Information Ecosystem - Putting your Documents in the System of Record

Metaphor: If you were put in charge of fisheries - would you insist that all the fish were put in the lake beside your office?

Expectation: "Our Information Management would be better if we could put all the documents in a single system."

Reality: "Documents are part of an Ecosystem and not a single place!"

SharePoint and other document repositories are great.  They support records management features needed for critical content.  So the knee-jerk idea is to put "everything" in there.  Retire the file shares, force people to work a "modern" way.

This has been the orthodox thinking ever since everyone just assumed that everything should be in the cloud.  Again, cloud is great.  It is nice to not have to power your own infrastructure.  BUT, it only works if you can get everything in there, everyone enjoys using it without training, and it performs better than what you had before.

This all seems pretty negative - what can we actually do?

1. Start with a document Inventory.  What do I have and where is all of it.
2. Do some document Analysis.  "Tag" the documents in your inventory as to its value and business use.
3. Take some Action: Migrate the document that are definitely Records into as proper system.  Delete the "ROT" (Redundant, Obsolete, Trivial documents), and then live with what is left - give people a tool to search all of it, and they will be happy.