<![CDATA[ERM Community Blogs]]>en-us<![CDATA[Infosec13 – What do you mean by Data Classification!?]]> It’s fair to say that within business it’s easy to assume that your customer knows everything. I think the customer may even go as far to say that they know everything too. However, one thing that was clear to me whilst at this year’s #infosec13 was a lack of understanding of what is meant by Data Classification.

There are a number of definitions to Data Classification provided by Wikipedia which are:

If you take a look at these you will see that there is relevance to all of it but at Boldon James we want to draw your attention to the fourth point ‘Assigning a level of sensitivity to classified information’ and more specifically:

‘Some corporations and non-government organizations also assign sensitive information to multiple levels of protection, either from a desire to protect trade secrets, or because of laws and regulations governing various matters such as personal privacy, sealed legal proceedings and the timing of financial information releases.’

We tend to think of ‘Top Secret’ classified information being a military thing only. Well it really isn’t, all of the content that we create on a daily basis has some form of sensitivity to it. This could be the spread sheet with your company’s sales figures and customer details on it, it could be your project plan when releasing a new product into the market, it could be the medical records your doctor holds. All of this information is crucial to business and it’s up to the content creators I.E you and me to ensure the integrity of your data.

This was the eye opener for me at Infosec13 and something that needs to be addressed and realised by content creators. Especially as more and more of us are creating new content every day which is creating more risk to businesses, especially if you are not labelling it.

Overall, the #Infosec13 show was a great experience with it being my first one and congratulations to @reallygrumpidad for winning £100 voucher from @ITGovernance in the Boldon James sweater competition.

Tweet @waylum_99

www.boldonjames.com

]]>Mon, 29 Apr 2013 04:46:55 GMT<![CDATA[55% of forms data is being rekeyed — Why?!]]> Last year, we set out with AIIM to measure the adoption of automated recognition of both Optical Character Recognition and Intelligent Character Recognition for processing forms. The results were astounding, especially the lack of organizations utilizing automated recognition. Only 32% of organizations surveyed are using OCR to extract document content. Over the last year, we have confirmed these numbers with much of the analyst community.

Working with AIIM, we produced an infographic highlighting some of the key points:

Click to see the Infographic

Here are a few datapoints:

·      50% of respondents say hand print or hand-script (cursive) fields are quite important; 25% say they play a key role.

·      However, many organizations are not taking advantage of this information. 88% of respondents say they scan forms, but only 32% say they perform text recognition to automatically make that data readily available for use in their organizations. The majority of respondents (55%) report they scan images and manually re-key the data as part of their workflow.

·      At the same time, survey participants estimate that they would achieve a considerable level of productivity savings if they were able to automate the recognition of hand-written text. The average estimate is a 34.8% improvement. The median is 23% more productive. 36% of respondents would expect a 50% or greater increase in improvement.

The majority cite localized decision-making and difficulty in accommodating different types of form layouts as the main reason for not adopting forms scanning, followed by a lack of designated owner.

What are you seeing? Share your experience by dropping us a line. If you’re interested in seeing the complete AIIM survey, you can get it here.

Don Dew is with Parascript, a leading recognition solutions provider, online at parascript.com

]]>Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:29:16 GMT<![CDATA[Taxonomies? Becoming a solution of choice?]]> Taxonomies? Becoming a solution of choice?
By on March 21, 2013in Blog, Enterprise Metadata Management, Information Governance

At the end of last quarter we surveyed our clients and the general marketplace and asked them their priorities for 2013 as it applies to unstructured content. The results indicated search, migration, and data privacy protection were the applications selected as the highest priorities.

However, there were three additional options included in the survey. These were metadata generation, auto-classification, and taxonomy. In both groups, each of these options was rated at approximately 98% as a 2013 priority. These were not included in the survey results as Concept Searching felt they were infrastructure components optionally available to deploy any of the applications not the end in itself. In addition, we felt our clients skewed the results as they have all recognized the need and have already implemented the products.

Removing our clients from the survey, what was very interesting, based on historical data and our experience, this does represent a change in the marketplace, and the growing awareness of more organizations to take a holistic approach to managing unstructured content, placing a much higher priority on these three technologies as a business enabler.

Obviously for years and years organizations have implemented taxonomies either at a very basic level or from a very sophisticated level. So taxonomies are no surprise nor are they a ‘new’ novel idea. Pulling in metadata generation and auto-classification provides the twist as all three were rated at almost 100%. I remember 13 years ago visiting an extremely large company who specialized in consulting and business oriented talent management, a company whose livelihood focused primarily on the use of unstructured content. I remember they were pretty much clueless about these technologies. Surprising? Maybe not considering the time lag.

Although participants in this group are not the norm, I am curious either from an organizational perspective or from a vendor perspective if the importance and understanding of metadata, classification, and taxonomies are recognized infrastructure business enablers? And are they considered a priority in the organization?

]]>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 13:07:58 GMT<![CDATA[ANSI/AIIM 25 Trusted Solutions Standard has been published]]> With virtually all business records created electronically – only a few needing to be reduced to physical form -- organizations are struggling with how to address the question of whether their electronically stored information (ESI) is reliable and accurate.  ANSI has adopted Standard 25 to assist all types of organizations, whether private, non-profit or public sector in assessing whether the environment in which the ESI is maintained is trustworthy.

ANSI/AIIM 25 states that any assessment must take a comprehensive look at the environment by reviewing the policies and procedures – from retention schedules to discovery response plans to digital signature policies – and evaluating how all members of the organization are following them.  In addition, there must be a review of the security models and data storage. Organizations must provide safe and secure storage and information access, as well as have a mechanism in place to determine whether the solution is actually meeting the needs of the organization.  Any storage solution must be "auditable" with reproducible results and there must be a method of independently verifying that the information is safe and secure. 

Because organizations have a myriad of options for designing their systems and environments to capture the ESI, development of an ANSI standard to accompany AIIM and ISO best practices for implementing Electronic Content Management (ECM) systems was necessary, according to Robert M. Blatt, President of EID, Inc., and chair of the ANSI/AIIM C27 – Document Management Standardization Committee responsible for drafting the standard.

“In the past few years we have seen an increase in the number of organizations questioning how they can demonstrate that the information they have stored in their ECM systems is true and accurate,” said Blatt.  “There are lots of variations in how each organization implements a content management system, so ANSI 25 provides general standards on how to go about conducting the assessment in order to match the variety you find in each ESI environment.”

Organizations trying to demonstrate the trustworthiness and reliability of their information will now have a standard against which to show that the records or documents were stored in trusted ECM systems, thus giving assurance as to the reliability and accuracy of the information.

A copy of ANSI/AIIM 25: 2012, Assessing Trusted Systems for Compliance with Industry Standards and Best Practices may be purchased through AIIM’s website at http://www.aiim.org/Research-and-Publications/Standards/Catalog/3123

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