A slide deck based on a very similar deck from the AIIM organisation (www.aiim.org) at which the president of AIIM coined the phrase \'Digital Landfill\'.
A lateral thinkers way of saying ‘this is what we’re going to be going through today’!
AIIM are a global association of which I am a member EMC is a global player in the Enterprise Content Management arena
Question – what do I mean by digital landfill? Examples on the board or in discussion… Using Google will bring up a number of entries explaining what particular individuals think Digital Landfill is to them. John Mancini is the President/CEO of the AIIM organisation and he recently coined this phrase on a webinar that I was taking part in.
How many of us have started a document and kept the original draft, then gone through various other drafts before coming to a final document and keeping all the revisions on the way? We keep all of them because they might come in useful later or for the next query from the boss to answer a similar question – you at least have a foundation to start from! I know I do! But why do we do it? A. Because we don’t want to lose it! Because we don’t think we’d find it again if it went into the ‘quagmire’ – digital landfill even! Why are we all afraid of that? Because we don’t have the confidence that we’ll find it again. Why? Because historically we have been poor at delivering ‘findability’ from any of our systems. A lot of people today talk about search when in fact that is just the functionality for finding something! We actually mean findability! The finding of something from the digital landfill that we currently have. We’re aiming to change that….
TLC and I carried out a survey of what people had for the purposes of finding out the ‘as-is’ situation before coming up with a ‘to-be’ filing structure for the future of FS and in fact we are also involved in the same thing for GO. The situation in FS was so bad we didn’t need to publish the ‘as-is’ to plan for the ‘to-be’ – we decided to go straight to the future state and plan the ‘to-be’! The NUB of this is that everyone is working differently, filing things differently and naming things differently and that means it is out of control. How many of you are emailing using your Blackberry on a daily basis and how many of those emails hold a business decision or action that doesn’t get retained?
Were you aware that Pfizer has it’s own ‘YouTube’ channel? PfizerChannel is an online technology, similar to YouTube, which allows users to view audio and video files. It also allows authorized users to post their own audio and video files.
Question – What is an exabyte? Examples on the board or in conversation.
I hear another question…
So that’s about 3½ stacks of these books from the earth to the sun
Refer back to the TLC discussion.
And it’s not just email from your desktop or laptop This particular company realised they had an email management problem and wanted to do something about it… This picture represents this company’s workshop on what email was doing to their workload and looking at what the issues were and seeking out solutions, if any…
How many business decisions or actions are taken using email? I don’t know but I can hazard a guess that it’s a large number…
I’ve taken a cursory look into Pfizer policy and we appear to be in the 59% One comment I received in my enquiries is - ‘every single email is archived ‘in perpetuity’ as required by legal’ … So even legal haven’t grasped the problem! SO WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE: Essentially, a backup is designed as a short-term insurance policy to facilitate disaster recovery, while an archive is designed to provide ongoing rapid access to decades of business information. Archived records can be placed outside the traditional backup cycle for a long period of time, while backup operations protect active data that's changing on a frequent basis.
From a GO view point I suspected that we were in that 56% so I took a quick look at it for this session We apparently have an ‘archived as part of back up’ policy which is NOT about retention
And this is the only digital landfill system/process of many that we’ve looked at here
An expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until he knows everything about nothing. The internet is turning us into the opposite. We know less and less about more and more until we know nothing about everything.
Blogging is going on as we speak now in Pfizer! While it may not be pertinent to our business decisions or actions it nonetheless adds to our digital landfill!
We do…
I can tell you that in FS we may understand it but we are not very good at managing this, especially the retention scheme…
FS took me on to help with all of this and we’ll take a quick look at some of the things we’re doing to address this shortly… But I can say that we are already improving the existing processes, procedures, services and systems and one drive will be to raise awareness in the future of just what is on offer and what can be accessed, where, when and by who
I know we’ve recently delivered training on GO Live for example. I went round and asked a number of key users of these systems and none of them were very confident in the use of them despite being provided with training. Why is that?
Scores on the board – work out the percentage of grade 5 or less
We’re getting into familiar territory now! We know that we have not been very good at this.
Scribble some on the board or take notes during discussion
Meridian: We’ve agreed across FS as a network that Meridian is the application of choice for managing our technical information and there are moves afoot to have an enterprise search engine across all three systems; there are also moves afoot to look at integration with Datastream/Tririga because the relevant drawings will be used to support CAFM work. Why is this relevant to ‘digital health’? It gets the data centrally controlled on one medium Archive Strategy (?): We have secured the record rooms in B509 2 nd floor to control and manage all the live documentation that ebbs and flows for FS but also in GO e.g. there can be substantial deliverables from a project and there needs to be room for any hard copy during the project. Why is this relevant to ‘digital health’? CD/DVD/floppy disks, etc. Paperless: We are currently looking at the paperless question at the document strategy team level for FS and GO; I’ve tabled a paper for the team to consider. Why is this relevant to ‘digital health’? Actually this one is more of a green issue and as long as we control it then we control the digital landfill. Accurate Records: We need to agree the set of records to be maintained (50%+) and then put a process in place to measure that we are keeping them up-to-date. Why is this relevant to ‘digital health’? If we have accurate records, centrally controlled, then we don’t have copious numbers of rogue copies lying around in all manner of other places. Filing Structure: This is done in principle for FS but we are working at this with the GO documentation strategy team to set a complete filing structure in place across all three systems. Why is this relevant to ‘digital health’? With a structured system we can control and manager our files, therefore we control the digital landfill. Processes: We are agreed in principle what the future technical documentation service is going to be for GO and this will help get information into the system quicker. Why is this relevant to ‘digital health’? It stops us keeping rogue copies lying around in different places. The quicker we get it into controlled systems the better our digital landfill looks. Quick Wins: All requests for documentation services are now routed through the Get Service system We are already getting non-drawing documentation into the Meridian system quickly We have agreed in principle a document retention of 20% for project works We have agreed in principle the future of documentation services for GO