Tagged: SharePoint

5 Questions about Information Governance in 5 Minutes: What’s Your Favorite Information Governance Story?

Here is the fifth and final (except for a bonus video coming soon) in our five-part video series where I asked 30 Information Governance the same 5 questions. This video is the longest of the five, as I ask our interviewees to tell us their favorite story about IG –  something that illustrates what it is, why it is hard, challenges they have faced and so on. There are some great stories, so get yourself a fresh cup of coffee and a snack and enjoy.

A New E-Discovery Pot ‘O Gold: The SharePoint Online Recycle Bin

Today Microsoft announced a new feature for its hosted SharePoint service that will inevitably rear its head in future ugly e-discovery disputes: a recycle bin for entire SharePoint sites. According to Microsoft, “business is full of “oops” moments, and sometimes these moments can really slow down productivity . . . enterprise customers can now restore full site collections, in addition to sites, documents, lists, and list items.”

“With just a few clicks,” you can self-restore entire site collections within 30 days after they are deleted.

Hmmn. Sounds like yet another area where SharePoint governance will be required –  and resisted –  by SharePoint admins.

Slides from my webinar on Solving Shared Drives

Here are the slides from the webinar we just completed on “Solving Shared Drives.” I personally don’t find slides divorced from their presentation that useful, but this will give you a flavor of what we talked about. Also, we will be shortly following up with a whitepaper on the topic as well as the recording of the webinar, so look for that too.

Solving the Shared Drive Problem

The sexy Information Governance problems today are (in rough order of sex appeal):

  • Social Media
  • Big Data
  • Cloud Computing

Somewhere waaaay down at the bottom of this list comes, “Governing shared network drives.”

However, in real life – outside of the hype cycle – solving the shared drive problem is right near the top of the list for my clients. The massive growth of SharePoint has been driven in large part by enterprises (or at least, departments within enterprises) looking for an incremental and easy replacement for shared drives.

However, most project teams tend to underestimate just how “incremental” the shift from shared drives to SharePoint or ECM is. In fact, in my experience, the problem is vexing enough that many project teams effectively throw up their hands and end up moving the big pile of unstructured manure from one unmanaged, fragrant corral to another (albeit a less fragrant, more attractive corral).

My firm has worked on this problem many times, and we are excited about a new partnership with Perram Corporation that allows us to finally bring intelligent process and intelligent technology to bear on this problem in a pragmatic, real-world way.

On Thursday, February 16th, we are going to walk you through some of the most useful things we have learned about this problem. We are hosting a webinar at 11 ET, which you can register for here. Hope to see you there.

 

Governing SharePoint: New Executive Information Governance Brief

“As soon as IT sets it up so that people can self provision and create these new sites, it’s always amazing to see how it proliferates . . .”

Bill Gates, speech at the first Microsoft SharePoint Conference, May 15, 2006

One of the key attractions of SharePoint – for IT at least – is the ease with which users can set up and use SharePoint sites with little to no involvement from IT. While this may drive adoption of the product and reduce the burden on IT departments, it can make IG more challenging, as sites can be set up with little or no enterprise control or insight into the information.

This is the role of SharePoint governance – the rules and processes organizations must adopt to ensure that they are leveraging the strengths of SharePoint, but also maximizing the value – and minimizing the risk – associated with the information within SharePoint.

We cover this concept of SharePoint governance in latest entry in our OpenText Executive Brief series. Click here to download the new brief from the OpenText website.

Click here for more information about the series, and for links to the other Briefs in the series.

 

New Information Governance Executive Brief Series

I’m excited to announce that I have been working on a new series of executive briefs about information governance, sponsored by OpenText. I have made it my mission to try to spread the IG concept as far and wide as possible quite simply because I believe IG provides the best chance we have to finally get information management right. OpenText’s sponsorship of this series provides a great platform for the IG message to be heard.

Every one of our clients tackling IG have the same problem: closing the gap between the people who “get” IG, and those who don’t. In many cases the people who have had the least exposure to the IG and its value are the people with the money and mandate to tackle enterprise-wide problems: i.e., senior management. Thus, the focus and the format of the executive brief.

With this series, I’m hoping to provide some practical and pointed IG advice for senior managers. While I won’t be covering new ground for serious IG practitioners, I will be laying out IG fundamentals in a way that hopefully is accessible to time-strapped executives. These briefs should also be a great tool to help you build awareness around IG in your organization.

In our first brief, we answer the first logical question about IG: “what is it, and why is it important to me?” There is no universally agreed upon definition of IG, but it is possible to define what most people mean when they talk about IG. Also, I think there is pretty broad agreement about the potential of IG, and the value it can bring to us. So, check it out now at the OpenText website.

Update

We have now posted the entire series of six Briefs. The links to them are:

1. Why Information Governance? (the brief above)

3. Getting Started with Information Governance

3. The Role of the CIO in Information Governance

4. Governing SharePoint

5. Records Management and Information Governance: What’s the Difference?

6. Justifying Investments in Information Governance