I have never attended the Enterprise 2.0 Conference (www.e2conf.com), but I did monitor the backchannel via Twitter during the most recent conference in Boston last week.  If you haven’t used Twitter in this manner before, it’s a great way to monitor the discussions and happenings at an event. 

I was monitoring the hashtag #e2conf when I saw a tweet from Susan Scrupski (@ITSinsider):

I don’t know the context in which the phrase was used, but assume it was from one of the presentations at the conference.  I’ll admit, like Susan, I was either not familiar with the phrase or it had been swapped out of main memory long ago.  There were several responses to her tweet, which is another cool thing about Twitter.  You can ask questions of your followers and get immediate answers.

Most of the tweets referenced an article from Wikipedia. 

"Tilting at windmills is an English idiom which means attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting unwinnable or futile battles. The word “tilt”, in this context, comes from jousting.  The phrase is sometimes used to describe confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications."

I couldn’t help but think about this in the context of organizations that aren’t sure where to start in getting better control of the unstructured content that is within their digital and physical landfills.  They, too, probably feel like they are “Tilting at Windmills” when it comes to getting their arms around this mountain of content that their organization has created and continues to create at a fairly significant pace. (See previous blog post that references IDC report that estimates our digital universe will grow by a factor of 44 between 2009 and 2020).

But this battle is neither unwinnable nor futile.

One of the first steps I recommend before looking at any technology solutions (unless it is to get an idea of what Enterprise Content and Records Management (ECRM) technologies can do), is to do an assessment of the current state of information management in the organization.  For example, answers need to be developed to questions like the following:

• Where is unstructured information currently stored?
• What technologies are managing unstructured content today?
• What policies, processes or other governance is in place for Records and Information Management?
• What is the culture of the organization in terms of changing the way people work?

The next step is to develop a future state vision for ECRM in the organization.  It is possible that this information could be derived from conversations with senior management or from user interviews from the current state assessment.  The end result is to have an understanding of what the pain points are when it comes to managing unstructured content in the organization.

Once the current state has been assessed and the future state has been defined, the gaps between the two need to be identified, along with what it will take to fill them.  It is quite possible there will be gaps in many areas, including the technology to manage records and information.  Developing a roadmap of what it will take to build out the ECRM program is the next step, keeping in mind any budget or human resource constraints.  A steering committee made up of the key stakeholders will be a good group to establish early on to help drive the program and the priorities.  It is important that business user input be part of this process, because ultimately implementing ECRM must be solving a business problem in order to be seen as a success in the organization.

We all know the old saying - how do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.  But many organizations fail to take this simple concept into how to begin better management of their unstructured content.  If you take a very deliberate approach and treat this as a program with a series of projects instead of one large project, the goal of better content management is not like fighting unwinnable or futile battles.