Across the public sector—from federal to state to local governments—agencies and departments are looking for solutions to the content chaos that exists today. Whether due to mandates like the Presidential Memorandum on Managing Digital Records or the continued cost and complexity of government document processing, organizations are looking for ways to better manage content and automate business processes.
If we define content chaos as the inability to properly find, manage, and secure documents and records, it’s clear from metrics that most government departments and agencies (if not all) are facing content chaos in 2015. Issues range from the amount of time knowledge workers spend searching for documents, the times the wrong version of a document is used, or the significant investments that companies are forced to make in human capital to staff information governance or records management groups. And all of this is due to the failure of technology to address these areas. Perhaps the single largest area of concern is around content security within the government, with case of Edward Snowden never very far from anyone’s mind.
How did we get here? Let’s discuss three key developments that we believe have led to the content chaos of today.
1. ECM Avoidance
It’s interesting to consider that all of the “find, manage, and secure” issues of today could possibly have been avoided if the legacy ECM vendors of the past had focused on one simple issue: user adoption. Instead, we saw an almost myopic focus by users on ECM avoidance, looking for any way to avoid logging into complex and time-consuming ECM systems. Across virtually industry, surveys show less than 50% of content being managed in ECM systems, with utilization numbers in the 10% (or less) being not uncommon.
2. The Dropbox Problem
Technologies like Dropbox, Box.net, or other simple “file, sync, and share” have led to major concerns around security as well as creating silos of content within agencies and department, This is happening in spite of the incredible technology investments and advancements made into simplifying the way that documents are shared—particularly with those outside of your organization.
3. SharePoint Sprawl
Across the government, metrics show that SharePoint has achieved a level of pervasiveness that few would have predicted even a few years ago. However, from a recent AIIM survey, now published as an AIIM Industry Watch paper titled Connecting and Optimizing SharePoint, some interesting themes emerge:
- Only 11% of respondents see their SharePoint deployment as a success
- Most organizations use SharePoint primarily for collaboration—with only 30% using it widely for document management and only 11% for records management
- Only 13% say SharePoint aligns with their information governance policies
- Only 6% have true federated search—the ability to search across both SharePoint and other document repositories and silos
The Solution: Adhere for Alfresco: Government
So how do you address all of the topics above? It was exactly this question that led us to create Adhere for Alfresco: Government—our solution to the content chaos that exists today. Adhere is the glue that binds together and secures content across your organization and outside. Throughout your ECM systems and content silos, we can deliver to users what an ECM solution should have always meant to them. Our Adhere solution today provides:
- SharePoint Integration and Synchronization
- Federated Search
- Automated Workflow/BPM
- Embedded In-Process Classification and Extraction
- Simplified Information Governance
- Universal Content Security (UCS)
- Enterprise Mobile ECM
Zia delivers solutions across the public sector, at the federal, state, and local level. We have helped departments ranging from human services to court systems, and worked both in civilian and defense agencies.
- Specific focus areas include:
- SharePoint Compliance and Security
- Legacy ECM Migrations with Zia ActiveMigrate
- Digitization of Records
- Automated Document Processing with Capture and BPM
- Secure Government Cloud
If you would like more information on Adhere for Alfresco, please feel free to contact me personally at probinson@ziaconsulting.com or visit our website at www.ziaconsulting.com.