Yes, we know change is constant, but it seems to be exponential at the moment, with no let-up in sight. Well I hate to tell you, but it is and there isn’t. 

Gordon Moore is an American businessman, co-founder of Intel and the author of Moore’s Law. My understanding of Moore’s Law (with apologies to the IT purists reading this) is that it states the level of change and innovation is such that the number of transistors on a microchip will increase exponentially, typically doubling every two years, and since microchips are the building blocks of technological hardware, this exponential progression obviously has a huge impact on all other aspects of technology. 

Moore’s Law is widely seen these days as the benchmark of technological innovation. So if you think life is busier, faster and things are developing at a furious rate now, it’s going to be 1024 times faster in 20 years. 

So what does this mean for our Enterprise content Management (ECM) thinking? At the moment, we are faced with a number of disruptive technological and social changes that we are uncertain about or just don’t trust. A couple of examples include:

The Cloud

How often have you heard that it’s risky to store information in the cloud? If I had a dollar for every time someone quoted the US Patriot Act when talking about cloud storage…It feels like it’s our ‘go to’ statement at the moment for not investigating the option further. Much like ‘SharePoint isn’t an EDRMS’ was 5 years ago…and yet, it’s still gaining market share in ECM circles. 

One of the newest disruptive ideas on the block, and building off Cloud technology, Platform as a service (PaaS) is a category of cloud services that provides a computing platform and a solution stack as a service.  Along with software as a service(SaaS) and infrastructure as a service (IaaS), it is a service model of cloud computing. Basically the organisation creates an application or service from a service catalogue from the provider. The organisation also controls software deployment and configuration settings. The service provider provides the networks, servers, storage, and other services that are required to host the organisation’s system, rather than the organisation itself.

So the risk and cost are outsourced, but how does an organisation maintain autonomy and accountability?

According to Gartner’s definition of ECM - what used to be document collaboration is now Social content. A huge paradigm shift. How do we manage our agency’s wiki’s, blog’s, Yammer, Facebook, Instagram (according to my 17 year old it’s the new Facebook) and other social accounts? Our people expect this type of social collaboration at work now, and I firmly believe this should be part of an agency’s ECM framework, but how…? 

Remember those people I was just talking about? Well they also expect to be able to access information on the go. So it’s no longer enough to have a piece of software deployed to a PC, it needs to be able to be accessed via an internet portal, a Smartphone or a tablet. Oh, and I almost forgot the most important point – in a meaningful way – not just being able to view a PDF of a document without being able to edit it. 

There’s an app for that

And while these pesky people are trying to access information on their devices, they’ll more likely want to do this via an app. As someone who prides herself on having a general understanding of how technology works and interacts with our business information, I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t really know how apps work (and why don’t Smartphones and tablets get viruses like PC’s do..?). But what I do know is that they are far more fun to use than standard PC software. Now I know I’m ignorant about how apps work, but there is no denying that they are disruptive technology – a whole new ball game. I don’t think we’ve even scratched the surface with their capability yet. 

And it’s even worse for our government organisations – they also have to contend with issues like frequent Machinery of Government changes from restructuring, Digital transition and Open Access policies.

So I ask the question again – considering this level of change we are seeing, and acknowledging that the level and rate of change will increase, what does it mean for ECM? 

Long term, I have no idea. It could take us anywhere. I think perhaps our best bet is to wait for the next Star Trek film – it seems to be the best predictor of technological advance (mobile phones, tablets, google glass).

In the short term, it means keeping up to date with the latest advances, investigating these technologies, really understanding the impact and requirement of policy change and being agile enough to respond quickly and appropriately before the next technology emerges. 

And that’s the real challenge. Being agile. 

Fuelling’s Law of Agility perhaps?

Kate Fuelling is an Information, Project, Change and Process management professional and currently works as a contractor and consultant through her company, Lime Business solutions. Contact Kate at lime-solutions@tpg.com.au