Traditionally, the primary role of a CIO is to secure and govern information, while also making technology investments that provide cost savings for the organization. Today, the CIO is being asked to both focus on cost reduction and add additional value through enterprise automation (EA). EA with Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Automated Intelligence (AI), and low-code/no-code tools are imperative to customer and employee satisfaction – a life blood of any business. Customers want easy access to information and quick answers to their questions. Employees want to put their energy toward meaningful work. CIOs are clear that it is critical to automate manual processes and free up employees to make higher value contributions through analysis and decision making instead of tedious data entry tasks. These investments ultimately contribute to the financial health of the business.
Beyond RPA, Zia Consulting embraces hyperautomation. This term is used to describe the use of multiple technologies, tools, and platforms to help an organization address relevant content issues with AI, Machine Learning (ML), event-driven software architecture, RPA, business process management (BPM), and intelligent business process management suites (iBPMS), Integration and federation platforms like Objective 3Sixty, low-code/no-code tools, packaged software, and other automation tools. In other words, RPA may be the current buzzword, but it cannot solve all content problems alone. Engaging Zia allows organizations to build solutions that address their specific business problems, wherever they are on the automation spectrum.
The need for automation is compounded by organizations having a massive amount of content that is poorly managed, or not managed at all. Documents exist in silos that make it difficult to search and utilize data to its full capacity. Shared drives, email, various ECM repositories, Dropbox, and USB drives are just some of the places documents are stored. Chaos ensues without better management and the risk of lawsuits, data breaches, and regulatory fines increases without better security through federation and proper governance. These issues are at the forefront of organizations as they try to move into the future of enterprise automation.
Zia takes customers on an hyperautomation journey and partners with Objective to bring federation to their customers using Objective 3Sixty. In 2022, Objective, a software organization out of Australia, conducted in-depth interviews with a group of CIOs from organizations in the public sector and regulated industries. Their goal was to uncover the key challenges that organizations face around managing information and their plans to address these challenges in the future. The results are interesting and worth sharing as we continue to help people manage their unstructured content and protect their data.
Three Key Trends from CIO Interviews
Creating order from chaos amidst the information explosion
CIOs identified losing control over their information, or digital creep, as their greatest concern. This involves finding a way to manage the vast amount of information that is constantly being created.
“41% of CIOs pinpointing information sprawl as their top challenge in managing information.”
Information explosion is opening up CIOs to increased risk
The intense focus on digital creep among CIOs is not surprising when you consider the amount of content produced on a day-to-day basis. Just over a decade ago, the world’s entire data storage capacity was around 487 exabytes. By 2025, it’s estimated that we’ll be creating the same volume in under two days.
CIOs in the public sector see the information explosion coming from both public information and that within the organization itself. The siloed nature of storage was also noted as a problem. When this information is not governed, it opens the organization up to greater reputational, legal, and security risks. For example, spikes in Redundant, Obsolete, and Trivial (ROT) data comes with a host of quality, governance, and usability issues.
Personally Identifiable Information at an increased risk
An even more concerning trend is the rise in breaches of personally identifiable information (PII). IBM’s 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report found that 80% of businesses had documents that compromised PII.
Another study by cybersecurity firm Varonis found that at 15% of organizations, more than a million files were accessible to every employee of the organization, including documents with sensitive personal information.
We’re data rich but information poor
There was a consensus among the CIOs surveyed that their organizations are “data rich but information poor”.
Many CIOs are looking for ways to connect and synthesize their data in order to gain insights and value from it. At the same time, there is a need to balance this with remaining compliant with record keeping legislation. This consideration remains a top priority for organizations in the public sector and regulated industries.
“21% of CIOs said their organization lacked a broader information and data management strategy, and many felt their information managers were more focused on records than the broader information management strategy.”
As they plan for a digital future, the interviewed CIOs are working towards a holistic approach to information management. Download the entire insight paper, How CIOs are Taming the Information Sprawl, for a full set of results.
The future of enterprise automation is exciting, but can also be stressful for organizations. In 2023, Zia Consulting is highly focused on making it possible for organizations to create an automation culture and begin implementing aspects that are sensible and within budget. Often this starts with converting unstructured content into structured data that sets organizations up for full automation of core back end processes.
Collectively, Zia and Objective are uniquely aligned to help organizations by providing federated access to data in disparate content repositories. Objective gives Zia an opportunity to target specific market pain-points that emphasize the unique capabilities of their platform. This improves the customer experience, decreases response times, and increases the accuracy of data by delivering it to one location. This process also helps organizations move the right content and systems to the cloud and integrate them with existing repositories. Feel free to reach out to us to see how we can support your specific business needs.
************
Zia Consulting, Inc is a systems integrator of content management, process management, document capture, and cloud sharing technologies. Zia helps businesses better manage, process, and secure documents with enterprise automation, federation, integration, and automated governance.
Objective 3Sixty offers a decentralized approach to managing and governing information. Built for complex environments with terabytes of data, Objective 3Sixty includes connectors to over 50 content repositories. This allows organizations to search and analyze information, manage content in-place and migrate from wherever it resides. This approach allows departments and teams within an organization to have responsibility over their own information governance practices, while still adhering to a set of overarching policies, procedures and standards set by the organization.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shelly Mahon, VP of Marketing
After a long career of researching, teaching, writing, editing, speaking, developing and marketing parent education programs and products, and serving as the executive director of a non-profit, Shelly has landed as the VP of Marketing for Zia Consulting. She works with the company’s marketing, sales and executive teams to implement a strategic marketing plan focused on lead generation, brand awareness, and client and partner support. She also conducts market research, and assists the sales team in supporting existing clients and moving prospective clients through the sales funnel. She is passionate about building relationships and working in a way that is focused on being efficient, effective, and thoughtful. When not at work, she is an avid cyclist, mountain-biker, skier, runner, and parent educator.