Occupy IT Manifesto

Table of Contents
Epiphany  3
About This Manifesto  5
My Background  14
Bias #1 — It’s a sin to waste money.  15
Bias #2 — All evidence to the contrary, I think I’m a
technology expert.  16
Bias #3 — Despite lots of IT spend, true process
automation is just in its infancy.  17
Thinking Differently About IT  19
The #OccupyIT Manifesto  28
Demand #1 — Commit to the cloud.  30
Demand #2 — Mobilize everything.  34
Demand #3 — Make the business social.  40
Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves.  46
Demand #5 — Prepare for extreme information
management.  52
So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW?  59

CHAPTER 1

Epiphany

Enter code OCCUPYIT for 20% off the Certified Information Professional (CIP) Exam
through December 31, 2012. Enroll at: http://www.prometric.com/aiim

I am reading the #OccupyIT Manifesto
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Every once in a while the light bulb goes off.

For me, the light bulb went off in 2010. It was during a meeting
of the AIIM Task Force on the Future of Enterprise IT, headed
by Geoffrey Moore, noted futurist and best-selling author of
Crossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity, among many titles.

Geoff posed this simple question in the context of the
amazing period we are currently living in:

Why is it that in terms of technology I feel so powerful as a
consumer and so lame as an employee?

As the CEO of AIIM (the Association for Information and
Image Management) a global association of information
professionals, but perhaps more importantly as the CEO of
a small business of 45 employees with enormous member
expectations about our own use of technology, the question
quickly morphed into:

Why the hell have I been spending so much on technology
and yet have so much frustration to show for it?

4
Chapter 1: Epiphany

CHAPTER 2

About This
Manifesto



That light bulb moment was the inspiration for this book.

I wrote this book for information professionals. So your very first
question before going any further might be what the heck is
an information professional?

Let me put it this way:

... If you are business executive struggling with how to get
value out of all information you are gathering...

... if you are an IT manager looking to remain relevant at
a time when technical knowledge alone seems to be
becoming a commodity ...

... if you are a compliance officer or a records manager
worried that the old ways of managing information risk
are drowning in the torrent of information hitting your
organization...

...if you spend time worrying about how you put the right
information in the hands of the right people in order to make
more timely decisions ...

THEN YOU ARE AN INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL AND THIS
MANIFESTO IS FOR YOU.

Geoff crystallized his question about feeling so powerful as a
consumer and yet so lame as an employee in the following
from his white paper, A Sea Change in Enterprise IT:

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Chapter 2: About This Manifesto

#OccupyIT by AIIM President, John Mancini
AIIM, 2012

Over the past decade, there has been a fundamental
change in the axis of IT innovation. In prior decades, new
systems were introduced at the very high end of the
economic spectrum, typically within large public agencies
and Fortune 500 companies. Over time these systems
trickled down to smaller businesses, and then to home
office applications, and finally to consumers, students and
even children. In this past decade, however, that flow has
been reversed. Now it is consumers, students and children
who are leading the way, with early adopting adults and
nimble small to medium size businesses following, and it is
the larger institutions who are, frankly, the laggards.

Our initial response might be to dismiss this trend as not
really relevant to the issues of business. After all, if there
really were useful productivity gains here, surely we would
already be investing in them. Isn’t it far more likely that
this proliferation of consumer services, social sites, and
interactive games is simply digital entertainment which, if
anything, should be banned from corporate computing?

In a word, No. In two words, emphatically No. What is
transpiring is momentous, nothing less than the planet
wiring itself a new nervous system. If your organization is
not linked into this nervous system, you will be hard pressed
to participate in the planet’s future. To be more specific,
amidst the texting and Twittering and Facebooking of
a generation of digital natives, the fundamentals of

7

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next-generation communication and collaboration are
being worked out. For them, it is clear, there is no going
back. So at minimum, if you expect these folks to be your
customers, your employees, and your citizens (and, frankly,
where else could you look?), then you need to apply
THEIR expectations to the next generation of enterprise
IT systems. But of far more immediate importance is how
much productivity gains businesses and governments are
leaving on the table by not following the next generation’s
lead.

The first yardstick we usually use in thinking about this kind of
technology change is Moore’s Law. Now before I thoroughly
confuse everyone, the Moore referred to in Moore’s Law is
not Geoffrey Moore but Gordon Moore, former president
of Intel. Yes, it does seem like the Moore family has a pretty
good handle on this future prediction thing.

Just kidding. As far as I know, Geoff and Gordon are not
related, although it admittedly would be way cool if they
were. Moore’s Law, originally stated by Gordon Moore in
an article in the 1960s, contends that our ability to lay down
transistors on a semiconductor essentially doubles in capacity
every 12 months. That was later increased to once every 18
months, but even at 18 months you can get a sense of the
exponential impact of technology change on our ability to
improve hardware.

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In Race Against the Machine, Andrew McAfee and Erik
Brynjolfsson (neither of who is named Moore) make the point
that the impact of Moore’s Law is just beginning to hit its
radical phase. Andy and Erik use the analogy of the fable of
the invention of chess as a way to talk about what happens
once the power of exponential improvement really takes hold
of processes and people and technology.

The fable goes like this: Supposedly the inventor of the game
of chess showed his creation to the emperor. The emperor
was so delighted by the game that he allows the inventor to
name his own reward. The inventor was a clever man, and so
he asks for a quantity of rice to be determined as follows: one
grain of rice is placed on the first square of the chessboard,
two grains on the second, four on the third and so on with
each square receiving twice as many grains as the previous
one. The emperor agrees, thinking that this reward is far too
small for such a fabulous game.

He is reassured in his thinking during the early phases of the
rice doubling because initially it really doesn’t seem that
impressive. Even after 32 squares, the emperor has given the
inventor only about 4 billion grains of rice. Now that’s an awful
lot of rice, but it is only about one large field’s worth.

However, it is in the second half of the chessboard that
volume of rice becomes overwhelming. In the second half
of the chessboard the emperor ultimately realizes that the

9


number of grains of rice is equal to 2 to the 64th power, minus
1, or about enough rice to make a mountain the size of
Mount Everest.

The point that Andy and Erik make with this fable in terms
of technology is that we are now starting to move into
the second half of Gordon Moore’s chessboard, where
technology change really accelerates. And if the changes
and improvements in hardware technology (as represented
by semiconductor capacity) are not impressive enough, our
ability to create software and algorithms improves even more
quickly than our ability to improve the hardware.

This leads to a situation in which technology becomes more
and more ingrained in the fabric of every business and within
the reach of individuals, not just businesses. Technology
doesn’t just enhance businesses. It creates the potential for
vast new businesses and revolutionizes the very foundations of
existing businesses.

And most importantly for the purposes of this book, it
changes: 1) what we need to do with technology if we hope
to keep our organizations competitive; and 2) how we go
about deploying technology.

All of the work we did in creating Systems of Record for our
organizations no longer provides competitive advantage;
effective Systems of Record are a necessary but not sufficient
investment for competitiveness. To quote again from A Sea

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Change in Enterprise IT:

Those of us old enough to have senior management
positions understand enterprise IT through the lens of data
processing. That is how it grew up around us and we
grew up with it. We spent the last half of the 20th century
building up this capability from rows of punch cards
that could process census data to global information
systems that capture every dimension of our commercial
landscape, from financial transactions to human resources
to order processing to inventory management to customer
relationship management to supply chain management
to product lifecycle management, and on and on.

These are the great Systems of Record, and like the
interstate highway systems of a prior generation, they
have paved the way for an enormous economic
expansion. But most important of all, the thing to register
about Systems of Record is that they are mostly and
largely complete, particularly within larger organizations.
Are they perfect? No. But these Systems of Record are
no longer a source of competitive differentiation for
organizations. They are a necessary condition of doing
business. Once you have an interstate highway system, the
era of the great build out comes to an end, and the era
of maintenance comes to the fore, and that is precisely
what has happened with enterprise IT as we have known
it. As a result, this past decade has been one of increasing

11


optimization, led by IT budget cuts as funds are transferred
to other uses within the enterprise, and led technologically
within IT by virtualization, cloud computing, and ever more
outsourcing. And that is where we stand today.

The next stage of IT investment requires that we think
differently. We need to change what we are trying to do
with our IT investments and how we go about procuring
technology.

Welcome to the world of Systems of Engagement.

Systems of Engagement will overlay and complement
our deep investments in Systems of Record. Systems of
Engagement begin with a focus on communications.
We grew up with letters, phones, telexes, and faxes, and
grew into email, shared text databases like Lotus Notes,
portals, websites, and mobile phones. Now we are going
to incorporate a third generation of communications,
based on 1) connecting people in real time; 2) smart and
geographically-aware mobile devices; and 3) ubiquitous
and cheap bandwidth.

These communication capabilities will also be
complemented with new collaboration capabilities. These
are IT-enabled services that allow groups of people to
interoperate both synchronously and asynchronously,
and they include wikis, collaboration tools, chat, crowd
sourcing, Web conferencing, video streams, video

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conferencing, and similar services. And as cultural and
language barriers become more and more important to
overcome and transcend, high definition real time video
telepresence sessions and the like will complement and in
some cases replace the inevitable round of international
trips required to make global commerce really work.

If you are dependent upon suppliers or distributors or
partners to deliver your fundamental value proposition
to your customer then who are we kidding? You have to
grab onto the new communication and collaboration
systems or you will simply end up as road kill. If you are in
a sector such as technology or health care, or financial
services, or consumer packaged goods, or retail, or
education, or government, or energy, or aerospace
and defense, or travel and hospitality, or media and
entertainment, or marketing and advertising, then there is
little alternative to rethink your engagement strategy.

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CHAPTER 3

My Background
Bias #1 — It’s a sin to waste money.  14
technology expert.  15
automation is just in its infancy.  16



Perhaps before we go any further, I should share my own
experiences — and corresponding biases — at this point.

Bias #1 — It’s a sin to waste money.
I have worked at nonprofit associations for the past 30 years.
For those of you who haven’t worked in a nonprofit, you will
likely find it bizarre — bordering on the incomprehensible
— that someone could build a career out of working for
them. You may be amused when I tell you that there is
an “association of associations” (the American Society of
Association Executives).

Most importantly, you will likely think that nonprofits are places
where the pace of work is pretty mellow and relaxed and the
bottom line is not terribly evident. Kind of a place to go once
you are approaching retirement age and are looking for a bit
more relaxed pace.

However, the reality couldn’t be further from the truth. The
thing to know about nonprofits — and hence my bias — is
that there is no place I know of that is MORE focused on
the bottom line than a nonprofit. Associations are “out
there,” exposed to far more second-guessing from members
and constituents than is the norm in the for-profit world. A
5 percent variance in budgeted expenses is a BIG deal.
So when I look at the amount I have spent on proprietary
“association management” systems over the years, it makes
me nuts. Really.

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Chapter 3: My Background

AIIM, 2012

Most likely certifiable.

technology expert.
My last two gigs have been at technology associations —
the American Electronics Association (now TechAmerica)
and AIIM (the Association for Information and Image
Management). The biases this carries are: 1) I love
technology; and 2) I know just enough to be dangerous.

Ten years ago, the coolest pieces of technology in my life
were the PC laptop and the Blackberry handed to me by
central IT casting. (True confessions: I am old enough to have
once considered myself cool enough to lug a COMPAQ III
on an airplane in order to fire up the 1980s adventure game
Leisure Suit Larry.)

In this bygone era, we used to think it totally reasonable to
issue our employees devices and tell them they were not to
be used for anything except business. Under penalty of death
or at least firing.

That worked when IT and the “man” held all the cool
technology cards and could use this as an instrument of
control. A lot has changed in the past decade. The tables
have turned.

The iPad has been deployed in business organizations

16


exponentially faster than the iPhone. When senior executives
got an iPad 1 for Christmas in December 2010 and then
brought them into work after the holidays the world changed.

The time is coming very soon when we won’t even issue
computers or phones to employees; we will simply assume
that they will bring their own devices to work. Gartner (Tablets
and Smart Phones are Changing How Content is Created,
Consumed, and Delivered) forecasts that by 2014, 90
percent of organizations will support corporate applications
on personal devices. Gartner doesn’t say this, but I believe
the other 10 percent are the world’s remaining buggy whip,
eight-track, and portable CD player manufacturers.

But the more important point here is that the consumerization
of technology has made us all experts. Or at least we think
we are experts. Business executives now carry expectations
— and excitement — from their experiences in the consumer
technology arena into the workplace and are frustrated to
find that all of their great weekend ideas (“I was working on
my iPad over the weekend, downloaded this cool app, and
had this great idea...”) are met with groans and eye-rolling by
IT and by all of the “control”types.

automation is just in its infancy.
I have spent the last 16 years as CEO of AIIM. AIIM’s focus
is on information professionals, and its roots are in the

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content and process management space. The bias this
brings to the question of effective information management
is an obsession with the vast opportunities that exist for
organizations that can actually get their “you know
what”together relative to managing their information assets.

Those of us in the content space have said for years that the
vast untamed Wild West of information management is in
the world of unstructured information. Unstructured is all of
the “stuff” (a technical term) like email, Office files, images,
instant messages, social content and, yes, paper, that
surrounds, engulfs and chokes off all those nice theoretical
automated processes on those cute workflow diagrams.

There is a reason that my blog is called Digital Landfill. It’s
because what passes for effective information management
in most organizations is a thinly concealed veneer over the
chaos.

This strange set of experiences leads me to these two
conclusions:

1. We need to rethink what we are trying to accomplish with
IT, and
2. We need to rethink how we view the people charged with
this urgent mission.

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CHAPTER 4

Thinking Differently
About IT



In this new world of radically changing technologies and
radically increased stakes tied to the effective use of
technology, I am convinced that our ability to engage
— really engage — our customers, our partners and our
employees will be the key to success.

The technologies we deploy will play a role in determining
how effective we are in driving this engagement. We
can no longer assume that this engagement will happen
serendipitously in our organizations or as a byproduct of
“serious” technologies.

We need to think strategically about engagement and the
information systems that are necessary to make engagement
happen.

So let’s first think about this rather amorphous thing
called “engagement.” Is it important? Does it impact
the effectiveness of organizations? Gallup has done
some very interesting work in researching the question of
“engagement.”

Let’s start with employee engagement.

Gallup aggregated 199 research studies across 152
organizations in 44 industries and 26 countries. For each
study, Gallup calculated the relationship between employee
engagement and performance outcomes. In total, they
studied 32,394 business units, including 955,905 employees.

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Chapter 4: Thinking Differently About IT

AIIM, 2012

They looked at nine specific outcomes: customer loyalty
engagement, profitability, productivity, turnover, safety
incidents, shrinkage, absenteeism, patient safety incidents
and quality.

In Employee Engagement: What’s Your Engagement Ratio,
Gallup describes the categories of employees as follows:

• Engaged employees work with passion and feel a
profound connection to their company. They drive
innovation and move the organization forward.
• Non-engaged employees have essentially “checked out.”
They sleepwalk through workdays. They put in time but
don’t approach their work with energy or passion.
• Actively disengaged employees aren’t just unhappy at
work; they’re busy acting out their unhappiness. Every
day, these workers undermine what engaged co-workers
accomplish.

The data suggests that the reality of most organizations is a
lot like “The Office,” whether you are talking about the U.S. or
the U.K. version. In other words, it’s NOT GOOD. There are an
awful lot of Stanley Hudsons and Creed Brattons out there in
our organizations.

According to Gallup, in average organizations, 33 percent
of workers are engaged in their jobs, 49 percent are not
engaged, and 18 percent are actively disengaged. The
ratio of engaged to actively disengaged employees in

21


organizations is 1.83:1.

On the other hand, in world-class organizations, the numbers
are vastly different: 67 percent of workers are engaged
in their jobs, 26 percent are not engaged, and 7 percent
are actively disengaged. The ratio of engaged to actively
disengaged employees in average world-class organizations
is 9.57:1.

Per Gallup, all of this translates in $370 billion per year in
lost productivity in the U.S. alone as a result of disengaged
employees.

Gallup has also looked at this question of engagement from
the customer perspective in Customer Engagement: What’s
Your Engagement Ratio. Their conclusion is that fully engaged
customers generate a 23 percent premium in terms of share
of wallet, profitability, revenue and relationship growth.
Organizations that have optimized customer engagement
outperform their competitors by 26 percent in gross margin
and 85 percent in sales growth.

So what do we do about this and how do we deploy and
use our information systems and tie them to the question of
driving engagement?

All organizations face a significant disconnect as they think
about the nature of work in the future and the systems to
support this work. It’s a challenge that is as old as time itself,

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but is particularly exacerbated in times of rapid technology
disruption.

The core disconnect we should be worried about —
whether you are a business executive, an IT manager, or a
compliance geek — is that our decision-making tends to be
dominated by those whose frame of reference is structured
by past rather than what lies in the future.

That is clearly the case today.

On the business side, we keep pushing, pushing and pushing
for change. We are handicapped by our lack of true
technical knowledge, and yet empowered by our perceived
heightened level of technical knowledge based on our
experiences in the consumer space. We sense that something
should be different, but are not quite sure what.

All we know for sure is that we are spending way too much
on all of those old clunky Systems of Record and we sure
would like to get more value out of our IT spend. We can’t
understand why we are spending more and more money
on maintaining systems that document the past rather than
enable the future. According to Gartner (Cloud Computing:
Economic, Financial, and Service Impact on IT Planning
Assumptions) we sense we can no longer afford the luxury
service levels that are delivered by traditional IT organizations.

On the IT side, we are so captive to our existing legacy

23


Systems of Record that we sometimes cannot imagine an
alternative future. We cling to the control we once had (or
thought we once had) and try to repel the barbarians at
the gate who are demanding change, dismissing them as
lunatics who “just don’t understand.”We hear the demands
from business for a new way of doing things, and sense
that our technical skills are increasingly commoditized, but
we don’t quite know what to do about it. Truth be told, we
identify with the problems of Nick Burns, Computer Guy on
Saturday Night Live.

This need for engagement coupled with accelerating rates
of technology change and the explosion of capabilities in
the consumer space has exacerbated the traditional tensions
between business and IT. In 2010, Susan Cramm (founder and
president of the IT leadership firm Valuedance®) published
8 Things We Hate About IT: How to Move Beyond the
Frustrations to Form a New Partnership with IT. Here’s what she
wrote:

Business hates when IT is overly bureaucratic and control
oriented.

Business hates when IT consists of condescending techies
who don’t listen.

Business hates when IT is reactive rather than proactive.

Business hates when IT proposes “deluxe” when “good

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enough” will do.

Business hates when IT doesn’t deliver on time.

Business hates when IT doesn’t understand the true needs
of the business.

Business hates when IT doesn’t support innovation.

Business hates when IT inhibits business change.

Since 2010, the level of tension has escalated. I know in our
own little association business, we are thoroughly reassessing
the “what” and the “how” of our technology investments.
Every time we make a technology decision, we ask ourselves
whether we really want to own a piece of technology, or
whether we would like someone else to own it, thank you very
much, and we’ll be content to be renters.

I believe that all of this boils down to a rather simple mandate
in our organizations:

It is time to look differently at our technology investments
and the skill set of the people we charge with these
investments.

I believe that if we are to be successful in using technology
to engage our customers, our partners and our employees,
we on the business side need to lead a revolution in how we
view IT. The IT side needs to prepare for and embrace this

25


revolution or risk being run over by it and marginalized.

In short, business needs to reclaim IT. It is time to #OccupyIT.

Now I know there are those will bristle at the #OccupyIT title
of this book.

Some people LOVE the various permutations of the Occupy
movement and think these folks are a fabulous manifestation
of the social consciousness of the world. Others HATE them
and think these folks are an unwashed spoiled iPad-carrying
group of phonies. Whichever way you tend, when Time’s
Person of the Year is “The Protester,” something unusual is
going on.

What does matter is that the inexorable drive toward Systems
of Engagement requires that we think radically differently
about IT in our organizations. Given that most senior business
executives are digital immigrants from the email generation,
this is particularly daunting. But to do otherwise is to condemn
our organizations to the practices of the past.

Susan Cramm notes her book is written for those who “make
the business rock-n-roll on a daily basis.” She assumes there
are plenty of books available for CEOs on business and
organizational strategy. The purpose of her book is to create
a toolkit to help bridge the gap between those who “do” IT
and those who are ultimately accountable for justifying its
effectiveness.

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The five demands of my #OccupyIT Manifesto are focused
not so much on how to bridge the gap between the business
and IT. Rather, they are focused on creating a framework
and a set of imperatives for how we should collectively look
at our IT priorities in the era of consumer technologies. The
five demands should be considered the prism through which
we decide what kinds of IT projects we should prioritize in our
organization. The five demands are focused primarily on the
what of our IT strategies.

I conclude, though, with a focus on the how. I believe that
there are a wide variety of job positions that have a need for
basic information management competency at their core.
This new breed of professional will need deep experience in
the specific skills necessary to do his or her job. But to be truly
effective in the era of cloud, social and mobile technologies,
this professional will have these deep skills positioned
within an awareness and knowledge of sound information
management practices.

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CHAPTER 5

The #OccupyIT
Manifesto
Demand #1 — Commit to the cloud.  29
Demand #2 — Mobilize everything.  33
Demand #3 — Make the business social.  39
Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves.  45
management.  51



In the spirit of manifestos, let me quote Marx. Groucho, not
Karl: “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to
fetch a child of five.”

So here is our list of demands.

Don’t worry; there are only five.

Demand #1 — Commit to the cloud.

Demand #2 — Mobilize everything.

Demand #3 — Make the business social.

Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves.

management.

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Chapter 5: The #OccupyIT Manifesto

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Demand #1 — Commit to the cloud.
We must break down monolithic enterprise solutions into
more “app-like”solutions that can be deployed quickly,
independent of platform and in the cloud.

We’ve all just about had it with monolithic proprietary
systems that cost lots of money. There are the capital costs
to buy these systems along with annual costs for service. We
often have to engage in expensive customizations just to
get anything actually done. Many systems require frequent
upgrades. This in turn requires additional consulting services to
do the upgrade, and yet more consulting services to port the
previous customizations to the upgrade, and on and on and
on.

In To The Cloud: Cloud Powering an Enterprise the authors
describe this challenge:

Business always strives to do three things simultaneously:
1) sustain existing products and services; 2) grow them;
and 3) introduce new ones. Gartner labels these activities
run, grow and transform. According to Gartner in 2011,
66 percent of IT spending sustained existing products and
services, 20 percent helped improve them, and 14 percent
enabled the introduction of new products and services.

Now that doesn’t mean there isn’t a role for on-premise
software. Far from it. Many of these systems are the backbone

30


of our core Systems of Record. But as we think about how
to meet the challenge of rapidly deploying new Systems
of Engagement, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a brain
surgeon or [insert your own personal favorite proxy for a really
smart person] to realize that something needs to give.

We have to find new, more cost-effective ways to deploy
new systems, and we need to find ways to save on legacy
Systems of Record. Cloud solutions can provide a way to save
money on our legacy systems and also provide new ways of
more quickly deploying transformational technologies. Cloud
technologies are the very first stopping point we need to
make in terms of thinking about revolutionizing the way we
approach IT.

A couple of data points to consider:

• Sixty percent of organizations are ready to embrace cloud
computing over the next five years as a means of growing
their businesses and achieving competitive advantage.
The figure is nearly twice the number of CIOs who said they
would utilize cloud in the previous 2009 study. (IBM Survey
of 3,000 global CIOs)
• The total size of the public cloud market will grow from
$25.5 billion in 2011 to $159.3 billion in 2020. The market for
virtual private cloud solutions will grow from $7.5 billion in
2011 to $66.4 billion in 2020. The market for private cloud
solutions will grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to $15.9 billion

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in 2020. (Forrester, Sizing the Cloud: Understanding and
Quantifying the Future of Cloud Computing)

However, the data suggests that organizations are having a
difficult time making the transition.

• Thirty-three percent of organizations have a generic IT
strategy for moving to the cloud. 12 percent do not, and
55 percent are still undecided. (Process Revolution: Moving
Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Twenty-eight percent of U.S. organizations currently using
cloud computing. (CDW Cloud Computing Tracking Poll)
• About 33 percent of organizations are still unlikely to use
cloud-based or SaaS solutions. (State of the ECM Industry)

Cloud computing is one of the top priorities for CIOs in
2012, but the reality is that actual deployments are still at a
relatively early stage. Gartner (Cloud Computing: Economic,
Financial and Service Impact on IT Planning Assumptions)
notes that cloud computing represents only 3.5 percent
of the IT marketplace, scaling to 5.9 percent by 2015. A
strong argument can be made that these percentages
underestimate the impact of cloud solutions because
revenues do not include the use of “freemium”(or near
freemium) products in the enterprise (or by individuals within
an enterprise, unknown to IT).

Some of this disconnect is due to the fact that there is a lot
of confusion regarding what the term “cloud”means. This

32


confusion ties back to the many flavors of cloud computing
(public clouds, private clouds and hybrid clouds), as well as
the multiple uses of the cloud: to host software applications
(SaaS), to host infrastructure (IaaS), and to host platforms
(PaaS).

The impact of the cloud, though, will be massive beyond
the immediate revenues classified as cloud because cloud
changes the way we look at IT services, how we pay for
these services within in our organization (capital spending
vs. operating), and how we view upgrade paths (and who is
responsible for these upgrades). Organizations that do not
incorporate the cloud into their thinking do so at their own
peril.

Business needs to DEMAND that IT embrace the cloud. Not just
experiment with it or consider it or ponder it or look at it when
they have a chance. Point one of our #OccupyIT manifesto
demands the cloud be a part of every IT decision, not an
afterthought. Business must take advantage of the cloud to
become faster, more agile and more innovative – and IT must
figure out how to make it work, not figure out how to keep the
status quo.

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Demand #2 — Mobilize everything.
We must redefine content delivery and process automation to
take advantage of mobile devices and mobile workforces.

It seems like only yesterday that the iPhone first appeared.
It’s hard to believe how long the iPhone — and all the
smartphone sons of iPhones for those initially held in Verizon
and Sprint purgatory — have been with us. Believe it or not,
it’s been less than five years. A blink of an eye.

The iPhone was introduced in June 2007 to fairly widespread
snickering among “serious” technology types. Said blogger
Mark Flores (http://www.intomobile.com), “The initial reaction
from competitors, or soon-to-be competitors since Apple
wasn’t really in the game yet, was either shock or laughter.
RIM didn’t think it was possible to have such a device without
it being a power hog. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer laughed at it
for not having a physical keyboard.”

I will confess to being swept up early in the iPhone frenzy and
ultimately convinced my IT types to chill, that I would handle
my own tech support, and that everything would be OK.
(And true confessions, for the most part it was. And yes, I do
understand that technology in a small 45-person organization
is different than technology in a Fortune 500 company.)

Well, a lot has changed. We now find ourselves in…

• A world in which there are more tablets and smartphones

34


sold than PCs.
• A world in which people are more likely to own a cell
phone than a toothbrush.
• A world in which our customers expect to use a mobile
device to: 1) interact with us; interact with the information
we provide; and 3) interact with the processes that drive
our businesses.
• A world in which our employees, who are increasingly
working outside of traditional, chained-to-the-desk
office environments, expect to use multiple devices and
locations to interact with corporate information and
systems that we once thought of as locked down and
“company confidential.”
• A world in which less than half the devices accessing the
Internet run on Windows.

Ubiquitous mobile computing is one of the core underlying
drivers for Systems of Engagement and continues to shape
the future of these systems. In the span of a decade,
cell phones have spread to essentially every person and
location on the planet. Mobile technologies are the “steroid”
accelerating all of the other elements in our technology
strategy.

On the opportunity side, we now interact with customers on
devices that are aware of their location. If we know exactly
where a customer is, in real time, what does this mean in
terms of the kinds of new products and services we can

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AIIM, 2012

deliver? If our customers carry around connected devices
with 5-megapixel portable cameras and scanning devices
in their pockets, what does this mean in the context of our
interactions with them?

My wife and I recently drove down to surprise my daughter
for her 20th birthday during the middle of exams. When we
got there, we easily found her car, but not her. I had the
brainstorm to use the “Find my iPhone” functionality to find
her. I will admit that my daughter did not think this was as
cool as I did.

The natural reaction of IT in the face of this dramatic change
is to fall back into the control paradigm. Witness the following:

• More than three-quarters of organizations have no mobile
processes: 24 percent haven’t even thought about it, 20
percent cite security reasons or feel mobile adds no value,
32 percent have evaluated it but not made a move.
(Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to
PC to Tablet)
• A third of organizations have not optimized their websites
for mobile. Of those that have, only 8 percent specifically
test access to all pages and forms, only 10 percent have
apps — and only 5 percent check for tablet resolution.
(Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to
PC to Tablet)
• Median % of processes that could be mobile that actually

36


are = 2.5 percent. (Process Revolution: Moving Your
Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Only 47 percent of organizations allow personal devices
to access company data, most doing so in a policy void.
(Making the Most of Mobile: Content on the Move)
• Mobile access to ECM systems is somewhat restricted
with 37 percent of organizations having no mobile access
available on their ECM systems and a further 30 percent
needing a conventional Web interface. Only 15 percent
have a dedicated app, at least for iPhone. (Making the
Most of Mobile: Content on the Move)
• Some 42 percent expect staff to carry two phones, a
company one and a personal one. Nearly one-half (47
percent) allow personal devices to access company data,
but only a third of those enforce data-wipe policies. The
rest rely on employee trust. Twenty percent have no usage
policy on mobile and 9 percent allow staff to hook up in
an ad hoc way. (Making the Most of Mobile: Content on
the Move)

But many agree the potential benefits of embracing mobile
are significant, as the following survey data shows:

• Median expected productivity improvement among
administrative staff for automated processes — 29
percent. (Process Revolution: Moving Your Business from
Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Sixty-seven percent of organizations believe that mobile

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AIIM, 2012

technologies are “important or extremely important to
improving their business processes.” (Process Revolution:
Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• Median expected productivity improvement for field-
based or travelling staff if they could input directly to, and/
or interact with back-office processes using mobile (hand-
held) devices — 25 percent. (Process Revolution: Moving
• The average organization that has deployed mobile
solutions is 2.7 times faster in responding to customers and
staff than those that have not. (Process Revolution: Moving

I heard someone once say that the continuum of devices we
currently use (phones-tablets-laptops) can be thought of in
food terms as the progression in functionality from snacking
to dining to cooking. It is clear that the “action” right now is
on the snacking and dining front, and we need to make sure
that our systems adapt to be snacking and dining friendly.

While we can’t ignore the control factor, we need to respond
aggressively to the opportunities afforded by mobile. Point
two of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that mobile be a
part of every IT decision, not an afterthought. It demands that
we invest in the required technical skills, which are different
from traditional IT skills, to take advantage of mobile. It
demands that we set our focus on where our customers will
be three years from now in terms of mobile, and figure out

38


how our IT strategies and systems will meet them when they
get there.

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AIIM, 2012

Demand #3 — Make the business social.
We must integrate social technologies into processes rather
than create stand-alone social networks with the objective of
making the business itself social.

It seems like just a few years ago (oh, it was just years ago)
that social technologies were viewed as some temporary
aberration of college students. Kind of like keg stands or an
ice luge (ask your kids). Well, wake up! Social technologies
have moved into the enterprise with a vengeance and are
beginning to transform organizational processes.

Consumer sites like Twitter and Facebook initially exposed
organizations to the potential benefit of using social
technologies as listening posts to the market. Many early
adopters of social and collaborative technologies were
keen to try out different tools and services to see how they
might work in a business environment. These pioneering
toolsets have now converged to a much more defined set
of products and application areas, and an increasing focus
on integrating social technologies into the core of business
processes.

Organizations are now beginning to understand that true
Systems of Engagement mean more than just a public
“social” veneer. True Systems of Engagement mean
embedding social technologies into the very nature of how
organizations operate. In just a few years we will cease to

40


view “social” as a separate layer from process. Our long-term
objective should not be to “bolt on” social systems, but to
make the business itself social.

It is clear that the young professionals in our organizations —
those of the mobile and social generation — view work much
differently than we in the email generation do. And if we are
going to race with the machine rather than against it, if we
are going to position our organizations for the future rather
than the past, we best start paying attention to what they are
saying and doing.

Many current technology decision makers tend to view the
world through the prism of work that is done in an office.
Technology decision makers of my generation — the email
generation — tend to view collaboration as something that
revolves around in-person meetings and email. We tend to
worry about what our employees are doing when they are
not in the office. We tend to equate social with Facebook
and worry about what domains we should restrict (except
of course for those crazy marketing types, we’ll let them go
wherever they want). We think about the question of what
might happen far more often through the prism of Sarbanes-
Oxley and Enron and litigation and control than through the
prism of opportunity and new business and flexibility.

In November 2011, Cisco released a very interesting report on
what is going on in the minds of college students and young

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AIIM, 2012

professionals. The Cisco Connected World Technology Report
surveyed 1,441 college students from 18 to 24 and 1,412
young professionals age 30 and under from 14 countries.

Now, one can say, particularly if one is of my generation,
“Who cares what these people want. Just suck it up and
work the way we tell you to.” But honestly I don’t feel that’s
the way to approach it. If we buy the proposition that
engagement is key to creating value — and ultimately
profitability and productivity — then we really need to think
about the social and mobile technology systems that create
and foster engagement — and how they connect back to
the existing information resources of the organization.

So let me give you a couple of data points about how young
professionals in the workplace view mobility and flexibility and
social technologies, according to the Cisco report:

• Forty-five percent of young professionals would accept a
lower-paying job with more flexibility rather than a higher-
paying job with less.
• One in four young professionals say the absence of a
remote access option for their jobs would influence their
job decision.
• Thirty percent of young professionals feel that the ability to
work remotely with a flexible schedule is a “right.”
• More than three-quarters (77 percent) of young
professionals have multiple computing and

42


communication devices. Fully one-third use at least three
devices for work purposes.
• More than one-half (52 percent) of young professionals
believe that they are not responsible for securing their
work devices and data — service providers and IT are.
Fifteen percent of young professionals have had their
mobile phone, laptop or other devices stolen in the past
12 months and 30 percent have experienced identity theft
at least once.
• Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of young professionals
access Facebook at least once per day. Seventy percent
of these have “friended” either their colleagues, their
manager, or both.
• Sixty-eight percent of young professionals believe that
company-issued devices should be available for both
work and play.
So, clearly, we need to think about how we engage this
generation of employees differently from how we engaged
the email generation. While the deployment of social
technologies in a business context is still in its infancy, the data
suggests huge potential benefits:

• More than one-half (51 percent) of organizations consider
social business to be “imperative” or “significant” to
their overall business goals and success. (Social Business
Systems, Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications).
• Thirty-eight percent of those organizations using some form

43

AIIM, 2012

of Enterprise QA or expertise sourcing get half or more of
their answers from unexpected sources within the business.
(Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0
Applications)
• Within organizations using an open innovation social
platform for ideas and suggestions, 48 percent have
successfully surfaced major changes to internal processes
and 34 percent have come up with major changes
to external product offerings. (Social Business Systems:
Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0 Applications)
• By using specific social collaboration between sales and
marketing staff, the number of respondents reporting
“poor sharing of knowledge and information” drops from
41 percent of organizations to 8 percent, and “poor
working together” drops from 21 percent to 4 percent.
(Social Business Systems: Success Factors for Enterprise 2.0
Applications)
There is still huge resistance to these technologies, in
this case not only from traditional IT, but from business
executives who believe that these technologies will result
in the escape of corporate secrets and the death knell of
employee productivity. Sound familiar? We all said exactly
the same thing about deployment of email and then Internet
connectivity to the general employee population. We were
wrong then and we are wrong now.

Point three of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that we

44


embrace social technologies as the future digital dial tone
of our organizations. That we understand that how the
Facebook generation will expect to connect with their peers
and customers is dramatically different from how the email
generation did so. That email as a group collaborative tool
(as opposed to a direct tool for one-to-one communication)
is poorly suited to the task.

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AIIM, 2012

Demand #4 — Digitize anything that moves.
Drive bottlenecks out of processes (especially paper ones),
link systems together and automate process flows.

We’ve all done it. Admit it. Tearful confessions are the first step
to forgiveness. And an appearance on Dr. Phil.

No, not sex, drugs or rock-n-roll. I’m talking about pulling rank
on the IT people, coming in with a great idea you thought
of over the weekend, and convincing everybody to roll it
out as quickly as possible. To push out that new System of
Engagement and damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

Except for one thing. True customer engagement is more
than just creating a social veneer. Because once you bring
the customer into the business, once they truly engage, all of
the weaknesses of your backend systems and processes will
be exposed. The reality of most organizations is that there is a
lot of cleaning up to be done in core backend processes and
to get systems and departments on the same page.

We’ve all experienced the irritation of keying in our phone
number or account number multiple times in a call response
system, only to have the very first question asked by a
customer service representative (assuming we get one) be,
“Can you tell me your phone number?” I won’t even go
into the recent customer experiences that generated the
following tweets (company names masked to protect the

46


guilty; my wife calls these my old man rants):

@Jmancini77 — 1:40 pm via HootSuite — If someone doesn’t
contact me today and let me end run your #Satanic call
center, I’m blogging tomorrow @xxxxx

@Jmancini77 — 3:40 pm via HootSuite — This is Day 87 that I
am held hostage by @xxxxx’s ridiculous #mortgage refinance
process. Please call.

No matter how elegant the front end, Systems of
Engagement cannot operate in an environment in which
the processes that support and complement them are
engulfed by paper and inefficiency. The reality is that most
organizations exist in a hybrid environment in which process
information may come from paper documents, paper forms,
Web forms, faxes, telephony, emails, SMS, mobile and social.

Automated capture of information as early as possible in
the business process and as close to the point of origination
produces cleaner data, resulting in higher quality information,
less exception handling and better process management.
The more important the process is to a business, the greater
the impact such improvements will have. Once paper-based
information moves into the digital realm it can be used to
enrich social and mobile applications. In paper form, that
information might as well not exist since no one can get to it
without great effort.

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AIIM, 2012

Forms processing is a particularly important element in
process automation. Forms — both electronic and paper —
are used to collect data, carry signatures, drive the business
process and provide an auditable record of the outcome.
Each of these can be readily carried out in all-electronic
formats. But until recently, the paper form has been
somewhat stubborn in its hold on even the most modern
offices.

A few data points illustrate the reality that exists in most
organizations:

• The average cost to process a paper invoice is still more
than $9. (Automating Financial Processes: User Feedback
on the Real ROI)
• Overall, 52 percent of organizations surveyed have
yet to adopt any automated AP systems. One-third of
organizations receiving more than 25,000 invoices per
month are still using paper-based processes. (Automating
Financial Processes: User Feedback on the Real ROI)
• A third of small and mid-sized companies and 22 percent
of the largest have yet to adopt any paper-free processes.
Only 20 percent of organizations of any size pro-actively
evaluate all processes for driving out paper. (Process
Revolution: Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to
Tablet)
• The percentage of processes that could be paper free
that actually are — 14 percent. (Process Revolution:

48


Moving Your Business from Paper to PC to Tablet)
• On average, 45 percent of documents that are scanned
are “born digital”– just as they came from the printer. And
many of the rest would be all-digital if not for the added
signatures. (The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)
• Seventy-seven percent of invoices that arrive as PDF
attachments get printed. Thirty-one percent of faxed
invoices get printed and scanned back in. (The Paper Free
Office: Dream or Reality?)
• For 40 percent of organizations, half or more of their
electronic workflows are interrupted by physical sign-
offs, generally requiring multiple paper copies to be
printed. (Digital Signatures for documents, workflow and
SharePoint)
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about true progress
relative to digitizing processes is how compelling the existing
results are relative to the lack of progress outlined above.

• Electronic-only filing would halve the storage space
needed for paper in five years. The average proportion of
office space taken up by paper is now 15.3 percent, and
it would drop to 7.4 percent with an all-electronic filing
policy, a saving of nearly 8 percent in overall office costs.
(The Paper Free Office: Dream or Reality?)
• Sixty-one percent of accounts payable system users report
a payback period of 12 months or less. Seventy-seven
percent consider they have achieved a payback of 18

49

AIIM, 2012

months or less. A significant 20 percent report a payback
in as little as six months. (Automating Financial Processes:
User Feedback on the Real ROI)
• Invoice costs reported range from less than $2 to more
than $30, with an average of $11.60. Half of survey
respondents are processing 5,000 or more invoices per
month. At this rate a 33 percent saving at $10 per invoice
is $200,000 per year. (Automating Financial Processes: User
Feedback on the Real ROI)
• On average, respondents using scanning and capture
consider that it improves the speed of response to
customers, suppliers, citizens or staff by six times or more.
Seventy percent estimate an improvement of at least
three times, and nearly a third (29 percent) sees an
improvement of 10 times or more. (The Paper Free Office:
Dream or Reality?)
• Forty-two percent of users have achieved a payback
period of 12 months or less from their scanning and
capture investments. Fifty-seven percent are posting a
payback of 18 months or less. (The Paper Free Office:
Dream or Reality?)
Paper is the enemy. Our processes are engulfed in analog
sludge. The technologies involved in addressing this are not
terribly complex, nor are they particularly new fangled. They
are mainstream and proven. It’s time that these core process-
improvement projects move to the front burner and actually
get implemented organization-wide.

50


Point four of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that we
ruthlessly drive paper out of every process we can find. It
demands that we view the connections between systems with
as much rigor as we view the individual systems themselves.
It demands that once we drive paper out, we keep it out. It
demands that we automate just enough, but not too much.

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AIIM, 2012

management.
We must find insights and value in all that information we
are storing, and mitigate the risk associated with all the
information we are saving.

I believe the term “extreme information management” was
first coined by Gartner. I like it a lot because it implies both
the scale of the challenge facing organizations, as well as the
need to look at this challenge in a new way.

According to IDC, the amount of information in the digital
universe will grow by a factor of 44 between now and the
end of the decade. Even more challenging, the number
of containers or files will grow by a factor of 75. The subset
of information that needs to be secured is growing almost
twice as fast. And the amount of UNPROTECTED yet sensitive
data is growing even faster. And while all of this is going on,
the number of IT professionals in the world will grow only by a
factor of 1.4. (IDC, Digital Universe)

Needless to say, that’s a lot of bits and bytes and not a lot of
new folks to manage all of it.

The shift to Systems of Engagement dramatically increases the
complexity and volume of data and information that must
be managed within an organization. IT, we on the business
side understand that not everything can or should be saved

52


forever because of the litigation risk associated with saving
“everything.” We also believe that there is growing value in
mining the huge masses of information we are accumulating.

We also understand that these two statements are not
necessarily consistent with each other. We need IT to help us
make sense of our irrationality.

Gartner identifies big data by these four attributes: volume,
velocity, variety and complexity.

On the “risk” side of the equation, the volume of information
coming at us is making it clear that manual information
retention and disposition processes simply extended from the
world of Systems of Record will no longer suffice. Aside from
the sheer enormity of the task, a lack of clarity about what
content is valuable is the main obstacle, along with the fear
of getting it wrong and a sense that there is no immediate
ROI from getting rid of outdated information.

The reality in most organizations is that traditional approaches
to information governance are a joke, and it’s not for lack of
effort. It was never realistic to assume that knowledge workers
would assist in manually classifying documents according
to a complex records retention schedule, and it is equally
unrealistic to assume that we will manage the fire hose of
data and unstructured ephemeral social content with the
same degree of records rigor that we applied to retaining a
life insurance policy for the life of the policy holder.

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AIIM, 2012

Clearly, adapting to the world that is upon us is proving
problematic:

• Two-thirds of organizations have an information
management strategy, but only 22 percent use it. (Process
Tablet)
• Seventy-nine percent of organizations have an information
retention policy, but only 32 percent enforce it. (Process
Tablet)
• Seventy percent have mobile device rules and social
media rules, but only 30 percent enforce them. (Process
Tablet)
• Fifty-eight percent of organizations say that a single
enterprise records management model underlying all
content systems is their goal, yet only 9 percent have
achieved this. (Records Management Strategies: Plotting
the Changes)

But big data is more than managing information-related
risk. Organizations are increasingly realizing that there is also
“gold in them thar hills.” McKinsey (Big Data: The Next Frontier
for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity) believes
that big data can create significant value for the world
economy, enhancing the productivity and competitiveness
of companies and the public sector and creating substantial

54


economic surplus for consumers:

...if US health care could use big data creatively and
effectively to drive efficiency and quality, we estimate
that the potential value from data in the sector could be
more than $300 billion in value every year, two-thirds of
which would be in the form of reducing national health
care expenditures by about 8 percent. In the private
sector, we estimate, for example, that a retailer using big
data to the full has the potential to increase its operating
margin by more than 60 percent. In the developed
economies of Europe, we estimate that government
administration could save more than €100 billion ($149
billion) in operational efficiency improvements alone by
using big data. This estimate does not include big data
levers that could reduce fraud, errors and tax gaps (i.e.,
the gap between potential and actual tax revenue).

Yuchon Lee, an IBM vice president, describes the “value” side
of the equation this way:

For the past decade, companies have been
accumulating data in what we call a system of record.
Those who survive going forward will also have systems
of engagement, which start with evaluating how you
can have a relevant conversation with each individual
customer across all channels. And ensuring you have the
analytical capability and the data to support that analysis.

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AIIM, 2012

That is where the linkage is between the system of record
data and the system of engagement. On the technology
side, we believe the future of handling this volume lies in
leveraging the capability of the cloud. A lot of the analysis
is done behind a firewall, but the analysis, platform and
architecture is really a hybrid. That is how you solve the
problem and get the most value out of the data.

There are a wide variety of vexing and previously unsolvable
business problems that big data brings within our grasp.
Among these are the following (per http://www.cloudera.
com):

• Modeling risk and failure prediction
• Analyzing customer churn
• Web recommendations (ala Amazon)
• Web and ad targeting
• Point of sale transaction analysis
• Threat analysis
• Compliance and search effectiveness

Many analytical solutions were not possible previously in the
world of unstructured information because: 1) they were too
costly to implement; 2) they were not capable of handling
the large volumes of data involved in a timely manner; or 3)
the required data simply did not exist in an electronic form.
New tools now bring the capabilities of business intelligence
and the benefits of optimization, asset management,

56


pattern detection and compliance monitoring to the world
of unstructured information. New approaches to data
management, designed for the cloud, such as HADOOP and
NoSQL, have dramatically reduced the cost of analyzing
large volumes of information, making it affordable for first
time.

Systems of Engagement are generating massive volumes of

Fortune, by 2020 Internet-connected devices will grow from
new structured and unstructured information. According to

400 million today to 50 billion. These devices will be talking to
each other and to the Internet. By 2020, it is also predicted
that our smartphones will have the capability of storing
and accessing as much information as IBM’s Watson and
supercomputers can. Cisco estimates that the flow of data
transmitted across the Internet will increase from 275 exabytes
per year now to 275 exabytes per day by 2020. [Note: That’s
a lot of routers!]

The core difference between this “low-value-density”
information and all of the “high-value information” in Systems
of Record is that this new information tends to have value in
the aggregate or as it is interpreted rather than intrinsically. In
other words, it is easy to see the value in storing a document
or a piece of data that documents a specific transaction or
process. It is more difficult — and it has been too expensive in
the past — to do so with vast quantities of digital flotsam and
jetsam that has value only as it is aggregated and analyzed.

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AIIM, 2012

Advances in semantics, search, content and text analytics,
and print stream analytics are now making analysis of large
amounts of information practical for first time, especially all of
that unstructured information hidden away in digital landfills.
In addition, for the first time, natural language processing
and visualization technologies are moving the analysis of all
of this data and information from technical back rooms and
into the executive suite. As organizations develop standard
approaches to metadata, and expose this metadata in the
cloud, processes will standardize and transform.

Like the cloud, actual big data implementations are still in
their early stages. Many organizations will fail in their efforts
to extract value from big data, and we face a growing
shortage of people with the data analysis and statistical skills
necessary to tap into all of this potential value. But for those
who succeed, the payoff will be dramatic.

Point five of our #OccupyIT manifesto demands that we
acknowledge the old world of paper-driven records
management thinking is dead; and we need IT’s help in
mitigating the risks associated with the death of what was
once a nice predictable world. We also desperately need to
get more value out of all the “stuff” we are gathering — and
use this intelligence to improve customer responsiveness and
anticipate and predict where the business will go next.

58

CHAPTER 6

So What the
Hell Can I Do
TOMORROW?



Thus far, my manifesto points to the issues that we must
address within our organizations if we are to remain
competitive and if we hope to transform our organizations.
These are changes that are urgent and challenging.

But there is something that every organization can do
tomorrow in order to prepare for the demands of the future:
Commit to viewing information management as a profession.

IT staff must commit to placing their technical competence
in a broader information management and business context.
At the same time, digital immigrants on the business side must
commit to taking their technology game to the next level.

Traditionally, IT focused on either the deployment of enterprise
software applications (seemingly the more complicated the
better!) and the “plumbing” of our information infrastructures.
The business now needs professionals with a broader skill
set than what is traditionally found within traditional records
managements or IT departments. Specifically, the business
needs people who understand the management, utilization,
and application of information and social assets to the
organization. The business needs a new breed of information
professional.

Last year, Gartner published “CIO Alert: The Need for
Information Professionals.” The core finding in the report
(subscription required) was:

60
Chapter 6: So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW?

AIIM, 2012

The vast majority of organizations see the need to
manage information as an enterprise resource rather
than in separate “silos,” departments or systems, but they
don’t know how to begin to address the challenge, as
it is so large... Professional roles focused on information
management will be different to that of established IT
roles… An “information professional” will not be one
type of role or skill set, but will in fact have a number of
specializations.

This perspective was reinforced in a January 2012 report by
noted IT skills expert David Foote of Foote Partners in IT Skills
Demand and Pay Trends Report:

Gone is the tendency to hire specialists and large teams
of limited range permanent staff for long-term initiatives.
New models require smaller teams made up of multitaskers
and multidimensionally skilled workers with subject matter
expertise, business savvy, technology skills, and a range of
appropriate interpersonal and “political” skills.

The challenge in the early stages of this revolution is this new
breed of professional can have a number of roles within
the organization. Few people currently have “information
professional” as a title, but many have the stewardship,
management and application of information assets as a core
part of their job.

“Information professionals” can be found on the legal,

61


records, and library staff of organizations. They can be
found among those whose primary focus is governance,
e.g., information architects and managers. Process owners,
business analysts and knowledge managers all have effective
information management as a core part of their skill set, as do
the new wave of information curators, digital marketers and
community managers who currently focus primarily on social
systems.

And that’s the point. At the early stages in the evolution
of a profession — particularly one that is an umbrella that
cuts across and encompasses a wide variety of technical
disciplines — it is difficult to define where it begins and where
it ends.

Consider just one profession that is very well defined today
— project management. Twenty-five years ago, one would
imagine that the idea that there was a common body of
knowledge associated with people who manage software
projects and manufacturing projects and construction
projects would have been met with extraordinary skepticism.
How can that be? The projects are so different! There
can’t be any commonality across projects that are so
different. However, more than 400,000 project management
professionals later, it is clear that there was and is a core
profession and body of knowledge associated with
managing very different kinds of projects.

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AIIM, 2012

I believe this is how the profession of information
management feels today.

These are what we call “T-shaped” individuals in our
organizations. The need for deep knowledge relative to a
particular domain or technology does not go away. But this
deep knowledge has far more value if it can be applied in a
broader context. Hence the need for “T-shaped” individuals.

The five points of our manifesto have focused on the “what”
question: On what areas do we need IT to focus if you are to
be relevant to the business challenges we face? As such, the
#OccupyIT Manifesto focuses primarily on the changes the
business needs — demands — from those charged with our
technology infrastructures.

However, there is also a broader change needed within
organizations. And that is to realize that a new information
management skill set is at the core of every one of the
demands in the manifesto. That the business needs business
people, technical people, analytic people and process
people with a core grounding in information management.
That “connecting the dots” will increasingly create far

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Chapter 6: So What the Hell Can I Do TOMORROW?I


more value than knowledge of an individual dot. That how
organizations put deep technical and domain knowledge
into a broader context has great value for the business.

Because the era in which abstract technical skills created
competitive advantage is ending. Technical skills alone are
becoming a commodity. Technical skills will continue to have
value in helping our organizations run and grow. But what will
have much greater value to the business in the years ahead
are information professionals who can help transform the
business.

In the face of rapid change, organizations can take one of
three approaches:

1. The “10 percent more of the same” approach. Assume
that the change that is coming is just an extrapolation of
the immediate past.
2. The “Oh, $%X#%^C!” approach. Just be reconciled that
whatever comes will be a surprise.
3. Or assume that what is coming will be dramatically
different from what came before and try to prepare for
and anticipate the change.

The consumerization of Enterprise IT means change is coming.
Your assignment, as a member of our new tribe of information
revolutionaries, is to try and anticipate that change by doing
the following:

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AIIM, 2012

1. Test your information competency by taking the Certified
Information Professional practice exam.
2. Identify your weaknesses, review the free AIIM videos that
are relevant, and then take the CIP Exam.
3. If you are a boss-type, have the people who report to you
take the Certified Information Professional practice exam
and then work to bring their skills up to the appropriate
level.
4. Pass this manifesto around to others in your organization.
To colleagues. To friends. To family members, especially
teenagers, if you wish to torture them.

Welcome to the Revolution. #OccupyIT.

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Occupy IT Manifesto

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