How to Drive Information Management Adoption

'Information Management' is a problem identified by many and you would think that IM adoption should be easy, but every organization I have consulted with suffers from an Information Management adoption problem.

All too often, IT-driven product evaluations focus on how well a tool supports managing, finding & retaining documents, leaving project teams in many enterprises surprised at how quickly users abandon what IT believes to be a superior Document Management/Records Management product. Here are some of the key lessons I have learned:

• What worked for one department doesn't/won't necessarily work for another - Focus on the business processes of a department and what they do on a day to day basis instead of taking a massive cookie cutter approach.

• Mandate from the 'Boss' negatively affecting users - Today's increasing focus on compliance and risk mitigation forces many enterprises to lock down and better manage documents located on the notorious shared drive. Properly mandating without change management is not going to cut it. Almost all effort is spent on rolling out the system and very little on Change Management, whereas my personal approach is to focus around 70-80% on Change Management.

• Poor usability plagues many IM initiatives - If the IM system does not integrate well with the most commonly used tools, then it can be a nightmare. Be very careful when selection a vendor/tool.

• Making everyone a Information Manager - When onboarding a group into an Information Management system, build solutions that reflect their business process and do not bog users down with useless classifications, categories or making them select individual documents and declaring them as records. Leave the job of RM with the records managers and focus instead on creating an information architecture for the particular user group that works for them.

Finally, all IM needs are not the same and make sure you gather requirements and answer key questions for each constituency. Rapid deployment of technology is the easy part, but deriving business value out of the deployment is the difficult part.