuse “convenient” with “controlled.”

Here's what to do instead:

• Bring your data back under your ownership — and know where everything lives
• Build private content workflows that are visible, searchable, and auditable
• Give your team Google-like access to your data — but on your own terms
• Ensure security by design, not as an afterthought

You can still use modern infrastructure. You can still use AI. You can still scale. But you need to build with the assumption that certainty and control are non-negotiable.

Here’s an example of a customer that did it and they’re winning awards. They control their data and they understand it and they’re doing a different technique than just ceding it to someone else.

Also, when I talk to folks like James Merklinger, it's literally by policy and law, these firms and their clients want assurances that your data is appropriately protected. This is the kind of certainty that we're talking about.