M365 Governance and Information Chaos

This is the first in a series of blog posts about the findings in a new MER Merlin report on automated governance in M365. This first post will focus on understanding the context in which organizations are grappling with their M365 deployments -- A rising tide of information chaos.

There are three major findings I will explore in posts over the next few weeks…

• The alignment of business, information governance, and M365 governance strategies is increasingly critical → But is sorely lacking in most organizations.

• The pace of change in M365 is a significant challenge → Effective change management is more important than ever before.

• M365 automated governance and compliance adoption is still in the early stages → Most organizations have not caught up with capabilities of the platform.

Downloads of the report are free -- and private -- at THIS LINK. We won’t be handing off the names to anyone. We greatly appreciate the following underwriters, who made it possible to do this; I urge you to check out their offerings.

Download link for the report = https://mailchi.mp/merconference.com/merlin-m365

• Active Navigation -- www.activenav.com

• Archive360 -- www.archive360.com/

• Infocycle -- www.infocycle.com/

• Infotechtion -- www.infotechtion.com

• Preservica -- https://preservica.com/

• Protiviti -- www.Protiviti.com/Microsoft

• Quality Associates Inc./DocPoint Solutions -- www.qualityassociatesinc.com

•  -- www.docpointsolutions.com

• Xillio -- www.xillio.com

[For reference, the indented quotes in this post were made by an expert panel of end users; more detail on that can be found in the report.]

We live in a time of exploding data and information flows. They are already overwhelming our ability to effectively manage -- and the worst is still to come. As organizations struggle to transform into truly digital businesses and leverage the next wave of AI and machine learning technologies, most have an Achilles’ Heel that threatens even the most well-intentioned digital transformation initiatives. That vulnerability is out-of-control information.

“Honestly, we are facing a tsunami of information, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. We are in the digital age, but there are some that are still dealing with paper. Paper is still a very viable thing in many industries. Organizations are suffocating under the weight of paper, while simultaneously trying to embrace digital transformation. And they're not sure how to get there.”

In a digital age, information is the core asset creating customer value and differentiating the offerings of one organization from another. Information is critical to how public sector organizations deliver value to constituents and taxpayers. This was clearly demonstrated during the pandemic, when organizations suddenly realized that unless they could rapidly digitize their business processes, they could no longer operate. 

Developing an approach to address this vulnerability is the fundamental business challenge of the digital era. On average, organizations believe the volume of incoming information will grow four-fold in just the next 2-3 years, and they are realizing that the old, manual, paper-based approaches to information management no longer work. Basing digital governance upon concepts like file folders alone will never be sufficient. Something needs to change. Without a strategy, organizations will slowly sink under the accumulated weight of their exponentially growing digital landfills. 

“It's not so much a rising tide of information chaos, it's more a rising AWARENESS of the tide that's already completely engulfed us.”

But the challenge is more complicated than just more data. The problem is that as technologies have spread to virtually every individual in an organization, the type of information that is arriving is changing as well.  Some of the incoming information is still in the form of pure data, streaming off of web interactions, connected devices, and mission-critical line-of-business applications. Managing this structured data is a challenge, but one with which organizations have some familiarity. Organizations need to consider how these lessons from the world of data can be applied to exploding volumes of unstructured and semi-structured information.

Managing unstructured information like email, text messages, Office application files, images, and videos, and semi-structured information like forms and invoices is still a problem for most organizations. These types of information are just different from data. They carry greater compliance and litigation risk. They are difficult to manage, search, and protect. They are unorganized and require large amounts of storage. Applying manual governance methodologies based on the file cabinet have proven a failure. The problem is a significant one -- unstructured and semi-structured information represent 50-60% of the rising wave of information coming into and being created by our organizations. 

Large-scale mission critical processes that involve the collection, delivery, retrieval, governance, and overall management of documents were somewhat brought under control during the first wave of content-intensive process automation in the early 2000s, at least for large organizations. The transactional content management systems used to manage these processes touched relatively few knowledge workers.

But the consumerization of technology and its spread to the average knowledge worker changed everything. Suddenly, everyone -- employees, partners, and suppliers -- was creating unstructured information that needed to somehow be managed. 

“We’ve had 30 years of every employee creating hundreds of files every month. It’s no longer enough to talk about retention and disposition. We must reframe the conversation.”

The initial response to the democratization of technology was to try to manage this information in the same systems that were used to manage large volumes of transactional content. This was  because the platform in which most collaborative information was created -- the Office suite -- was not robust enough to natively handle records management and governance. This approach has largely failed, because at scale it was too complex and too expensive. It also failed because it relied too much on convincing thousands of undisciplined knowledge workers to manually “do the right thing” with regards to the governance and records policies organizations put in place.

Most individual end users believe they have some sort of structured and organized way to manage their information that meets their personal and team needs. The challenge -- especially in large organizations -- is that without a collaborative environment structured at the organizational level, the aggregation of all of the well-intentioned choices by individual employees will be suboptimal at best, and counterproductive and risk-laden at worst. When employees store all types of content, including M365 content, on local workstations and laptops, it means that the organization is not able to see or manage the vast majority of corporate data.

The evolution of the on-premise Office platform into the cloud-based M365 platform is rapidly changing the way organizations think about the challenge of organizing and governing collaborative content. The problem of governing collaborative content suddenly looks differently given the significant out-of-the-box governance, compliance, records, and security capabilities that now exist in M365. 

At a minimum, organizations want to manage M365 content in place and move unmanaged file shares into a more managed environment. In addition, some organizations are looking to retire legacy content management systems and migrate this content into M365 as well.

“M365 is everywhere. It's ingrained and the standard for most organizations. Most are not governing it; it's the Wild West.”

Download link for the report = https://mailchi.mp/merconference.com/merlin-m365