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Executive Briefings

Published July 2008

Cleaning Up the Digital Landfill

  

  Brian Summerfield

Information overload might be the most universal issue in the corporate world today. What denizen of any modern organization has not felt overwhelmed by backlogs of e-mail messages, piles of documents and/or seas of server files and folders? The ridiculous hopelessness one feels in these situations is not unlike what one would expect from the protagonist in a Kafka novel.

These circumstances can be attributed to the sheer volume of information and the technology that allowed it to proliferate so quickly. But another important factor is the way that information is managed — which is to say, not at all.

John Mancini, president of AIIM, a community that provides education and research about how organizations control and optimize information, has given the name “digital landfill” to the collective morass of employee desktops and corporate servers. He first identified this trend about 15 years ago, when electronic production and dissemination of documents truly became mainstream in enterprises.

“When we put Microsoft Office on everyone’s desktop, we basically gave everybody the most powerful content- and document-creation tool that had ever existed,” Mancini said. “That was a fabulous thing because people unleashed all these creative and productive forces.

“The thing that we didn’t do collectively at the time was really think about where we wanted all that information to wind up, what form we wanted it to wind up in and how we would find it when we had to go looking for it,” he added. “What most organizations typically did was just deployed all this stuff, and what passed for a strategy in terms of managing all of it was a hodgepodge of shared drives, individual drives and eventually portable devices. The metaphor of a landfill came to mind, as organizations that were trying to find a particular piece of information in a particular context for a particular business decision was akin to digging around for something in a vast landfill.”

Organizations should develop strategies and set expectations about how information is managed, transferred, saved, stored and deleted, Mancini said. This can impact the learning function in two ways. The first is the need to develop programs to educate employees about processes and procedures for information management. The second affects how learning leaders deliver their programs generally.

With regard to the latter point, many learning departments already are doing what Mancini suggests on some level, including focusing on tracking capabilities and reusability. But the key is to formulate and formalize a consistent approach to information management.

“The challenge of managing information in a learning environment is very similar to the overall challenge an organization faces: If you don’t do that with a structure and strategy in mind, you’ll be starting all over again every time you have a new project,” he said.