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How Will Context and the Cloud Impact Your Information Management Initiatives?

By Ken Stewart on March 17, 2010

With the explosion of information, relevancy has become increasingly important. Is Google the answer to creating this relevancy? How about Facebook? How about SalesForce.com?

I recently presented to a local chapter of ARMA International, a not-for-profit professional association on managing records and information, focusing on the impact the explosion of information, social media and cloud computing will have on information and records management.

It was a highly interactive and exciting group, and some of the take-aways I might offer are:

  • Consider the entitlement-factor when defining information management guidelines.
  • With an information explosion, relevancy is defined by context.
  • Information management has to shift from control-driven to community-driven.
  • Content doesn’t exist if it is not accessible, and if it is too accessible it’s a risk.
  • Take it or leave it: It’s your choice to adopt a social media strategy or not, but decide now.

Feel free to spin through the Prezi below, and share within your social circles if you find it meaningful.

How Will Context and the Cloud Impact Your Information Management Initiatives? on Prezi

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken serves on the board of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA), an international industry organization seeking worldwide best practices for the managed print services industry, and writes a weekly column for MPS Insights. He is also the founder of Seeking the Son, and is always interested in connecting with you to see how he might help you.

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Ripped From The Headlines

By Joe Kozlowski on March 16, 2010

Document Solutions Daily

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Ripped From The Headlines

By Joe Kozlowski on March 15, 2010

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Beyond Cost Cutting: Saving More Than Money by Being Nimble.

By Ken Stewart on March 15, 2010

How many times have you heard, “We need to cut costs.” How many times are you leading with a cost-cutting strategy in your talk-track?

There are only two ways to impact an organization’s bottom line:

  1. Increase revenue without proportionally increasing costs, and
  2. Decrease overhead costs with the focus of increasing profitability.

Innovations and disruptive programs can dramatically impact both, while taking your competition off guard. But you have to be paying attention to the bigger picture – influences impacting you and your customer. From economic conditions to technological advances, from global politics to currency rates, its about more than just what you sell; it’s about how what you sell can help your customer deal with their challenges and achieve their objectives.

Software as a Service (SaaS), server virtualization and data centers, managed services and outsourced print: All are very real opportunities driven by real customer demand – not speculative desire.

I call these opportunities leverage points. These leverage points speak to an underlying migration to reach utilization saturation, a phrase I’m fond of using to indicate a focus to leverage the economies of scale in order to drive down overall cost per transaction to a level that quite possibly could end around where in-sourced transaction costs might have been.

Jack Be Nimble.

As the nursery rhyme goes:

Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over the candlestick.

Adjust to change and offering value is a continual fight. All industries eventually face commoditization. Production at cheaper, faster, and better – at lower costs. Now we are no longer talking concepts of mass production at the factory level, but at the information level!

New York City found itself at the intersection of cost overruns and affordable, available technology to meet a need. According to a March 2010 article published by InformationWeek, IT commission, Carole post has orchestrated a massive data center consolidation. With a sprawling annual IT budget of $375 million, post is hoping to make a dent in their costs:

After a review of the city’s IT system, IT Commissioner Carole Post will oversee a plan to modernize and consolidate data infrastructure at more than 40 city agencies. The goal of the consolidation ” which will start later this year and consolidate 50 unique data centers into one shared system — is to lower the city’s cost of operations by up to $100 million over five years, according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office. … Many of the facilities and their technologies are obsolete, and having to staff, manage, and maintain them is a drain on city resources.

NYC is a perfect example of a customer who realized the convergence of technologies offered them substantial savings. But look past the savings of energy and hardware. Do you see the competitive advantages offered in having a strategy that is focused on multiple facets?

Sure it can include cost savings, and this is a critical component to overcome the pain of change. However, it also includes components of competitive advantage – an ability to be nimble and shift gears quickly. Dave McClure, GSA’s associate administrator, recently weighed in on the General Services Administration’s (GSA) cloud computing services request for quotations (RFQ).

… [we are withdrawing the RFQ because] the purchase agreement was 11 months in the making, and that’s like 11 years in the evolving cloud market.

Business moves at the speed of information, and information now moves without regard for person, place or thing. Rather than solely focusing on cost-cutting initiatives with your customer, think how you can provide value by allowing them access to relevant information and an ability to apply it to their market – help them be Jack.

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken serves on the board of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA), an international industry organization seeking worldwide best practices for the managed print services industry, and writes a weekly column for MPS Insights. He is also the founder of Seeking the Son, and is always interested in connecting with you to see how he might help you.

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Pain, Pleasure and Perspective: Dealing with Change (Part 1 of 2)

By Ken Stewart on March 13, 2010

How painful is the current economy for you, for your sales team? How painful is it to evolve into a new business model, or are you even certain you need to change? Change is constant, but the evolution we need to survive is often painful at best. Photizo Group predicts that 50 percent of the dealers will either be acquired or close their doors by 2013. Learn why pain and pleasure are not the only answers for your high-impact organization to make the cut.

Read the entire article at the new MPSInsights.com.

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken serves on the board of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA), an international industry organization seeking worldwide best practices for the managed print services industry, and writes a weekly column for MPS Insights. He is also the founder of Seeking the Son, and is always interested in connecting with you to see how he might help you.

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Ripped From The Headlines

By Joe Kozlowski on March 12, 2010

Document Solutions Daily

… plus as many as 15-20 other news items, press releases, white papers and case studies EVERY DAY that will effect your Document Solutions Business …

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Your Good is not Good Enough.

By Ken Stewart on March 12, 2010

Customer satisfaction is often thrown around like the word “good”. Good might be meant in the best of intentions, “I had a good day!” Or it might not, “How are you?” someone asks. “Eh, — I’m good I guess,” is the response.

But customer satisfaction is a number easily measured but not necessarily easily converted. It is certainly not a thing that will keep your customers coming back for more if your offering is not solid too. But what of things like customer retention and innovating as a means to thrive – not just holding steady in order to survive?

When a company culture begins caring less about constant and fanatical innovation to acquire and retain customers than it does simply surviving, perhaps it’s time to step away. The tough question to ask is whether you are culpable of being asleep at the wheel too.

What do you think?

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken serves on the board of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA), an international industry organization seeking worldwide best practices for the managed print services industry. He is also the founder of Seeking the Son. He is always interested in connecting with you.

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Ripped From The Headlines

By Joe Kozlowski on March 11, 2010

Document Solutions Daily

… plus as many as 15-20 other news items, press releases, white papers and case studies EVERY DAY that will effect your Document Solutions Business …

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Ripped From The Headlines

By Joe Kozlowski on March 10, 2010

Document Solutions Daily

… plus as many as 15-20 other news items, press releases, white papers and case studies EVERY DAY that will effect your Document Solutions Business …

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Blogs Are Important To Your Customer. Are They Important To You?

By Ken Stewart on March 10, 2010

“If it’s too good to be true, then it probably isn’t true.” That’s how the saying goes, right? How often do you buy something you are suspicious of? Being real with your customer elevates the level of trust in the buying cycle.

I receive a good many PR solicitations each week with this or that firm asking if I want to look at this or that. Most of them are not compelling in the least, but there was this one e-mail that got my attention regarding a subject I am very passionate about.

So I started chewing on the e-mail a bit. Once I got past the fact that from address was from an ISP and not their company domain (seeming a bit spammy), I began to review the PR company’s website. Instantly, I’m greeted by a warm smiling face of the owner. Interesting.

I read about the first 2 sentences of the front page of the firm’s website, and then I’m scanning the navigation for things like depth of content, ease of categorization, and what can I find that isn’t so manufactured. I stop on the link titled, “Blog.”

You see, I wanted to see some thought process going on, and the best way I can see that you are thinking is to share your thoughts (this is what Social Media is supposed to be about, by the way). If I agree with what you are saying, I begin to intellectually and emotionally align with you – thus engendering trust where none had existed prior.

Dee Wilcox of Dealer Marketing Systems, and owner of Creative Perch, posed the fundamental question of “Why are websites and search engines important to my dealership?” She goes on to say,

This is a good question. After all, our industry has been built on relationships, hard work, and good service. However, the business world is changing. While relationships are still important, the way relationships are formed, developed, and maintained is radically different than it was 15 years ago. … keep your site updated with fresh content that contains these keywords. The easiest way to do this is with a blog.

Looking at my own behavior, I instantly began to identify the business owner of this PR firm, whose picture graced the home page, as legitimately engaged in helping people. Just because there was blog? Nope, because there was content on the blog that spoke to the questions I was asking – and caused me to ask a few more.

Blogging is a labor of love; you don’t do it because you are going to get rich quick. Don’t believe me though. Take a look at some of what HubSpot, an authoritative inbound marketing company, has to say:

… In review of data from 1,531 HubSpot customers (mostly small- and medium-sized businesses) 795 of the businesses in my sample blogged, 736 didn’t. The data was crystal clear: Companies that blog have far better marketing results. Specifically, the average company that blogs has:

  • 55% more visitors: Why are website visitors important? Because more visitors mean more people to convert to leads and sales.
  • 97% more inbound links: Why are inbound links important? Because they signal authority to search engines, thus increasing your chances of getting found in those search engines.
  • 434% more indexed pages: Why are indexed pages important? The more pages you have on your site, the more chances you have of getting found in search engines.

You may believe you don’t have the technical know-how to start blogging. You would be wrong. It’s never been easier with SquareSpace, Blogger and WordPress. Whether you think it’s too hard, too time-consuming or simply a waste of your time, you can’t deny the one true fact about your customers – they buy because they have a need or want. But the major component at the time of transaction is trust; they trust that what they are buying, and who they are buying it from, will uphold its value and fulfill the need or want.

Blogging offers a message for your customers that you care about something enough to say it and put it out there. Don’t be intimidated, just be yourself.

Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Ken serves on the board of the Managed Print Services Association (MPSA), an international industry organization seeking worldwide best practices for the managed print services industry, and writes a weekly column for MPS Insights. He is also the founder of Seeking the Son, and is always interested in connecting with you to see how he might help you.

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