The Enterprise Intelligence Podcast

In part two of Jason’s conversation with Dave McComb, CEO of Semantic Arts, they continue their discussion of the increasing importance of digital transformation for the enterprise. Dave shares his views on how focus should be given to understanding your data rather than on specific programs to uncover meaning.

Your data holds more meaning and insights than you may realize, and that’s why understanding it unlocks true innovation and cost savings for your business.

You’ve probably heard the words ‘digital transformation’ thrown around quite frequently these days. And although we may be sick of hearing this buzzword, it is still a useful way to describe the ultimate goal our organizations should be striving to achieve. In this week’s episode, Semantic Arts CEO Dave McComb shares that to make this change, organizations need to focus on their data, not single applications or programs.

John Mancini is well versed in information management and data intelligence. He returns in part two of our discussion to talk about the increased complexity of data and the lack of standardization across applications and solutions.

Jason and John discuss the problems (and opportunities) that have arisen from the exponential data growth organizations have experienced over the past two decades. We are living in an age of information chaos and companies are naturally very sceptical about their ability to deal with this problem. The responsibility has fallen on information managers to be the common denominator between the different ‘dialects’ being spoken across different areas of the organization and across systems.

It’s been an article of faith for the past 25 years that 80% of information in the organization is unstructured and unmanaged and yet no one can seem to dig up the source of that ubiquitous stat. John Mancini is a well known industry strategist, writer, keynote speaker, former president of AIIM and host of his own video series The OxyMorons so he’s no stranger to information management. He’s since polled thousands of knowledge workers about the volume of information they’re facing and how much is actually unstructured.

From there it’s a throwback to the birth of ECM. Back in the 90’s ECMs were purpose built to manage and automate mission critical, document intensive, large scale processes at organizations. But that was tied to a limited amount of information. The scale has exploded and organizations need to let go of unrealistic expectations around how much records management the average knowledge work is inclined to perform.

Independent analyst Bob Larrivee joins us to discuss the growth in the nuclear sector with new companies working to create mini and micro-reactors that is creating a state wide network of facilities, which leads to a whole new set of information governance challenges of their own. Records managers will soon have to wrestle with universal clients – literary at the extra-terrestrial level with the companies working with NASA to potentially place reactors on the moon.

Out in space and here on earth companies still need to face the gap between the ideal and the reality when it comes to managing data, otherwise you end up with nothing more than a costly digital dumpster.