The value of the AS IS in Information Management Change

Added By Alan Pelz-Sharpe at 21-Feb-2010 | Twitter: @eiwatch |

One of the founding principals of business process change is the concept of understanding and defining the current "As Is" situation, before analyzing it and then constructing an ideal "To Be" situation.  It's a concept that has been around for many years and I have personally used it for the last 20 years, but it's a concept that is increasingly being ignored.

Today all too often IT and Business Managers focus their energy on the future system, with an implicit recognition that the current system needs to change, yet without really understanding the intricacies and essential challenges in the current system. As a result we see many well intentioned projects fail, simply because they tend to either repeat the same errors as past projects, or they fail to convince users of the need for change. 

Take two recent situations I have encountered, the first involved a document management implementation that had failed on so many levels, due to promised functionality and usability simply not materializing.  The key reason that the vendor failed to deliver was due simply to the fact that the product purchased was a pure Microsoft product, and the firm had a near pure Java technology environment. Not unfortunately a particularly uncommon situation.  Moving forward to the next generation of document management, the firm employed us to help them.

But it was quite a battle to get the buyer to focus on products that were a technical fit for them; in fact I would go as far as to say that if we had not worked with them there would have been a very good chance of them repeating the exact same mistake.  The reason being that over the three years that the original system had run, people had moved on, memories were short, and the reason for all the troubles forgotten. Received wisdom had it that they had simply been ripped off by a technology vendor.

In another case, we are working with an international company that is trying to make a radical business change. Their business continues to expand and their current information management system is overwhelmed with redundant, inaccurate, and duplicate data. Moreover it has become prohibitively expensive to administer and maintain.  Though new technology is a part of the solution to the problem, the most important part of the solution is to simply impose the most basic information management principals, including retention and disposition and applying metadata consistently to content.  Of course the old technology had all this functionality and more, but it had never been utilized consistently. 

This particular project runs into the tens of millions of dollars, and will likely be worth every penny, however by demonstrating to  end users key differences between the As Is and To Be situation in a practical and straightforward manner.  What this firm has learned to their credit is that information chaos can become acceptable and normal very quickly; people simply accept that that is the way things are. By vividly contrasting the current situation with the future they are receiving enthusiastic support from many who had been identified as potential obstructors to the project.

It's a simple lesson really, your map and directions are only of use to you if you know what your current position is.  Never assume you know why or how you got to your current position. Take time to figure it out. You may well find that the complex mess you currently work with is the result of some very simple and simple to correct errors made early on.

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Categories: Alan Pelz-Sharpe, Digital Asset Management, E-mail Archiving and Management, Enterprise Content Management, Portals and Content Integration, Governance, Implementation, Information Architecture