To prepare you for some specific issues before they become nagging problems, focus on these five top challenges in 2008, as defined by Forrester Research, Inc.: SharePoint, retention management, Enterprise Web 2.0, data governance and data quality. By keeping these challenges within your sights and proactively taking steps to address them, you will not only look smart but also be prepared when these issues hit.
There’s no end to the issues that information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals must tackle:
Moving content management throughout the enterprise. If you concentrate on some facet of enterprise content management (ECM), you know the challenge of getting business people to actually use the content system instead of relying on the old way of doing things. And now it’s getting more complicated as business people’s expectations continue to change through their use of new technologies that can store content in the cloud. Or they may bring in new technologies, such as folksonomies, and you have to figure out where they fit in your ECM strategy and put ECM technologies into business context.
Evolving collaboration strategies to reflect the way people work. If you focus on collaboration, there’s not only the constant issue of Microsoft versus IBM, but now the ante has been raised with questions like “Should I bring Google into the picture?” or “Should we use wikis instead of document management?” coming from all corners within the enterprise. Plus there’s a swirl of activity around social computing; your users may not only rely on these to connect with peers but also could be bringing it into the enterprise without you even knowing it.
Dealing with a changing data management landscape. If you concentrate on data management and decision support, then recent consolidation in the BI market created more work for you. Plus, data governance issues continue to grow, driven by increasing interest in data warehousing appliances, metadata management, and master data management.
Although the data management market is mature, the amount of change in the technologies and use of data is staggering. Some issues will very likely surface in 2008 - if they haven’t already - that you need to get your arms around now. Start thinking about how you can address these topics in 2008 (see Figure 1).
For more information, go to www.forrester.com.
This piece is brought to you by the Information Management editorial staff.
