Featuring the best of AIIM 2012 held in San Francisco this March; our virtual conference lets you take in sessions you wanted to see but may have missed. Plus, if you weren’t one of the fortunate few to attend AIIM 2012 in person; this online conference gives you a chance to catch up on what you missed. To get you ready for June 7, here are four of the sessions from AIIM 2012. Scroll down and you’ll discover a dissection of the “cloud,” different methods of collaboration, how to manage dynamic content, and how to maximize the use of SharePoint to enable collaboration.

Be sure to register today: The Best of AIIM Conference 2012 – The Virtual Event.

The Cloud: Powering Social, Local, Mobile. An AIIM 2012 Session by Chris Riley

You hear "the cloud" everywhere -- radio and TV commercials, technology and business magazines and websites, conversations with your boss and users to "just put it in the cloud," etc. But what IS the cloud? We'll set the baseline and dissect what the cloud is; it's various components; and how those components interact with this new way of business. The Cloud can be broken into four facets: - Software as a service - Infrastructure as a service - Development/test hosting - Cloud-based file systems Each of these facets aligns with social, local, and mobile -- and content management -- in different ways.

2 Types of Collaboration. An AIIM 2012 Session by Billy Cripe

Collaboration comes in many forms and influences how we work. But accidental collaboration is a new phenomenon that has emerged with collaborative and social software. In this presentation, Billy covers the two types of collaboration -- intentional and accidental -- and explores how accidental collaboration, powered by the social technology revolution, is vastly more powerful than other kinds of collaboration. He explores the 10 key requirements for successfully orchestrating accidental collaboration.

Managing Dynamically Changing Content. An AIIM 2012 Session by Linda Larrivee

In November 2011, Ultimate Software was the recipient of a Forrester Groundswell Award for the effectiveness of its social customer community, showing that you can achieve innovation in social technology applications while still achieving key business and organization goals. As a SaaS provider of People Management solutions, it's vital that Ultimate respond quickly to the latest changes from taxing authorities and regulatory agencies, providing timely and accurate communications to customers. Managing related content in a way that enables rapid and dynamic communication is only possible through the application of well-organized structure and controls including single-source authoring. This session looks at how Ultimate Software's Content and Communications team is continuously improving upon how to collect, create and manage information used to support a dynamic customer communications environment.

Maximizing Your SharePoint Investment- Social, Sharing, and Search. AIIM 2012 Session by Bert Sandie

Bert Sandie talks about how EA uses technology to enable company-wide collaboration. Many companies who are using SharePoint are looking at how they can best maximize their investment. This talk will examine the social, sharing, and search features provided by SharePoint 2010. We will take a deep dive at how you can customize what comes out-of-the-box to create a customized solution that meets your company's business needs and embraces your culture. Specifically, we will examine use cases for social profiles, video usage, articles with rich media, activity streams, and how to find all of this information using enterprise search. We will show real-world examples of companies who are gaining significant benefits to their business, employee engagement, and culture by creating thoughtful and innovative SharePoint solutions that meet their employees' needs.

“That survey result reinforces a finding that we've observed elsewhere in our research: in company after company, the patterns and processes by which people communicate with each other are unmistakably in flux. The old "corporate communication" is giving way to a model that we call "organizational conversation." That shift is, for many people, a disorienting process. But it also offers a great leadership opportunity.”

The authors share four steps to helping companies make leadership more conversational:

1. Close the gap between you and your employees
2. Promote two-way dialogue within your company
3. Engage employees in the work of telling the company story
4. Pursue a clear agenda

Generic enough to almost be helpful. While I agreed, I found myself reading a lot into each of their points, and will be interested to read more as the authors further explore each idea in future articles. Until then, I started jotting down notes of how I would expand on these ideas, and shared the link out to my network through Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+ only to get a reply from my friend and business partner Clayton Cobb at Planet technologies, expressing his frustration at the lack of detail. “Christian, what did you get from this article? I didn't really see anything of substance in those 4 bullets. The writer(s) didn't really make a point, though I may have missed it.”

Remember that scene from Jurassic Park where the film explaining how they cloned the dinosaurs mentioned filling in unknown gaps in the dino DNA with something known, like the DNA of an amphibious frog? That’s kind of how the human mind works, filling in gaps with personal experiences and stories (like my Jurassic Park reference), sometimes taking content (like this) in a direction that may be different than what the authors intended. But dialogue and ideas are good, right? Here is how I interpreted the post:

1. Get out and talk to your employees and peers more often. Sometimes referred to as “management by walking around,” I am a big believer that many communication issues are the result of self-imposed barriers between manager and direct report. It’s silly, it’s counter-productive, and it often leads to a lack of transparency of priorities in both directions (managers not communicating priorities to the team, team members not communicating priorities and status to management). You cannot manage through email and dashboards. You need to talk to people (which is often harder than email/dashboards).
    
2. In an old Dilbert cartoon, the term “bungee-manager” was an excellent description of this communication error. Always one-sided, a manager would “drop in” to share info, and then immediately depart for a phone call, another meeting, or to hide behind a closed door rather than have an actual conversation about what was happening within the business, and feedback on any proposed change. You see this more with skip-level or upper management leaders, and it tends to be driven by deep cultural issues. Social tools are one way that many companies are attempting to “democratize” communication, helping all voices to be heard (at least on the surface). Again, transparency into what is being done (or not done) with the feedback will ensure that these kinds of communication improvements are embraced, and that the culture changes to the positive.
    
3. The fundamental problem I see here is that employees don’t know how to represent the company vision and/or objectives. What is the company’s elevator pitch? What are the rules of engagement with customers, partners, or the media? In a startup environment, every employee tends to understand the goals and positioning statements, as it is understood that promotion and evangelism is the responsibility of every employee. The same should be true no matter what the company size or maturity. Management should prepare their employees to be better advocates, and as a result, they will get much richer dialogue out of their employees about what the company is doing well, and where it needs to improve its messaging.
    
4. There is a reason why new projects, internal or customer-facing, tend to have a launch or kick-off event: it is an opportunity to get everyone on the same page about goals, budget, timeline, and roles and responsibilities. The corporate version of this is often the annual kick-off event, or for many the quarterly kick-off. Some organizations go even further, with monthly business reviews – or they may even incorporate broader goals and commitments in more frequent planning meetings. The point here is that you are consistently disseminating what is happening within the business, where you are succeeding, where you are failing, so that employees feel they are a part of the business, not just a “resource.” The more you involve people in the process, the more people will take ownership of that process.

I agree with the author’s summary: Leadership is conversation. The hard part for every organization is institutionalizing the conversation, making it part of the company culture. But the benefits of improved dialog are clear.

I have been in the audience at several large conferences that addressed one or more of these three topics. Those sessions have all been good, but they have primarily been 30-45 minutes long. After a brief (sometimes) introduction, the panel usually has about 20-30 minutes to “discuss” the issue and that often means “direct the attention to (my) company’s product.” The chapter meeting started at 8:30 with breakfast – yes, for those who follow @cluise or @sympmarc, this was a bacon-fueled event. The discussion stared at 9:00 and continued until 11:30 with a short break in the middle, ample time to explore the major issues in depth. The panelists and the audience talked about the problems with the way companies are addressing these issues and the various ways management and corporate IT are missing the point(s).

Interestingly, this panel didn’t have and didn’t need a moderator. We kick-started the discussion with a single question: “are cloud, mobile and BYOD three disparate topics or are they really related?” In a twist that telegraphed the rest of the meeting, the first panelist to respond said “can I answer a different question?” The panelists offered their opinions, shared their experiences, supported each other sometimes and sparred with each other at other times as they responded to questions from an in-room and live streaming audience. The dominant message we heard from these experts was that corporate IT is failing its constituents; iPads and smartphones and the cloud aren’t so much new as they are the new face of a familiar problem that has dogged the technology sector forever – change. The difference today is scale, ubiquity and velocity, but the problem is the same, we aren’t doing the right things. Rather than embrace the benefits these trends bring, we are trying to maintain a moat mentality, as one panelist put it “as if that has worked in the past.”

If you want to read more about the content of the event, including a few choice quotes, check out my SharePoint Stories blog. As I said in that blog post, I took over 10 pages of notes during this event. I am tempted to continue; perhaps I will try to squeeze another post out of this great event, but I can’t capture the energy, the passion or the intensity of the discussion; for that, you had to be there. You had to be in the room, at a chapter event with bacon.

Student from Calgary, Alberta: I work for a bank in a prairie province in Canada.  I am leading the newly developed ERM department and needed a better understanding of records management for current effectiveness and future developments.

Carl:  When did you get the idea to make AIIM Education part of your training focus and what were the drivers for the decision?

Student from Calgary, Alberta: The technical lead for our ERM system was familiar with AIIM and aware of the training courses that AIIM offered.  The training department recognized that the course would be valuable for members of our various businesses and bringing together staff with similar, and supporting, roles across the businesses and functions, and consolidating our thinking, was very good.

Carl:  What do you see as a benefit for you and future attendees of these programs?

Student from Calgary, Alberta: What really got my attention was the importance of metadata and taxonomy (a classification scheme).  When evaluation our current structure (very new) and adding future business areas, we need to ensure these are used in the best way possible for our business users.  I obtained insights from the course material that I want not have received from any other sources.  I also gained the realization of the importance of both managing emails properly and the impact of social media.  The course material gives me a much broader perspective to the records and information that needs to be properly managed.

Carl:  For the future, how do you see the role of AIIM education evolving in relation to you and/or your customers?

Student from Calgary, Alberta: Our current primary focus is on electronic records management.  The course did provide a lot of information and provoked a lot of thought on the subject.  Once we mature, we certainly will be looking at AIIM’s Taxonomy Practitioner course and its Social Media governance course.  The ERM Master course was very comprehensive in addressing: What is ERM and How you Implement an ERM Environment.  The case (group) exercises allowed us to piece the information we learned in the lectures together.  The many examples that were given were also very valuable

Carl: Is there anything else you might want to share with our readers related to AIIM Training and how it has been of benefit to you and may be of benefit to them?

Student from Calgary, Alberta:  This is excellent training.  We need to focus on getting the business owners aware of this information and getting them educated on the various topics.  The whole idea of information governance is new to us and certainly should be a central theme for anyone working in records management.

Carl: I want to thank you, for taking time to talk with me and for sharing your valuable insights and perspectives with our readers.

I will be speaking at the following events:

1. June 5^th– 8^th, 2012 AIIM ERM Master class in San Francisco, CA
2. June 12^th, 2012 Info360 ECM Practitioner Pre-Con in New York, NY
3. June 19th – 22^nd, 2012 AIIM ECM Master class in Houston, TX