Despite the best efforts of business and technology users and their information management (IM) vendors and service providers to collaborate on needed functions and features for managing unstructured data, these efforts still fall short of the mark. While much of the responsibility rests squarely on a mostly “reactive” user community's failure to properly plan for IM technology roll-outs, the vendor and service provider community hasn’t done enough to support users by gaining a deeper understanding end-to-end requirements and bringing better integrated, mature solutions to the market. The EDRM model is just one example of an industry collaboration that could benefit from a more complete view of end-user requirements.
This conclusion was borne out at the July 28 Peer Incite research meeting where Wikibon members, including four practitioners working in three highly regulated industries, energy, finance, and healthcare, discussed the primary barriers to implementing successful IM related initiatives.
The key findings of the Peer Incite regarding vendors are:
- IM vendors tend to look at a specific problem/solution, such as deduplication or mailbox management, and sell their point product, rather than looking at the whole picture.
- This is a complex area, and products don’t address all aspects of the problem appropriately. Vendors need to work together to solve problems holistically, as no one vendor has all of the answers.
- Vendors need to involve users from multiple parts of customer organizations in product design.
- A permanent public / private collaborative is needed to meet the threat matrices and risks.
- Diverse stakeholders need to work together to test new methodologies prior to investing. Vendors need to drive this, pay for it and advance the initiative.
- Vendors need to involve users in customer advisory boards.
The predominant user view is that the largest players in the space are more focused on M&A activity (See Information Management meets Compliance) than gaining a deeper understanding of unstructured data management (UDM) requirements. Users are also firmly convinced that vendors have less incentive to understand their requirements and are more focused on selling what they have now. While everybody understands that vendors need sales to fund product upgrades, the user community is anticipating more mature, better integrated products and, so far, vendor behavior is not giving them much hope for the immediate future.
Action Item: Vendors need to engage users more in the development of their strategic technology roadmaps and become more involved with a diverse group of users representing audit, compliance, finance, legal, records management and technology in order to see beyond their existing view. M&A activity and partnership agreements alone will not solve the IM solution integration problem. Therefore, vendors need to seek opportunities to work with complimentary technology and service partners - and competitors as well - in a public/private collaborative forum which steps up the dialogue with users and moves the IM solutions landscape more quickly towards a useful set of in-depth use-cases and requirements. This, users may hope, will lead to improved standards and a maturing of the IM solutions set for managing unstructured data.
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