Bar for information management practice continues to be raised

Continuing education is a prerequisite in the increasingly complex terrain of information management as the world experiences an explosion of data.

The Mckinsey Quarterly of October 2011 reports that companies with more than 1 000 employees store an average of 235 million megabytes (or 235 terabytes) of data. One would need to fell 50 000 trees to make enough paper to print out that amount of information. Such large sets of data are virtually impossible to process and analyse without specialised and customised information management systems that can extract useful information.

While this is the terrain of 'big data', today the principle of applying strategic information management to improve the bottom line is valid for organisations of any size. As the director of professional development at AIIM, the global community for information professionals, I recently visited South Africa to speak at Share 2012, the SharePoint conference for business users, and stated that information management has become the focal point of business processes.

Ten years ago, information management comprised the storage and processing of referenced data (any data or documents generated by the company and then stored, such as financial records and client records). But over the past decade the concept of information management has evolved into something that goes beyond the walls of an enterprise to extracting content from external sources, from the cloud, so to speak. Along with this evolution comes both increasing flexibility and complexity in tools to store, process and find content.

A simple example is collecting data about the buying habits of your market; instead of commissioning a research company to conduct a survey and deliver data to you, today your marketing team could be scanning social media or tapping into location data from mobile phones to understand where your market is shopping.

AIIM research shows there is a movement from systems of record to systems of engagement, allowing enterprises to engage more efficiently with their customers via Web interface and interoperability of systems - and they are seeing the results on their bottom line.

When making choices about the best processes for information management for your company, you need to look at the exact needs of your entire business, including the needs of your staff. It is important to address six key elements of engagement to develop optimum information management solutions:

1. Mobility - your engagement must be mobile, with information accessible on mobile devices.
2. Process - determine which processes and transactions can be digitised and automated.
3. Social environment - engage via social networks and information feeds.
4. Governance - look at how automation of information can help with compliance, meet regulatory requirements and remove the potential for error.
5. Cloud - look for applications that can give both flexibility and rapid response.
5. Big data - build capacity to assimilate, process and manage large quantities of data.

While most businesses will deal with a few of these issues (but not all of them), ideally you should take a step back and gain a holistic view of your business needs in order to establish the best solutions and best return on investment. Integration is the route to best practice. The rifle shot approach, where you focus on just one division or aspect of your company, is a short-sighted one, because changes in some processes will inevitably have an impact on others. It does not make good business sense to decide that you will start upgrading the systems in your finance department first, and then next year you will tackle the HR division, and so on. For maximum efficiency and financial return, it is important to address the whole picture and arrive at an end-to-end solution.

Along with the changes in the game has come a growing professionalisation of information systems management; it has become a highly specialised profession in which continuing education is a prerequisite. Information management professionals, such as a company's 'chief technical officer', need to be able to analyse and interpret the complex business processes within an organisation, they need to be able to work closely with the technicians in IT and they have to understand the on-ramp and off-ramp of information and what happens to it in between.

AIIM's professional accreditation of information managers is gaining worldwide recognition and people working in the field are increasingly required to have AIIM certification. Just as the credentials of certain graduates are instantly recognisable (eg, BCom, BSc Engineering, Dip IT Management), so the internationally recognised AIIM ECM Certificate and Certified Information Professional (CIP) certifications, for example, carry weight in the information management sphere.

ECM (enterprise content management) credential from AIIM is offered at three levels: practitioner, specialist and master. AIIM also offers training and certificates in Sharepoint, Capture, Business Process Management (BPM), Electronic Records Management (ERM) and Information Organisation and Access (IOA).

The latest certification on offer from AIIM is the Certified Information Professional (CIP), which provides a benchmark of essential proficiency. While the CIP is not a study programme, but rather an assessment of expertise, AIIM provides a host of information to enable practitioners to up-skill to meet the CIP standard. For example, the AIIM Web site provides access to over 120 YouTube videos on information management. Practitioners would do well to set the bar of their proficiency via the CIP and then select further AIIM certificate programmes to delve into a deeper knowledge of specific areas.

AIIM has over 70 000 members worldwide and engages with its membership to find out what they need and to offer support services that are tailored accordingly. For instance, AIIM developed its SharePoint training in response to comments from its members that SharePoint is like a Swiss army knife - it has so many tools but no one knows how to use them. While the AIIM model is developed for independent online study, it is currently working with its South African partner, NokusaEI, to set up classroom-based training because there is a strong local demand for this.

Thus AIIM itself is constantly evolving to meet market requirements in terms of continuing education. In South Africa, AIIM certification is exclusively offered by NokusaEI, which has consistently been one of AIIM's top training partners worldwide in terms of proficient delivery and quality trainers since they began their partnership in 2006.